Wow, Milton is awesome at talking to Statists. It looks like that interviewer changed his mind, just from 3 minutes of hearing Milton!
What TV license is he talking about? I thought the U.S. didn’t have a UK-style TV license?
A large part of that will be that people are getting news from the same sources but through the internet.
You have to realize that businesses in the United States are not allowed to operate without permission from the state, whether it be though business licenses, import/export licenses, professional certifications/licenses, health/safety laws, zoning laws, etc.
Regarding newspapers, read this The FCC’s newspaper-broadcast cross ownership rule (http://www.epi.org/publication/books_cross-ownership/).
Newspapers are a lot different than radio and TV. The BBC is far more pro state than other private newspapers. You would never see the bbc news investigate the state and uncover expenses scandal like The Telegraph newspaper managed to do a few years ago. Private newspapers often have more of a pro capitalism ideology or at least pro business. While the bbc has no advertising so they are not dictated/manipulated by any advertising. They are held captive by the state’s own regulatory bodies. It goes against the interest of the BBC to report on the state and reduce the size of the state. This is not the same incentive that a private news newspaper has. As long as you don’t break the law by encouraging unlawful activity. I think you can freely printer a newspaper and distribute it.
But when it comes to TV and radio there is a lot of licensing costs.
Fees
20. The application must be accompanied by the application fee. Application fees are reviewed by Ofcom annually, and applicants should consult the Ofcom website for the most up to date information on fees. The tariff tables are published no later than 31 March each year. The application fee for 2010/11 is £2,500 per application.
21. The application fee is non-refundable.
22. Once a service is licensed, fees are charged annually in April. The annual fee is based on a percentage of Relevant Turnover subject to a minimum fee (for all services licensed as DTPS/DTAS except teleshopping services, which are charged a fixed annual fee).
http://licensing.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/tv/guidancemay2010.pdf
http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/research/Tariff_Tables_2001112.pdf
Minimum annual fee of £1000 that increases with the more revenue you earn. But it is not as much as I thought it would have been unless I am not reading it correctly. At 0.03058% up to £10 million revenue. Then you have to ad here by the broadcasting code. http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/broadcasting/broadcast-codes/broadcast-code/
For radio ofcom charge £100000 for a national license annually and local licenses are charged based on how many listeners you reach. Then there are the network license fees which get passed on to the broadcasters via higher costs. arqiva in the UK are the main broadcasting network and I believe and you can rent a channel on sky or virgin for I think about 300k annually. That is excluding program costs and other costs, just the payment to sky or arqiva. I have no idea what arqiva charge but for a national tv channel I would imagine that it would be substantial.
I do however think there is still a lot of opportunity to start a tv channel and radio and newspaper. There are a few independent newspapers that i have seen people create and there was one channel on sky that used to have on non mainstream guests. It would be possible to create more competition in the UK. It is just having the financial backing the capabilities to put it all together so that it is profitable enough to maintain it.
It would still cost a lot of money to own a tv broadcasting channel on some mediums due to the network costs but on some platforms like cable it would be substantially cheaper without license fees.
Whether or not the media will support free trade, lower capital gains taxes, and lower corporate gains taxes is not something I’m going to bring up yet.
But looking at the reverse relationship, media lobbying government, there’s a lot of money flowing from the media firms to PACs to both parties.
Oh yeah. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone better. Definitely check out the list at Guides and Knowledge for your Intellectual Journey.
Basically the airwaves are regulated such that each company has a set place within the broadcast spectrum. A large part of the reasoning for this originally was so that multiple broadcasters wheren’t trying to send information over the same frequency and disrupting the transmissions.
See:
(and believe it or not, some countries even have license requirements to receive television transmissions)
That’s a decent point, and there’s some truth to that, but I could just as easily point to revenues and make the same argument. Newspapers are dying. And broadcast TV is constantly hemorrhaging viewers to cable, premium subscription channels, and plenty of other forms of entertainment/info sources…including the Internet. People simply have more options now…and the total audience for those companies (including their non-primary venue, e.g. TV, newspaper) is in overall decline…which to me shows a demonstrated preference for other things…which ultimately says Big Media is not “actually very efficiently satisying consumer demand right now”, and the masses aren’t “getting exactly what they want from their TV’s and newspapers”. Otherwise they wouldn’t be going elsewhere…would they.
The monetarist?
I’m really enjoying this thread btw.
How did I know this would come up.
Yes Milton Friedman was a monetarist. And yes I don’t think I’ve seen anyone better than him at talking to Statists.
The point is that they owe those profits to the largesse of the State, so the record label executives are handmaidens of the State, they must defer to its desires. Why did the King ever grant monopoly licenses in the first place except to gain influence over the market? So, when the State asks the record label execs to produce a particular type of music, that’s what gets produced. This might sound insane but it’s reality, here’s a specific example - the US government takes over General Motors in 2010. In mid-2010, Far East Movement releases a single called Like a G6 which goes on to top the charts and is played incessantly by Top-40 stations throughout 2010 and early 2011 and is still occasionally played today. Speculation was rampant about what the hell exactly a G6 is. The band eventually explained that they were referring to the Gulfstream G650 but it doesn’t really matter even if this is true - millions and millions of people (I am one of them) Googled “G6” to figure out what the hell they were talking about and got search results that looked like this.
Call me insane if you like but this is, in fact, how the world works.
Clayton -
Force is not the answer. Removing broadcasting restrictions would be a help. More freedom, not less.
Okay. No more derailing, y’all.
Thanks.
I watched the first 20 minutes when you posted it, but Sean Penn’s droning voice made me switch off. I’ll try again with it though as you are so positive about it.
That video really helped. Thanks.
I realise that, and it’s the same here. The thing that I wasn’t understanding is why such government interventions would cause media organisations to be quite as pro-State as they are. That is, why the product is skewed in such a particular direction. Regulations in general tend to favor bigger businesses, but other than that they don’t have a huge influence over the products. For example, in the restaurant industry, there are similar requirements (licenses, health/safety, etc), and these obviously make the product more expensive, and competition less vibrant, but the nature of the final product is not much different, e.g. the ratio of Chinese to Indian restaurants in my town would likely not change if the restaurant regulations were gone… there would probably be more of both, and the ratio would be maintained.
I was thinking that anti-State newspapers were like Chinese restaurants, and pro-State newspapers were like Indian restaurants. I suppose the State doesn’t care whether people are eating Chinese or Indian food, but if they did, they could manipulate the industry by charging 10x more for a license for a Chinese restaurant compared to an Indian. That would not be very subtle. I guess I was looking for a similar un-subtle way that the State might intervene in favor of pro-State newspapers over anti-State.
Ownership of the airwaves is a pretty obvious and unsubtle way the State can control TV stations. But I am not sure how this works in practice. I mean, what are the people who review the license applications, and the people who can revoke them, looking for? I am not expecting to find a rule that says “any station with anti-State message gets it’s license revoked”. That would be too obvious. Maybe the rule is more like “any station with a biased message gets it’s license revoked” and then they can shut down any anti-State station on grounds of “bias”. They could do a similar thing for newspapers.
But it seems to me now that this observation that the media has to cozy up to government officials and police to get ongoing information is actually a much more effective way for the State to control the media, and has a bigger effect of making the media pro-State than either licensing or copyright. So the mainstream media are not bad because of any specific government intervention, but more just as a side-effect of government being so big and all-encompassing… and hence the overwhelming “headline generator” in society.
Has anyone heard of LINK tv?
They are pretty leftist but mainly get funded by donations:
I agree. I watched the Free To Choose series in full a couple of years ago and was very impressed. His main skill is in how he relates to his audience. It never feels like he is preaching. He respects his audience, and often asks them questions to try to get them to think through his logic. He is also exceptional at getting to the source of disagreement straight away, explaining his position concisely and patiently, and using humor and flattery. Ron Paul is great obviously, but I can’t imagine Milton ever acting the way Ron did on that Morton Downey show from 1988. That’s NOT how you get people to think about what you’re saying.
I know. I live in one of those countries. To me “TV license” means a license to receive TV transmissions. That’s what confused me. I guess to Milton and you “TV license” means a license to broadcast TV transmissions.
I have to have a TV license if I want to watch or record any live UK TV. That includes cable and satellite, and even ITV and Channel 4, which are the two non-BBC broadcast channels, but as far as I know all license fee money goes to the BBC. I don’t need a license to use BBC iPlayer or 4OD (Channel 4 online service) to watch stuff later, but I had to tick a box on those sites to confirm I have a TV license to make live TV available on there. I don’t need a similar license to listen to live radio. The radio license was phased out in 1971 and now BBC Radio is funded through the TV license fee. It’s a pretty strange system. When you buy a TV from a retailer, I believe they legally have to take your name and address and report it to the TV licensing people, so that they can send someone round to your house if you are unlicensed to try catch you red-handed in the despicable act of watching live TV without State permission.
But alas the BBC is much cherished in this country, and most people happily pay the license fee, saying it’s worth it to not have adverts on the BBC. Among British institutions, it’s up there with the NHS (socialized medicine) in terms of how much people love it.
“What’s wrong with the mainstream media?”
Before answering this question, what is the mainstream media? Each newspaper (The Washington Post, The New York Times, etc.) and each news channels (CNN, MSNBC, etc.) has regular fluctuations in viewership, so that one is a news leader one month, but not another. I don’t have the viewer statistics long them, but my guess is that you are referencing, ABC News, PBS, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and the major newspapers previously mentioned. There are a variety of factors. One is ideology.
For example, yesterday USA Today published an opinion by ACLU lawyer Hina Shamsi that was critical of the Obama administration’s drone program. When was the last time you saw a mainstream opinion piece call taxation theft or the government illegitimate? There are limits to what the mainstream media allows.
Another factor is lack of skepticism, especially of government claims. For example, Media Matters for America, a progressive media watchdog group that will excoriate false conservative claims, but not liberal ones, reported October 30, 2007, ‘News outlets including CNN, the Associated Press, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times uncritically quoted White House spokeswoman Dana Perino’s response to a question about an October 23 Federal Emergency Management Agency press conference, in which the questions were asked by FEMA staffers playing reporters. Perino said of the conference, “It is not a practice that we would employ here at the White House and we certainly don’t condone it.” But these news outlets failed to note previous Bush administration scandals involving “fake” reporting.’
Another factor is non-disclosure. For example, Media Matters reported July 2, 2008, ‘NBC’s Today and Nightly News and MSNBC Live aired segments in which correspondent Janet Shamlian reported live from an offshore drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico. But while two of Shamlian’s reports included quotes from a Chevron spokesperson, none of her reports included an interview with or quote from environmental organizations or explained the “environmental concerns” that Shamlian acknowledged exist. Further, neither Shamlian nor the hosts and anchors disclosed that General Electric, which owns 80 percent of NBC Universal, also has an affiliated business unit that is invested in the acquisition and production of oil and natural gas and another that is a major supplier of equipment and services for the offshore drilling industry.’
If you want to see how a combination of these factors helped the Bush administration sell the Iraq War, watching the PBS documentary Buying the War.
Maybe. I pretty much stopped watching TV back in 2008, and before that I was probably blind to it. I’ve never read newspapers on a regular basis, maybe some newspapers aren’t so bad.
As for the expenses scandal, that story just annoyed me for the most part. It went on and on. People were outraged that an MP had paid £3k for a toilet seat or whatever, but they weren’t bothered in the least about them spending billions bailing out banks. It is hardly a big scandal in the scheme of things. After it broke, the government used the story to it’s advantage because it distracted from more serious things going on.
I hear that a lot from people arguing in favor of the BBC. This view is very dangerous, because it makes the BBC much more powerful. People let their guard down when watching the BBC and they think they are getting “fair and balanced” news because the BBC supposedly serves “the public interest”, while Sky and the rest are (of course) biased in favor of their sponsors, the evil, greedy corporations. Advertising on the BBC just takes a different form. Look at any BBC nature documentary of the last 20 years. Practically all of them repeatedly emphasise the “humans bad, environment good” message. A friend of mine is an avid nature-lover and even before she realised that climate change is a scam, she found BBC nature documentaries so depressing because they hit that note so hard and so often.
Yep, there it is. “To ensure that news, in whatever form, is reported with due accuracy and presented with due impartiality.”
Thanks for the info about the costs of the licenses. Sounds pretty expensive to me. The internet is the way to go.
Thumbs up on War Made Easy - one of the best points they make (and support with gold-plated examples) is the uncritical quoting of “government sources” as if government sources are some kind of objective purveyors of facts instead of interested parties seeking to sway public opinion on the question of war. This is a gaping hole in journalistic integrity and it needs to come to a stop.
Clayton -
Timely LRC blog entry on this very topic…
Clayton -
I find it fitting that the sountrack from The Adjustment Bureau is playing towards the end.
