Flabbergasted
Steve Fox:
Every now and then, you read a piece where you have to stop, take a breath and then go back and make sure you actually just read that.
Peter Scheer, billed as a lawyer, journalist and executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition, columnizes in the San Francisco ?Chronicle that newspapers and wire services, to help protect their collective bottom lines, should embargo their news content from the “free Internet” for about 24 hours.
. . . Hmm, ok. So, let me get this straight. A First Amendment attorney AND a “journalist” is proposing to withhold information from a part of the population? And Scheer has even thought about how to keep the pesky lawmen away:
“To keep the U.S. Justice Department at bay, it needs to be clear that the newspapers are not acting as a cartel, but as a standard-setting body agreeing on a common standard for the timing of release of copyrighted content to the free Internet.”
. . . I sit here flabbergasted. How, exactly, is this proposal in any way supportive of the First Amendment?
Scheer, in trying to come up with a proposal to save newspaper advertising dollars, misses the point completely. Advertisers are flocking to the Web and newspapers that are going multi-platform and accepting the fact that the newspaper Web site is the predominant moneymaker are ahead of the game.
The assumption that embargoing information (good luck doing that, by the way) will somehow inflate the value of newspapers is achingly flawed but no doubt is a concept supported in many corporate board rooms.
An editor at The Washington Post once asked me how the Web site could drive readers to pick up and read the Sunday newspaper. I politely responded that that’s the wrong direction. Scheer’s 1996-like proposal is just that, headed in the wrong direction. And, the idea that a First Amendment attorney would propose restrictions on the release of information? Wow.