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That testimony is worth reading in its entirety. But here is what editors refer to as “the nut graf”—the section that explains the point of the broader story:
Wall Street and free-market logic, having been a destructive force in journalism over the last few decades, are not now suddenly the answer. Raw, unencumbered capitalism is never the answer when a public trust or public mission is at issue. If the last quarter century has taught us anything—and admittedly, with too many of us, I doubt it has—it’s that free-market capitalism, absent social imperatives and responsible regulatory oversight, can produce durable goods and services, glorious profits, and little of lasting social value. Airlines, manufacturing, banking, real estate—is there a sector of the American economy where laissez-faire theories have not burned the poor, the middle class and the consumer, while bloating the rich and mortgaging the very future of the industry, if not the country itself? I’m pressed to think of one.
There will be time for the debate about solutions. For now, it is not just useful but necessary to be clear about the cause of the crisis in American journalism. On this point, what Simon says is spot on.
It wasn’t the Internet.
It wasn’t the current economic downtown.
It was a lousy newspaper ownership model that saw civic and democratic values replaced by the rapacious greed and commercial calculations of big media companies.
They fought for civil rights, not imagining the masses were innocent and would do better without government strictures. They worked for legislation that would have government institutionalize racial equality. The older people on the right are living in a society where pretty much anything goes. They seem to want to fight the government not in order to ensure rights for all, but to keep what they have.
Moreover, the whole idea behind the “health care as consumer” movement is that the problem is we use too much health care. If we spent more of our own money, we wouldn’t take those “recreational visits” to the emergency room or orthopedic surgeon. Two cracks in that theory. First, the research we have suggests people avoid both unneeded AND needed medical care when they pay the bills themselves. Secondly, the major reason we Americans spend so much more than, say, Canada or Germany, isn’t use rates, it’s prices. We pay more for everything we get from the health care system.
Following Mr. Payton here and posting some revealing parts of the NYT Interactive on the history of HC Reform. Seeing those who have come before and fought hard for incrementally better HC coverage and watching Obama’s speech to the AMA is making me feel bad about not lobbying doing more in my day for this great cause.
Matt Payton’s answers a Focus on the family survey.
The most ideologically devoted elements in both parties must accept that not every compromise is a sign of betrayal or an indication of moral lassitude. When too many of our citizens take an all-or-nothing approach, we should not be surprised when nothing is the result.
conjuredryad:No Impact Man: What if we create better world for nothing?
Now if only everyone understood this.
I will pretty much reblog this every time I see it on the dashboard.
Me too.
The tech press loves checklist comparisons. Let’s evaluate the iPhone to see whether it’s a good product:
Sounds like a terrible product. I bet it will fail.
Remember the MacBook Air’s launch?
Sounds like there’s no reason to buy one. (Like nearly everyone else, I complained about all of this when the Air launched. We all do it sometimes.) But it’s been very successful, especially in its later revisions, and the SSD models are great machines for people who travel a lot.
So it bothers me when either of two common failures occur.
Assumed equality
This is when a competitor advertises (and often, truly believes) that their product is at least equivalent to another one because it has checkboxes in many similar categories.
Since the iPhone’s launch, every other phone manufacturer has made competing phones with 3” touchscreens, music playback, and square app icons arranged in a 4x4 grid. (Well, except Microsoft’s hilarious interpretation.)
It’s like the CEOs commanded their engineering teams to come up with lists of the iPhone’s “features” and copy them so their phones would sell as well as the iPhone.
Every few months, the copy-list gets longer. Everyone just finished checking off their App Store box and is wondering when the developers are going to rush in.
Miscomparison
This happens when a geek or manager makes a list of features to compare two products and comes to an oversimplified conclusion based on which one has more checkmarks in its column.
The main problem is obvious: how do you determine which features go on the list? It can’t possibly be exhaustive enough to represent the entire experience of using the products, and it won’t be the same list for everyone.
Here’s why I decided not to use a Nexus One (or any other Android phone):
The Nexus One may be the better choice for people who care about what it does well, like synchronizing with Google’s services. But I don’t care about those things, and I do care about a lot of factors that the iPhone is a better fit for.
It would be ignorant and arrogant for me to presume that your priorities are anything like mine.
