"I Got a Strong Mind That Doesn't Have to Be Spoon-Fed"

Bonus points to anyone who can name the 1991 rap song from which the title of this post was lifted.

In my Sunday morning cruise of the news shows, I saw two things that intrigued me. The first was a discussion about a video press release from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Evidently, HHS put out a piece on Medicare using a hired TV reporter. The piece was edited to look like a news broadcast, and dozens of stations across the country ran all or most of the release as a legit news segment. Obviously, this irked some people.

Separately, the folks on "Fox and Friends" picked up on something we've been talking about in the online advertising industry for weeks - the defection of audiences from TV and newspapers. Surprisingly, not one of the commentators mentioned that people are flocking to the Internet. Not surprisingly, though, they talked a bit about the reasons why people are avoiding TV news and newspapers - a credibility gap.

Well, duh! When major news media fail to analyze what the administration spoon feeds them, obviously people are going to get upset and turn to other sources of news. Thankfully, the Internet is making it easier for private citizens to share thoughts with others. It's only natural that citizens turn to other citizens when news institutions go down the crapper.

The surge in popularity of blogs and independent online news sources is no coincidence. People are tired of the unprecedented cooperation between the major news media and the government. They want alternative points of view and critical thinking, not regurgitation of whatever the current administration thinks is important. We're seeing an online iteration of the "marketplace of ideas" concept, in which citizen-reporters and citizen-commentators are putting their thoughts out on the Internet in great numbers, and the cream is rising to the top.

Thanks to technology, publishing facts and commentary has never been easier. As more people publish their thoughts online, we see a process by which the best thinking, the most relevant agendas and the most credible facts come to light via a Darwinian process that involves small, independent online publishers putting forth an idea, larger online publishers developing it further, and online news aggregators disseminating it in a wider fashion. I think those that are involved in web publishing and the consumption of content from the Internet are all becoming better citizens of our democratic society for it.

Let Adam Smith's invisible hand do its job. If the mainstream broadcast and print news media want to continue sucking on the government's teat, let them do it. More people will defect to the Internet and will learn to engage in an active medium instead of being passively spoon-fed their news. The press release I linked to above condemns the government for their use of deceptive, TV-ready video news releases. How about condeming the media for lazily running this stuff instead of doing their jobs?

Did I Really Just See This?

Did I really just see a Wal-Mart commercial this morning in which an employee praises the chain for its medical benefits? Oh, please. That ad struck me as propaganda. Please, marketers, do a believability check.

Next thing you know, we'll see commercials for Exxon and Dow Chemical that praise their sense of environmental responsibility.

I Know...Let's Blame the Internet!

One of the things that really ticks me off is that the Internet itself takes a lot of flak for the communication it enables. In no other medium does the public shoot the messenger when something bad happens as the result of facilitated communication. For instance...

• When telemarketers call us at home during dinner, we blame marketers that use outbound call centers. We don't blame the telephone medium.
• When Super Bowl halftime shows broadcast naked bodies into our homes, those who are offended blame Viacom, not the television medium as a whole.
• When people are offended by shock jocks like Howard Stern and Bubba the Love Sponge, they blame the stations who are responsible for carrying the content and the corporate entities to which they belong, not radio in general.

But for some reason, when bad things happen as the result of communication over the Internet, the Internet itself gets blamed. Here's the latest: Internet Blamed in Spread of Syphilis Among Gays

It would be nice if the journalists who report on scientific studies would learn the difference between correlation and causality. The Internet doesn't make people have unprotected sex. The Internet doesn't make predators want to kidnap children. The Internet doesn't force people to sit around and look at porn all day. Yet, when these things happen, many journalists oversimplify things by implying a causal relationship rather than a correlative one.

The spread of syphilis is due to people having unprotected sex. If the Internet makes it easier for people who want to have unprotected sex to find one another, that's not the Internet's fault. In order to have sex, people have to meet up in the real world, at which point they have a choice as to whether or not to have unprotected sex. The Internet has nothing to do with that. Yet the medium takes the blame anyway.

Instead, members of our society should take some responsibility in using the medium. Parents of young children don't let their kids talk to strangers on the telephone, do they? People who ruin their marriages by looking for extramarital sex online have made their own beds - shouldn't they sleep in them? People who are offended by Howard Stern change the channel, don't they?

A while back, AdAge picked up a comment I made on one of the Internet advertising discussion lists about needing some sort of Internet Anti-Defamation League. If people, especially journalists, continue to blame the Internet for poor decision-making by the people who use it, I stand by my comment. We don't want people to see the Internet as threat, with insurmountable dangers inherent, do we?

The FCC's Ongoing Crusade

I feel so much safer now that the FCC is crusading to clean up the nation's airwaves. If not the Federal Government, then who will protect us from radio waves forcibly broadcasting themselves into the sanctity of my home? Furthermore, who will help me compensate for my seeming inability to use the fingers God gave me to change the station?

Seriously, though, this has gone far enough. Doesn't it seem silly to you that a federal agency is enforcing its own code of decency? Particularly when it's pretty well established that different communities have differing standards with regard to indecency?

Of course, we wouldn't know that these days, with Clear Channel and other media conglomerates homogenizing radio. When are we going to learn that in media where bandwidth is limited, letting one company control a wide swath of broadcast spectrum in many markets is a bad idea?