Monthly Archives: May 2003

Dean: “”In my travels around the country, I have discovered that this proposed
deregulation is one of the foremost issues on peoples’ minds. I am asked
about it everywhere–in small towns in New Hampshire, and in major cities
across the nation.”

Read his letter to Chairman Powell. Continue reading →

There were an extraordinary number of people who took up the Starbucks’s challenge. Check out the links here and lots elsewhere on the web.

There were many in the comments to the challenge who suggested there was nothing wrong with Starbucks exercising control over its own property. Of course that is right. And of course it is right that Starbucks should have the right to control people who are bothering people with their cameras, just as Starbucks has the right to control people who are bothering others with a radio. And of course it is right that Starbucks has the right even to be extremist about it — banning anyone who clicks even a picture of a friend, invoking mysterious claims about security or trade-secrets.

But if they exercise these rights to an extreme, then of course we have the right to criticize their extremism. We have the right to link their extremism to a growing phascism about photographs. (See the wonderful summary of your rights by Bert Krages.) For it is bizarre that we increasingly live in this world where every movement is captured by a camera, yet increasingly, ordinary people are not permitted to take pictures with cameras. This is yet another part of a growing obsession with control that seems to mark so much of this society. At a minimum, we have a right to take note of this control, and criticize it where we can.

That’s just what I wondered about when I read these stories about Starbucks’. I’m a terribly untrendy sort — I like Starbucks. But I couldn’t quite tell whether the extremism of these stories was an exception or a policy. And I guess I was relieved to read, and to find, at least some stores where the manager of a place that loves to imagine itself a public place was actually giving members of the public a freedom to feel like they are in public. I understand of course — as everyone should — that this “feeling” is just virtual. It can be withdrawn at anytime. Continue reading →

Frank Rich has a great piece in the Times today about MediaCon.

” Though liberal and conservative organizations alike, from Common Cause to the National Rifle Association, are protesting this further consolidation of media power, most of the country is oblivious to it. That’s partly because the companies that program America’s matrix have shut out all but bare-bones coverage of the imminent F.C.C. action, much as the ruling machines in “The Matrix” do not feed their captive humans any truths that might set them free.”

If you think Frank Rich is right, you might want to write the NY Times and ask, why is it the Times has “shut out all but bare-bones coverage of the imminent F.C.C. action”? Continue reading →

While I have no idea what this paragraph means,”[w]e opponents of megamergers and cross-ownership are afflicted with what sociologists call “pluralistic ignorance.” Libertarians pop off from what we assume to be the fringes of the left and right wings, but do not yet realize that we outnumber the exponents of the new collectivist efficiency,” I declare that the war of ideas in this media concentration battle is over. This brilliant piece by Safire ends it.

Let’s now see whether ideas and ideals translate into policy. Continue reading →