Regulating Loud Commercials
Peter Suderman and Berin Szoka provide sane, libertarian arguments against the Nanny State regulating the volume of television commercials. While they both find the longstanding practice where the ads are several decibels higher than the surrounding programming annoying, they nonetheless argue that it's not a matter where government should intervene. Says Suderman, It's easy enough to turn your TV ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on October 13, 2009 15:29
New York Times Malware Ads
This weekend, I got one of those fake "virus clean" popups after clicking a link to a New York Times article from Memeorandum. Apparently, I wasn't alone as there are a dozen or more posts about it today at Techmeme. The NYT itself has this Note to Readers: Some NYTimes.com readers have seen a pop-up box warning them about a virus and ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on September 14, 2009 14:43
Banning the Birthers
Jon Henke thinks it's time for the Right to throw out the lunatics: In the 1960's, William F. Buckley denounced the John Birch Society leadership for being "so far removed from common sense" and later said "We cannot allow the emblem of irresponsibility to attach to the conservative banner." The Birthers are the Birchers of our time, and WorldNetDaily is their pamphlet. ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on September 1, 2009 09:33
Charging for Online News
Stop me if you've heard this one before: A news executive has a plan to start charging for online news. The Financial Times editor, Lionel Barber, has predicted that "almost all" news organisations will be charging for online content within a year. Barber said building online platforms that could charge readers on an article-by-article or subscription basis was one of the ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on July 17, 2009 06:32
MPAA Loses Again
The Supreme Court yesterday declined to hear an appeal from the MPAA, thus letting stand a lower court ruling that Cablevision's new remote DVR technology does not constitute a "retransmission" of the programming and thus require additional fees. The new DVR service would work by storing a viewer's recordings in computers housed at the cable operator, rather than in a box ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on June 30, 2009 08:18
Obama Bans Yummy Cigarettes
The FDA now has the power to regulate what cigarettes taste like. For the children. President Barack Obama cited his own long struggle to quit the cigarettes he got hooked on as a teenager as he signed the nation's strongest-ever anti-smoking bill Monday and praised it for providing critically needed protections for kids. "The decades-long effort to protect our ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on June 22, 2009 16:03
FTC to Monitor Blogs
Here we go again: The government is looking to get into the business of regulating blogs, reports AP's Deborah Yao. Savvy consumers often go online for independent consumer reviews of products and services, scouring through comments from everyday Joes and Janes to help them find a gem or shun a lemon. What some fail to realize, though, is that such reviews ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on June 22, 2009 06:38
Unintended Consequences
It is a truism that well-intentioned attempts by government to curb bad behavior often spawn unforeseen and perhaps worse behavior. A classic, recurring example of that is the now-35-year-old effort to curb the influence of campaign contributions on politics, which has spawned the use of PACs, 527 groups, and other insidious activities far more harmful than single wealthy individuals giving money ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on June 12, 2009 09:19
Craigslist Killer Reax
Jennifer Collins observes, "I can tell that I am deep in exam grading because when I read news updates about the Craigslist killer, instead of pondering questions like whether his girlfriend will continue to stand by him, I am focusing on all the great questions that can come out of the case for use on a crim pro exam next ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on May 11, 2009 14:49
Conde Nast Closing ‘Portfolio’
Jeff Bercovici reports the demise of his own job: For nearly two years I've been covering the media industry's bad news on this blog, including some that's hit very close to home. Now it hits closer still: Condé Nast Portfolio is closing. Our editor in chief, Joanne Lipman, just broke the news to staff, saying the decision had been made "because of ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on April 27, 2009 11:19
Limbaugh, Failure, and Media Distortion
Commenter Bithead alerts me to a cross-blog debate that I somehow missed between Patrick Frey and Jeff Goldstein over Rush Limbaugh's "I hope Obama fails" line at CPAC and the ensuing media frenzy. Essentially, Patrick argues that conservatives should be more careful about what they say so as to avoid being distorted in the media and Jeff retorts that conservatives ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on March 7, 2009 07:51
Obama Ruins Commercials
I actually seldom watch commercials these days, owing to my DVR. But we're visiting my mother-in-law and doing it old school tonight. Several spots have taken on unintended meanings in light of the Obama confirmation debacles. Any TurboTax ad, naturally, makes me think of Tim Geithner. They're advertising wall-to-wall but, not surprisingly, have not taken advantage of the tie-in. Particularly amusing was ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on February 12, 2009 21:12
F-22 as Stimulus
[caption id="attachment_31385" align="alignright" width="300" caption="An newspaper advocacy ad touting the virtues of the F-22 Raptor is displayed among stories about the ailing economy, in Washington, Thursday, Jan. 29, 2009. Faced with a national economic crisis and a new president, the defense industry is itself playing defense. Its latest lobbying message: Weapons systems aren"][/caption] Andrew Exum catches something that we online-only news ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on February 10, 2009 16:12
Super Bowl XLIII Commercials
I can't speak for anyone else, but I found this year's crop of Super Bowl commercials pretty lackluster. At one point, I speculated that perhaps Madison Avenue decided that it would be in poor taste to spend scads of money on commercials during an economic downturn. Then I remembered it was Madison Avenue I was thinking of and discarded that ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on February 2, 2009 11:58
L.A. Billboard Ban Upheld
[caption id="attachment_29608" align="alignright" width="300" caption="This billboard sign was mocking the $300 Divorce signs that have littered Toronto the past year or two"][/caption] The 9th Circuit has upheld Los Angeles bans on billboards, saying no 1st Amendment issues were at stake. Outdoor advertising company Metro Lights LLC had argued that the city could not prohibit new "off-site" signs -- images that advertise products ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on January 7, 2009 08:52
