Technology U
by Glynn Wilson

I’m just going to come right out and say it. I know how to save the press and democracy — and the right to sue in this country.

The question is will the right people listen? Will they listen in time?

For an excellent discussion on where we are, check out this post from David Campbell, a professor of cultural and political geography at Durham University in the United Kingdom associated with the Durham Centre for Advanced Photography Studies.

Revolutions in the media economy: The context of crisis

Many of the points he makes have already been discussed here, but perhaps people will listen to him.

“The way news and information is reported and delivered to citizens is undergoing profound transformations, especially in the United States and Europe,” he starts out. “In the last 12 months commentary has been rife with claims about ‘the death of newspapers,’ the end of journalism, and the impact this crisis will allegedly have on democratic politics.”

I won’t take the time or space here to summarize all his points. If you are interested in this information, go read his piece and then come back to see how I am going to fill in some gaps he’s missing in answer to the question: “How do we fund the good stuff?”

The reason I’m focusing on this today is because I have been trying to communicate these points to certain demographic audiences in Washington as well as right here in Alabamaland. So far all my efforts have been in vain. Perhaps this bit of information will help break the logjam.

As Campbell points out, the news media has been funded largely by corporations since just before World War II. Notice the advertising messages that dominate even on large newspaper Websites and on TV. Big oil, energy and telecommunication giants, drug and insurance companies.

Pro-big business companies are not in such a crisis. Conservative news outlets will always find funding. Liberal and progressive media outlets have always struggled, but now their crisis is more acute — just at the time in history when what matters is a search for the truth, not partisan screaming.

Conservative Republican outlets such as Fox News don’t care about the truth, anymore than their largely ignorant audience. If allowed to dominate the debate, they inevitably influence some of the more reasonable people in the middle simply by their dominance in framing what messages we talk about and how we talk about them.

I’m here to tell you that does not have to be the case. We can change this.

I’m in the process of searching for funding to tell the real story of the relationship between objective journalism and democracy in a documentary film, so I won’t try to tell that whole story here today. The point I want to make is about a sector of the economy that has not been directly involved in the funding for media so much in the past, a sector that by damn better get involved now since their business is also in jeopardy.

I’m talking about trial lawyers.

I recently got a request on Facebook from a Birmingham law firm who wanted me to be their “fan.” When I said I have a policy: I only become fans of law firms that sponsor my Website as a way to fund the new Web Press and save democracy, I was told, “We don’t advertise in any form.”

Lawyers are new to advertising, since in the past it was associated with “ambulance chasing.” It actually used to be prohibited by bar associations. That changed in the 1980s, but many old fashioned lawyers still won’t advertise for business. That’s not what I was talking about, but there was a disconnect in the information exchange.

So let me take a stab at explaining it here once again. I’ve told a number of lawyers about this, but they just give me a blank stare, or dead air on the other end of the telephone, because they do not have a clue what I’m talking about.

The legal profession is in jeopardy all over the land because of a push for “tort reform,” Karl Rove’s nice little politically correct term for destroying the rights of citizens to sue corporations and the rights of juries to render judgments against corporations when they screw up and kill people. In Alabama, anyone who has followed the Web news knows that Rove turned the Alabama Supreme Court Republican back in the 1990s with cries of “jackpot justice” and “liberal judges” who “legislate from the bench.”

Now many lawyers are having trouble making a living in Alabama because it does no good to sue corporations here. The Supreme Court will just strike down the verdicts or reduce the punitive damage awards, like they did in the Exxon case.

A jury found that Exxon had lied about the amount of oil royalties it owed the people of the state from its offshore drilling operations. The Supreme Court reduced the amount the corporation had to pay by tens of millions of dollars. Even the law firm that handled the case did not even scream one little bit. Even if they had, not one single newspaper in the state would have printed a story sympathetic to their side.

But when I tried to discuss funding the Web Press with this Montgomery law firm, the computer programmer who also acts as the marketing director was such a moron that he decided they wanted to buy key words in my news stories to drive traffic to his law firm’s Website.

First off, that would comprise the integrity of the news product. Links in my stories go to reliable information adding information to the post. Not an ad taking you to legal propaganda.

The only reason I can think of for why any member of the public would want to go to a lawyer’s Website would be to check out the firm on what kind of cases they try and their success rate. Nobody is going to turn to a law firm’s Web public relations arm for their news. That is patently absurd.

So let me try to explain advertising this way.

Southern Company, Alabama Power, Exxon, Eli-Lilly and AIG do not spend millions of dollars on advertising to get people to buy electricity, drugs or insurance. They spend money on advertising for two reasons: to try to influence the public perception of their company, and to buy off critical news coverage of their operations. It is called “image advertising.” It is not the same thing as advertising expected to generate new clients.

Attorneys need to start doing the same thing. And they need to spend that money supporting the Web Press, where we are far more willing to tell the truth and take their side than newspapers already compromised by years of support from the big corporations.

If the legal community would begin to realize this, they could constitute a major source of revenue to save democracy and the press. And they would begin to turn public opinion around and also save their own hides.

If they don’t do this, and soon, then the jig may be up.

President Obama is caving into the drug and insurance companies as we speak in the debate over national health care reform. He and the key members of Congress are looking for a compromise on health care that will include some form of “reducing the high cost of medical liability.” In case you don’t get it, that means caps on what doctors, hospitals and insurance companies could be forced to pay when their negligence kills people.

The Republicans and the Birmingham News editorial board will tell you that is the main culprit in why health insurance premiums and the cost of treatment is so high. I’m telling you that is pure crap. Greed is why health care costs are so high.

Doctors, insurance company executives and drug company CEOs vote Republican because they know the GOP is the party that is on their side in allowing them to grow super rich so they can afford the biggest yachts and Veil ski resorts.

The very idea that poor working people in this country vote with them, when they cannot even afford the price of a regular check up, is just crazy.

No bailout of the newspaper industry is going to change that. Lawyers need to start supporting the alternative, independent Web Press. And they need to start now.

Support An Alternative Independent Web Press

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Tags: Technology U: How to Save Democracy, the Press -- and the Legal Profession

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009 at 5:02 pm and is filed under Big Oil, Connecting the Dots, Fund Raising, Media News, Media Reform, National Health Care, Programmers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.