Periodic political ranting, speculating, and babbling. Questions/ comments/ complaints? Email me at mattxiv at hotmail dot com.
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Nevermind Mind the Potheads, Lock Up the Fatties:
A CDC-sponsored study has found that obesity has a health care cost of obesity to be $93 billion a year and HHS Secretary Tommy G. Thompson says that data indicates that the lost productivity costs $56 billion. Together, the government estimates that obesity costs America at least $149 billion a year.
On the other hand, we have the government's estimate of the total (not just lost productivity and health care) costs of $160 billion for drug use, some of which is caused by the the government's postion of valuing deterence over harm reduction, such as removing access to fresh needles which would remove much of the costs due to drug-use transmitted diseases.
While I think it it is unlikely that the government is going to start locking up the obese, the control over the diet and exercise of prisoners would be a lot more effective at curbing obesity than locking up drug users is at fighting drug addiction.
I read this article in the NYT regarding the proposed relaxation of FCC regulations regarding media ownership and was struck by just how anachronistic these restrictions are. The FCC seems to be stuck in the past with how it looks at media, acting as if people still got their news solely by reading the local paper and watching the 7 o'clock news. Having been born a year after CNN came into being and growing up in an era where the internet has become accessible to just about anybody, the concerns of the critics of reducing ownership restrictions don't seem to apply to the actual media situation that I have experienced.
According to the Times:
"They [the critics] say more mergers will diminish the quality of news, including coverage of local events, and will eliminate diverse voices, promote greater uniformity of entertainment and reduce competition over the airwaves.
"There has already been a tremendous amount of consolidation and that has had some severe consequences," Mr. Copps said last week. He noted that fewer cities now had two newspapers and said entertainment was becoming homogenized, artists and musicians were often finding it more difficult to get on the airwaves, and media outlets were increasingly failing to respond to community concerns. "These are changes of terrible importance to the future of the country, and it is hard to see how further deregulation promotes diversity, competition and localism," he said."
First, national level news is plentiful in many outlets and is generally much better covered by news outlets that operate on a national scale, like papers with nation wide delivery, websites, and cable news. Thus, if local providers are to distinguish themselves on the basis of anything, it has to be the coverage of local events. Thus, if a national company buys a paper in a certain town, if it doesn't keep up the quality of local coverage, it becomes subject to competition from national scale competitors who haven't had to put the money into buying a local outlet. Most people will only read one paper a day, and if the local coverage isn't up to par, they don't have nearly as much of a reason not to read the WSJ or the Washington Post instead.
As far as entertainment goes, it is already more or less uniform, FCC notwithstanding. The only part of network television that is not essentially the same across every network affiliate in the country is 4-time a day local news broadcasts. What brings diversity to programming is more channels, not ownership regulations. Since almost every local broadcaster uses one of the major networks for their programming, restricting who owns them will not have any real impact on content. Whether or not the same company or 4 different companies run the FOX, CBS, NBC, and ABC affiliates within a town will realistically make essentially no difference on the actual programming, since the public will want access to the programming of all 4 stations.
Free-over-air TV generally provides entertainment, not news, to it's viewers, so it seems odd that there would be a restriction against owning both a TV and a newspaper station operating in the same market. It also doesn't address the key issue that determines how much media diversity that will be in a market, the number of outlets. Removing this restriction might actually increase the number of outlets by providing efficiency advantages by allowing a TV station and newspaper to draw from the same reporting. This would make it cheaper to run a TV station and a newspaper together, and since the number of TV channels in a market generally tends to be inelastic due to each of the national networks generally having a presence, this may increase the number of newspapers, which are generally limited to 1 or 2 per market.
Finally, the restriction on how much of the nation a broadcast company may reach does not seem to have any rationale at all. Restricting the share of the outlets a given company may own in a certain marketplace would ensure that there is a certain level of diversity in the media at that location, but trying to cap the national range of a certain broadcast company does nothing to accomplish this. For example, if a single company owned every NBC affiliate, and thus was reaching close to 100% of viewers, it would have nearly no impact on the actual diversity of programming at any site, since only a few areas, mainly by the accident of being within the broadcasting range of the networks of two major cities, have more than one NBC affiliate broadcasting to them.