Author: john

Does Death Penalty Save Lives?

Does Death Penalty Save Lives? A New Debate – New York Times

This is an interesting piece about a number of recent quantitative studies which have found that, controlling for other variables,  the death penalty can save more lives than it ends.

What interests me, that is not addressed in this article, is the question of what is it about the death penalty that is saving lives?  There are so many possibilities (ranging from a number of effects from locking up harmful criminals, to the impact of the law’s expressed condemnation of murder and violent crime), all of which statistical studies might have a hard time separating out all of these variables. Also unexamined is whether there are other punishments that might have similar effects.

Martin’s Daily Show

The Daily Show – New York Times

Kevin Martin’s op ed piece in today’s Times portrays the proposed relaxation of cross-ownership rules as good for journalism:

Without newspapers, we would be less informed about our communities and have fewer outlets for the expression of independent thinking and a diversity of viewpoints. The challenge is to restore the viability of newspapers while preserving the core values of a diversity of voices and a commitment to localism in the media marketplace.

Martin argues that the solution is that:

A company that owns a newspaper in one of the 20 largest cities in the country should be permitted to purchase a broadcast TV or radio station in the same market. … Beyond giving newspapers in large markets the chance to buy one local TV or radio station, no other ownership rule would be altered. Other companies would not be allowed to own any more radio or television stations, either in a single market or nationally, than they already do.

A newspaper purchasing a television station sounds fine because it would bring in more revenue and could possibly bring deeper journalistic values to the television newsroom. This sounds good until you step back and think about which direction the purchases would be more likely to go.

TV station owners have deeper pockets, and my guess is that they would be more likely to covet their local newspaper.

This scenario would most certainly not be a good thing for newspapers or the craft of journalism.  While newspapers are already under financial pressure that has caused cuts in the newsroom, television news values could cut papers even more (why send two news crews to an incident when you can just send one).  Television values also tend to sacrifice time consuming stories for “what sells.”  Fewer stories about what’s happening in government, or what’s going on at the community level, would not be good for “their role as watchdog and informer of the citizenry, newspapers are crucial to our democracy.” Further, television newsrooms are less likely to be staffed with graduates of journalism schools who are trained to do hard journalism–the kind that television reporters often rely on, but don’t do themselves.

Chairman Martin: the press is not on your side for very good reasons.

More on college copyright

New bill would punish colleges, students who dont become copyright cops

Ars posts a good summary of the bill I mentioned the other day.

What has been bothering me about this one is the question: why colleges? The only reasonable answer I can come up with is that they are service providers to a discrete population of younger savvier users who (one might think) would be more likely to infringe.

Yet, is this any basis for legislating against them? Armed robberies (I am guessing) might be carried out to a higher degree by lower income folks, but we do not pass gun control laws that specifically target this population. We know that there are probably a host of other factors that go into this correlation (things like financial need, desperation, and mental illness).

It seems to me that some of the factors at play here, other than being “at college,” is that the population is younger, more likely to have a computer, and is more likely to have an interest in many types of media. Under these same factors, we might require a dot-com company that provides internet access to follow the same rules outlined in this bill.

Colleges must pay for media subscriptions

Democrats: Colleges must police copyright, or else | CNET News.com

New federal legislation says universities must agree to provide not just deterrents but also “alternatives” to peer-to-peer piracy, such as paying monthly subscription fees to the music industry for their students, on penalty of losing all financial aid for their students.

With colleges feeling the financial pinch, some so hard that they are unable to provide services like blogs and wikis that might have immediate instructional benefits, one wonders what will be sacrificed to pay for media subscriptions.