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Chris Ingram

By Chris Ingram

To Hell with the Constitution

The controversy about the NYC mosque being built blocks away from Ground Zero is serving as a convenient distraction for congressional Democrats who would rather not be talking about record budget deficits, Social Security going bankrupt, and the millions of Americans looking for a job.

All that aside, while it is easy to jump on the no mosque in my backyard bandwagon, it is completely un-American to do so. And I’ve got to laugh at all of the Constitution loving blue-blooded Americans who conveniently forget about the rights our Constitution provides for religious liberties for all – not just those we don’t perceive as a threat.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan of any faith that treats women worse than a whipped dog and makes them walk around covered in sheets, but hey, if that’s how they want to act that’s their right.

And while it is equally easy to condemn all Muslim’s as gun toting terrorist, fortunately they’re all not.

As such, we shouldn’t trample on the Constitution because we don’t agree with the views of a religion that is not our own. What’s next? If a bunch of radical Methodists take to the streets and kill a bunch of people are we going to start banning Methodist churches?

Yours could be next. 

Howdy Doody has a good week

Bill McCollum has had a good week. Depending on which poll you read, he’s back in public favor over opponent Rick Scott.  The Republican Party establishment (you know, the ones who gave us the mess we’re in) have been pushing McCollum hard the last week or so, and McCollum has finally gotten his groove back.

There’s not a whole lot for Scott to do other than dump millions more into TV ads and with roughly 20 percent of the electorate still undecided, it’s worth the big ad buy.  But at this point with momentum on his side, this race looks like it is McCollum’s to lose. Quite a change from two weeks ago…

I already cast my vote for Rick Scott. I voted for him because after twenty years in public office, Bill McCollum is part of the problem not part of the solution. Not to mention he won’t be horse trading good legislation for bad with Tallahassee lobbyists and special interest groups – because if elected he won’t owe anybody any favors.

Strippers for Jeff Greene

Democrat Primary voters also seem to be trending away from big bucks billionaire Jeff Greene. Greene has spent millions trying to woo Democrat voters into believing that a man who had Mike Tyson as his best man, Heidi Fleiss as a houseguest, and naked strippers on his mega-yacht has what it takes to get our economy back on track. I’m thinking not – unless that is, he plans on hiring all the unemployed to become poll dancers on his yacht Summerwind. Click here to see the boobies on Greene’s yacht; but don’t open if you’re offended by, well, boobs.

Five Florida politicians make list of 12 “most crooked”

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) recently released its Top 12 Most Crooked Candidates who are running for federal office in 2010. While the name of this organization would indicated it is run by a bunch of people living in some Utopia (ethics in Washington?), the non-partisan group has nonetheless done its homework in compiling its 2010 list.

Sadly for Floridians, five of the twelve hail from the Sunshine State and four of those are running for the U.S. Senate.  CREW doesn’t favor one party over the other in its assessments. The four Florida bad boys are: Charlie “pander pants” Crist, NPA; Marco “whose got my Amex Card” Rubio, Republican; Kendrick “gotta’ find my momma a job” Meek, Democrat; and Jeff “show me some boobies” Greene.

Ah, Florida…tropical breezes, beautiful sunsets, Disney World, and dirt-bag politicians.

Libertarian candidate Alex Snitker is starting to look like the best option.

(The fifth Florida candidate on the list is Republican Allen West who is running for the U.S. House of Representatives).

See the CREW Top 12 by clicking here.

Don’t Spread My Wealth!

A video interview I did with Susan Massey of the website Don’t Spread My Wealth can be watched by clicking here. Susan and I discussed Florida and Hillsborough County elections.

Special Political Connections on Bay News 9

If you’re in the Tampa Bay area and have Brighthouse Networks, be sure to check out Political Connections’ special one-hour election coverage this Sunday at 11:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. Betty Castor and I discuss Florida elections with hosts Adam Smith and Al Ruechel. We’ll also be on deck on Election Night starting at 6:30 p.m. until who knows when.

Chris Ingram is the president and founder of 411 Communications a corporate and political communications firm, and publisher of www.IrreverentView.com. Ingram is a frequent pundit on Fox News and CNN, and has written opinion columns for the Washington Times, UPI, Front Page Florida, and National Review online. E-mail him at: Chris@IrreverentView.com.

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By Mike Matteo 

So far today I have seen six political ads on television, have been called by two opinion research poll companies and had four recorded announcements by candidates who are running in the primaries.  And it’s not even noon on a Monday!  As I sat back and began feeling overwhelmed by the all this undeserved attention it made me realize that running for office is a lot like dating someone who possesses ulterior motives.  But even women who have sought relationships with me haven’t given me as much attention as the candidates who are obviously obsessed with my vote. Normally I should be flattered by all the attention but, to be honest, I find the whole process like being stalked. No matter where I turn they’re there, the “CANDIDATES.”  It’s like being a victim in a horror movie the only difference is that instead of being lunged at with a knife, I’m being assaulted with advertisements, calls and campaign literature which keeps the guys who collect my recycling extremely busy.
 
Being a voter is a lot like having two girlfriends who are trying to convince me that I should date one of them exclusively because the other one could never make me happy but they never mention what they’ll do to make me happy.  In all the years that Bill McCollum, Jim Norman, Kevin Ambler etc. have held offices they have never picked up the phone to say, “Hey, Mike, how’s it going?  What can I do to make you happy?”  But during election time they leave me little messages on my answering machine, send me flyers and have their workers call me every day and tell me how much they need my support.  I hate to think that politicians might have ulterior motives or are disingenuous, however, this pattern seems to emerge every year at this time so it has aroused my suspicions.  Is it possible that they like me only for one thing: my vote? Will I fade into oblivion after Election Day only to be used again next year at this time?  What kind of relationships are we building here?
 
Personally, whether it is dealing with a woman or a candidate I like to find out things on my own instead of having them tell me what they think I want to hear.  The only thing that phone calls and political ads tell me (especially since they are mostly about their opponent’s negative qualities) is that they would rather have me focus more on what the other guy does wrong versus what they do right. 
 
Finally, is there anything more annoying that having to get up to answer the telephone during dinner to hear a recorded announcement?  When I have someone who I know personally and they call me at inopportune times, I let them know and if they continue the behavior I end the relationship.  Sadly, I can’t do this with my political admirers because they are beyond persistent.  Thus, my strategy for dealing with candidates is that I’m keeping a pen and paper near the phone and every time I get a call from a candidate I put a check mark next to that candidate’s name.  I total up the check marks on the eve of an election.  The candidate who has annoyed me the most (the highest number of check marks) will not get my vote.  Hopefully if all the candidates who feel that the best way to get votes is to harass voters by calling them at home (sorry but I don’t recall every giving them my phone number) are voted against, perhaps, in the future I can enjoy my dinner without being bothered. 
 

Mike Matteo is a resident of Tampa, Florida where he was a public and private high school teacher who taught classes in economics, history, psychology and philosophy. Mike has written twenty full-length feature screenplays, has taught screenwriting at the University of South Florida. He has written or co-authored three books, 2 produced movies, stage plays  and currently writes for a teen travel show. E-mail him at: writer161@aol.com.

Cameras and cleavage

An irreverent look at sex and the media culture

By Victor Epstein

See racy photos and our first annual ”shame on you” list.

Gotcha!

Happy belated April Fools Day you oversexed maniacs.

The fact that you’re even here proves the accuracy of the old adage “there’s a sucker born every minute.” Showman P.T. Barnum said it first of the throngs that spent millions of dollars on the fake curiosities he rolled out in the late 1800s – like the Cardiff Giant and the Feejee mermaid, which had the tail of a fish and the head of a monkey.

Look, this is a news site, not a sex site. This headline and pic merely serves to prove a point – which is the degree to which sex is marketed to Americans and the degree to which it drowns out the news you need to ingest to be a fully functioning voter in a working democracy.

Educated voters are the real mythical creature of the deep in America right now – not the Feejee mermaid – because we’ve been programmed by biology and by decades of increasingly focused marketing campaigns to respond to boobs and six-pack abs.

What am I saying? I’m saying that you all are the problem you scapegoat the media for. Not part of the problem.

The Problem

Look in the mirror. You’re reading this because of a digital photo of two boobs being pushed together. You don’t even know if it was a photo of a real person.

TV news wheels out stories about strippers and breast augmentation every sweeps period because this is the kind of stuff we have been programmed to watch. They run footage of L.A. car chases with no particular significance because we like to see violence. Same goes for the daily crime story.

If crime reporters don’t have a murder, they run rape. If they don’t have a rape, they run assault. If they don’t have a decent assault they run stories about parents getting ticketed for racing a sick child through stoplights to the emergency room. It’s a form of journalistic triage.

If there was as much readership interest in good news, journalists would be writing more good news stories.

And people wonder why they feel so frightened. It’s ridiculous.

We’ve created a world obsessed with sex and violence where every one of us is a suspect. I’m part of this world, too. I’m not above it.

That’s why I was running for my life just last week in my own building. I really was.

I’ve covered more than a dozen hurricanes, grew up in the Bronx in the bad old days before Rudy Giuliani, sat in on countless autopsies and have walked through some of the most dangerous neighborhoods in America while interviewing people about late-night crime, but that’s not what frightens me in this screwy society of ours. What frightens me is a sweet little 2-year-old boy, alone with me in an otherwise empty hallway, wheeling slowly on his tricycle. He wants to talk and play.

Once upon a time in America, I would have spent a couple minutes pushing this lonely little guy’s tricycle through the hall, because it takes a village to raise a child. Right? Not anymore. Not in a world obsessed with pedophilia, murder, shootouts and car chases.

This innocent toddler was trying to talk to me and I was literally stumbling and bumbling for the front door of my apartment building – mumbling “have a nice day little man” and trying to exit the hallway before his mom stepped outside and accused me of who knows what. I was frightened of what might be misconstrued. Not of what I would have done.

Likewise, most of us have never witnessed a serious crime or been victims of a serious crime – unless you count the wholesale fleecing of the American middle class – but we are terrified of crime. You know why? Because crime sells.

So does sex.

That’s why you’re here in the first place being lectured by me. You saw two boobs and said to yourself, “Wow, this is interesting.”

I’m no prize, but I am a sneaky bastard. I placed this snare for you, baited it with boobs, and you fell right into it. So, now I’m telling you the painful truths many of us don’t like to confront.

One of them is that it really does take a village to raise a kid – that African proverb is spot on. The other is that we don’t act like a village in the U.S.

I was running from that poor little kid because our society has lost its way – because we have transformed our neighbors and ourselves into permanent suspects. Instead of “doing right” and spending a little time with this sweet kid, I was busy “being right” and covering my ass in a society where allegations are too quickly embraced as the truth, victims are empowered and the value of coping skills is marginalized.

We have descended into a world where the only morality is the pursuit of profit growth and victimhood, by any means necessary. That’s why people and groups compete to be victims and the real origin of disgraces like the Octomom and the Colorado Balloon hoax.

Look, you’re part of the problem. I’m part of the problem. We’re all hip deep in this mess.

The first step toward righting this listing ship is to call things by their right names and make better use of what we have. The thousands of pornography Web sites and cable TV channels that now exist are a force to  be reckoned with. I say “let’s put this resource to work for America.”

Here’s my humble proposal: when you want to see boobs, six-pack abs and strangers having sex – go to a porn site. And when you want to see news, go to a news site.

My site is a news site.

I can see every IP address that moves through my website and I’m willing to bet the house that traffic to it will more than double behind this sexy headline and pic. That’s a damn disgrace.

We can do better. To do better we have to get a handle on the marketing campaigns that have turned us into morons. The first step is to look for inherent truth. It exists. Trust me on that.

Let’s look at a few truths

John Ellis Bush (aka Jeb Bush)

John Bush was successfully marketed to Floridians as a political outsider when he ran for governor in 1998 and 2002. First off, his name isn’t “Jeb” and he was formed in the Northeast – not the South. But Jeb resonated with the conservative voters of North Florida so that’s the way he was marketed.

Remember the old adage/slur about a good saleperson being able to sell ice to eskimos? Well selling Jeb Bush to voters as a political outsider is the same thing.

John was part of his daddy’s political campaigns as a teen. He’s a brilliant man – a policy wonk with a great sense of humor – and I liked him very much as a person when I covered him in Tallahassee, but he’s not an everyday guy. John attended the exclusive Phillips Andover boarding school in Massachusetts and has never lived without a financial safety net.

If we’re going to elect him again for public office let’s elect him for who he is.

Bill Clinton

This is the president that signed the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993, heralding a period of U.S. job displacement to low-wage nations that has done more damage to working Americans in my lifetime than any other. This is also the guy that removed some of the speed regulators from the housing market, laying the groundwork for the housing collapse that began in 2006.

Who cares what he does with cigars and ambitious, willing young ladies from politically connected, wealthy families? That stuff pales in comparison to the damage some of his policies have done to American families.

“Geedub” Bush and Ronny Reagan

These are not conservatives, unless big government spending that pushes us into deficits is a now a conservative trait. If being good to the many is an act of socialism – as it’s now being misrepresented by conservative pundits – then the big prescription medicine plan G.W. Bush pushed through for seniors is the biggest socialist program in decades. It took effect on Jan. 1, 2006.

Geedub was marketed to religious zealots as one of their own, but balked at the opportunity to appoint a conservative justice to the U.S. Supreme Court that would have overturned Roe v Wade, the landmark case underpinning legalized abortion. You know why? Because co-opting religious votes is not the same as enacting policies that please religious voters and alienate the rest of the nation.

Geedub also championed a plan to privatize Social Security, which would have left millions of seniors eating catfood after the stock market collapse that began in 2007 if he had succeeded.

Ohio Voters

I don’t think it’s asking too much to expect a state’s voters to act in their own self interest. Somehow, Ohio voters managed to vote for Geedub in 2004 even though they were losing thousands of manufacturing jobs to China. Why? Because he convinced them that he would help them impose their religious values on others.

So, from here on out Ohio will be known as “The Sucker State” on Journalism Purist, just as South Dakota is known as “The Loanshark State” here for its role in undermining state usury laws.

Political Pie

Much of the time the most significant difference between the Republican and Democratic parties is not the voting groups they claim to represent, but the donor groups they take money from. Those donors have been running our pay-to-play government since Washington, D.C., devolved into perpetual campaign mode.

The biggest donors support both parties.

If you can’t afford a lobbyist or a meaningful political donation you are not represented in our political system much of the time. That’s why voters keep turning out incumbents. They’re searching for major-party candidates that represent working-class interests in a system that marginalizes those interests. Candidates that just don’t exist in this age of closely policed party-line voting.

You’re paying much more for health care, cable TV, energy, gasoline, bank fees – just to name a few – than 20 years because those industries employ effective political lobbyists and are generous political donors.

Bottom line, politicians don’t need to cater to working class voters  if they can fool them. It’s the same strategy Barnum employed – he didn’t need a real unicorn to make money from fools if he could put together a convincing fake unicorn. Barnum would have been a great political strategist.

And so we have a lot of very convincing candidates who portray themselves as champions of the working class, while working for the big money interests that exploit us. The fact that we keep ousting incumbents is the best proof of the degree to which working class interests are abandoned by elected officials as soon as they win office.

The big danger of this situation is that it frustrates one of the very strengths of America – the ability to conduct a bloodless revolution every time we have an election. To do that you have to have the ability to vote for a candidate and a party that represents your interests. Working Americans no longer have that option because the cost of running an effective campaign serves as a poll tax on prospective cadidates that don’t want to work for the big donors.

Wedge Issues

Political strategists carve up elections the way a baker carves up pie. They need to cobble together more slices of the electoral pie than their competitors to get elected. That game makes for some odd alliances and campaign rhetoric.

Wedge issues earned that moniker because they divide the working class vote, making it irrelevant. Working votes only matter when they’re united by a single issue as they were in opposition to the war in Vietnam and to Richard Nixon’s involvement in Watergate.

Groups that vote the same way en mass are particularly prized by political strategists because they’re not divided by wedge issues, which is why Miami’s relatively small Cuban community and New York City’s relatively small Hasidic Jewish community sometimes wield such disproportionate power.

Physical Appearance

Americans spend a lot of time and money trying to look like the celebrities they see on magazines and TV. You know why most of you fall short? Because even the people you’re admiring don’t look that good most of the time. It’s fiction.

What you are really looking at are manipulated images and calculating people who have transformed themselves with liposuction, hair implants, fake nails, breast augmentation, pectoral and butt augmentation, bulimia, pancake makeup, steroids, hair dye, spray-on tans, diet drugs like Alli, dental caps and bleach, and yes – wigs and hair extensions.

Almost nobody really looks like what you see on the red carpet at the Oscar Awards. There are only a handful of genetic freaks that feature big boobs and sex-pack abs – because boobs are mostly made of fat and fat covers six-pack abs. So the two rarely go together – especially for people over 25.

What am I saying? I’m saying there is absolutely nothing wrong with you if you don’t look like Brad Pitt or Halle Berry because even Halle Berry and Brad Pitt don’t look like their public facades most of the time when the cameras are off. They fart. They have hair in places they don’t want it. Everybody does.

The images you are seeing of them are often the best photo from hundreds of less flattering photos that were taken after makeup artists and lighting specialists had been at work for a long time. OK? Chill the heck out.

I don’t really know how to close out this story and my wife is giving me the evil eye. So, I just want to say “thank you” for staying with me to the end and leave you with this closing thought.

If it really takes a village to raise a child, let’s be a village.

Right now, we’re more like a collection of strangers staring competitively at each other and whispering to ourselves “I’ve got them beat, got them beat. Not them. Them. Not them.”

That’s not a life. It’s the human equivalent of the deranged pacing that caged animals engage in at the zoo when they’ve been confined too long.

Journalism Purist is the blog of veteran journalist Victor Epstein, who has spent more than 20 years in the new industry’s trenches and believes there are still inherent truths in the world. His new blog is for you if you suspect those truths are being systematically obscured by the rising influence of public relations and marketing on news, and the political and corporate interests that bankroll them. Contact him at: victor1212@gmail.com.

By Robert G. Picard

Oxford, England – Journalists like to think of their work in moral or even sacred terms. With each new layoff or paper closing, they tell themselves that no business model could adequately compensate the holy work of enriching democratic society, speaking truth to power, and comforting the afflicted.
 
Actually, journalists deserve low pay.
 
Wages are compensation for value creation. And journalists simply aren’t creating much value these days.
 
Until they come to grips with that issue, no amount of blogging, twittering, or micropayments is going to solve their failing business models.
 
Where does value come from?
 
Moral philosophers differentiate intrinsic and instrumental value. Intrinsic value involves things that are good in and of themselves, such as beauty, truth, and harmony. Instrumental value comes from things that facilitate action and achievement, including awareness, belonging, and understanding. Journalism produces only instrumental value. It is important not in itself, but because it enlightens the public, supports social interaction, and facilitates democracy.
 
Economic value is rooted in worth and exchange. It is created when finished products and services have more value – as determined by consumers – than the sum of the value of their components.
 
To comprehend journalistic value creation, we need to focus on the benefits it provides. Journalism creates functional, emotional, and self-expressive benefits for consumers. Functional benefits include providing useful information and ideas. Emotional benefits include a sense of belonging and community, reassurance and security, and escape. Self-expressive benefits are provided when individuals identify with the publication’s perspectives or opinions, or when they’re empowered to express their own ideas.
 
These benefits used to produce significant economic value. Not today. That’s because producers and providers have less control over the communication space than ever before. In the past, the difficulty and cost of operation, publication, and distribution severely limited the number of content suppliers. This scarcity raised the economic value of content. That additional value is gone today because a far wider range of sources of news and information exist.
 
The primary value that is created today comes from the basic underlying value of the labor of journalists. Unfortunately, that value is now near zero.
 
The total value is the value of content plus the value of advertising. However, advertisers don’t care about journalism – only the audience that it produces. Thus the real measure of journalistic value is value created by serving readers.
 
What are journalists worth?
 
Economic outcomes have traditionally held low priority for journalists. That’s got to change.
 
Journalists are not professionals with a unique base of knowledge such as professors or electricians. Consequently, the primary economic value of journalism derives not from its own knowledge, but in distributing the knowledge of others. In this process three fundamental functions and related skills have historically created economic value: Accessing sources, determining significance of information, and conveying it effectively.
 
Accessing sources is crucial because information and knowledge do not exist as a natural resource that merely has to be harvested. It must be constructed by someone. The journalistic skill of identifying and reaching authorities or others who construct expertise traditionally gave journalists opportunities to report in ways that the general public could not.
 
Determining significance has been critical because journalists sort through an enormous amount of information to find the most significant and interesting items for consumers.
 
Effective presentation involves the ability to reduce information to its core to meet space and time requirements and presenting it in an interesting and attractive manner. These are built on linguistic and artistic skills and formatting techniques.
 
Today all this value is being severely challenged by technology that is “de-skilling” journalists. It is providing individuals – without the support of a journalistic enterprise – the capabilities to access sources, to search through information and determine its significance, and to convey it effectively.
 
To create economic value, journalists and news organizations historically relied on the exclusivity of their access to information and sources, and their ability to provide immediacy in conveying information. The value of those elements has been stripped away by contemporary communication developments. Today, ordinary adults can observe and report news, gather expert knowledge, determine significance, add audio, photography, and video components, and publish this content far and wide (or at least to their social network) with ease. And much of this is done for no pay.
 
Until journalists can redefine the value of their labor above this level, they deserve low pay.
 
Well-paying employment requires that workers possess unique skills, abilities, and knowledge. It also requires that the labor must be non-commoditized. Unfortunately, journalistic labor has become commoditized. Most journalists share the same skills sets and the same approaches to stories, seek out the same sources, ask similar questions, and produce relatively similar stories. This interchangeability is one reason why salaries for average journalists are relatively low and why columnists, cartoonists, and journalists with special expertise (such as finance reporters) get higher wages.
 
Across the news industry, processes and procedures for news gathering are guided by standardized news values, producing standardized stories in standardized formats that are presented in standardized styles. The result is extraordinary sameness and minimal differentiation.
 
It is clear that journalists do not want to be in the contemporary labor market, much less the highly competitive information market. They prefer to justify the value they create in the moral philosophy terms of instrumental value. Most believe that what they do is so intrinsically good and that they should be compensated to do it even if it doesn’t produce revenue.
 
A century and half ago, journalists were much closer to the market and more clearly understood they were sellers of labor in the market. Before professionalism of journalism, many journalists not only wrote the news, but went to the streets to distribute and sell it and few journalists had regular employment in the news and information business. Journalists and social observers debated whether practicing journalism for a news entity was desirable. Even Karl Marx argued that “The first freedom of the press consists in it not being a trade.”
 
Adapt or die
 
If the news business is to survive, we must find ways to alter journalism’s practice and skills to create new economic value.
 
Journalism must innovate and create new means of gathering, processing, and distributing information so it provides content and services that readers, listeners, and viewers cannot receive elsewhere. And these must provide sufficient value so audiences and users are willing to pay a reasonable price.
 
If value is to be created, journalists cannot continue to report merely in the traditional ways or merely re-report the news that has appeared elsewhere. They must add something novel that creates value. They will have to start providing information and knowledge that is not readily available elsewhere, in forms that are not available elsewhere, or in forms that are more useable by and relevant to their audiences.
 
One cannot expect newspaper readers to pay for page after page of stories from news agencies that were available online yesterday and are in a thousand other papers today. Providing a food section that pales by comparison to the content of food magazines or television cooking shows is not likely to create much value for readers. Neither are scores of disjointed, undigested short news stories about events in far off places.
 
Some news magazines have confronted the issue and are already changing and trying to provide unique news content. Newsweek has moved away from creating a compendium of events to a publication that explores the issues and implications of events and trends. US News & World Report has emphasized its consumer review and rankings activities.
 
Daily newspapers don’t have quite as much leeway with content but they can emphasize uniqueness. The Boston Globe, for example, could become the national leader in education and health reporting because of the multitude of higher education and medical institutions in its coverage area. Not only would it make the paper more valuable to readers, but it could sell that coverage to other publications. Similarly, The Dallas Morning News could provide specialized coverage of oil and energy, The Des Moines Register could become the leader in agricultural news; and the Chicago Tribune in airline and aircraft coverage. Every paper will have to be the undisputed leader in terms of their quality and quantity of local news.
 
Finding the right formula of practice, functions, skills, and business model will not be easy, but the search must be undertaken.
 
It is not just a matter of embracing uses of new technologies. Journalists today are often urged to change practice to embrace crowd sourcing, to search specialty websites, social networks, blogs, and micro-blogs for story ideas, and to embrace in collaborative journalism with their audiences. Although all of these provide useful new ways to find information, access knowledge, and engage with readers, listeners, and viewers, the amount of value that they add and its monetization is highly debatable. The primary reason is that those who are most highly interested in that information and knowledge are able to harvest it themselves using increasingly common tools.
 
Finding the rights means to create and protect value will require collaboration throughout news enterprises. It is not something that journalists can leave to management. Journalists and managers alike will need to develop collaboration skills and create social relations that make it possible. Journalists will also need to acquire entrepreneurial and innovation skills that makes it possible for them to lead change rather than merely respond to it.
 
The demise of the news business can be halted, but only if journalists commit to creating value for consumers and become more involved in setting the course of their companies.
 
Robert G. Picard is a professor of media economics at Sweden’s Jonkoping University, a visiting fellow at the Reuters Institute at Oxford University, and the author and editor of 23 books, including “The Economics and Financing of Media Companies.” This essay is adapted from a lecture Professor Picard gave at Oxford. He blogs at http://themediabusiness.blogspot.com

By Laura Tillinghast

The last scheduled night launch of the manned space flight program as we know it is tonight (tomorrow morning) at 4:39 a.m.  If you live in Florida, set your alarms, go outside, and look East for the blaze in the sky.  If you are really adventurous, get in your cars, drive to Titusville and pull off anywhere along US-1, turn on the AM radio and listen to mission control as it launches.

View of Space Shuttle from Cocoa Beach, Fla. in 2007

There are just four more scheduled shuttle launches this year – all day launches – then the shuttle program ends forever.  Tickets to view from NASA galleries go on sale 4-6 weeks prior to launch and are pricey, but again, you can watch from US-1 as well.  The new NASA budget does not fund any future manned space flight program, so 2010 will be the last for some time – I would estimate at least a decade.  Civilian space flight is projected to start in 2011 in New Mexico with Richard Bronson’s company which is fascinating, of course.

I studied aerospace engineering in undergrad and did an internship at Cape Canaveral where I was able to crawl around inside one of the shuttles and watch one mission be assembled in the Vertical Assembly Building.  This is truly the end of an area…though the beginning of another.  Almost two years ago, I was talking with a classmate of mine who went Navy pilot with the idea of one day becoming an astronaut.  I asked him if he was on track and would you believe he said this, “Actually, I have decided I want to be a civilian astronaut.”  A WHAT?!?  How cool is that?  A civilian astronaut…  Of course, it means a whole new frontier of regulations within the FAA, but man, the sky is no longer the limit by any means.

Long story short - set your alarm clock and look East!

Editor’s note: Laura Tillinghast has her undergraduate degree from the United States Naval Academy (class of ’97). She is an all around great person and the type of individual we need in elective office and public service because she’s smart, honest, and has the best of intentions.

By Chris Ingram

I recently had the privilege to have lunch with Susan Massey who is a lovely lady in Tampa. Susan is a familywoman, a businesswoman, a conservative, and a someone who truly cares about the direction of our country. She got active in politics just a few years ago after getting tired of seeing the direction our country is headed. She now runs a web site called “dontspreadmywealth.com” which focuses on politics with an economic focus. Susan recorded our conversation at lunch last week and you can listen to the podcast here. We discussed Obamacare, the Masschusetts election, the debt, and the direction our country is headed.

As we have all seen on the news, Haiti is in shambles following the devastation from an earthquake earlier this week. What many may not know is Haiti was in shambles before the earthquake. Haiti is the poortest country in the Western Hemishpere with an annual GDP of $720, or about two bucks a day. Politically the country has been savaged by corrupt politicians for years.

I have travelled to some places like Haiti including to the country of Sudan which is among the world’s poorest countries. Countries like Sudan and Haiti aren’t nice places to begin with. When a tragedy like this strikes, those countries become even uglier places with devastated infrastructure, fractured supply lines, inadequate medical facilities, a lack of food, and dirty water.

The people of Haiti are suffering and deserve much-needed humanitarian assistance. Irreverent View encourgages its readers to assist the Haitian relief effort by making an immediate on-line contribution to the American Red Cross (www.redcross.org) by clicking here, then clicking on the “donate now” button on the upper right-hand screen.  Even a small contribution of just $10 or $25 (the amount you may spend at lunch at work today or for a family pizza tonight) will bring valuable assistance to the Haitian people.

By Chris Ingram

Rumors are flying around the sunshine state that lackluster Republican Party of Florida Chairman (and Charlie Crist bag-boy) Jim Greer will resign from his post.

Greer has been all but blatantly using state party resources to run Charlie’s floundering campaign. He has also sparked the ire of party loyalists, county party chairman, and donors for his heavy-handed tactics, arrogance, and lack of fairness, accountability, and dare we say, leadership. Oh yeah, there’s that little issue of American Express cards, anonymous web sites attacking Marco Rubio, not to mention all the people around the governor who are under investigation.  Way to look out for Charlie Jimbo!

As one party leader told me, “I couldn’t ask for a better early Christmas present than for Jim Greer to resign.”

Stay tuned…

Chris Ingram is the president and founder of 411 Communications a corporate and political communications firm, and publisher of www.IrreverentView.com. Ingram is a frequent pundit on Fox News and CNN, and has written opinion columns for the Washington Times, UPI, Front Page Florida, and National Review online. E-mail him at: Chris@411Communications.com.

Most Americans have this whole Fort Hood massacre all wrong.  Maj. Nidal M. Hassan was not a terrorist.  And he wasn’t a mass murderer.  And he may not even have been a coward. 

Maj. Hassan was an enemy combatant. 

And until we come to grips with that reality, as well as the fact that we are still a nation at war, the United States will continue to suffer such needless and unnecessary losses.

Since so many Americans have been undereducated by our government-run public schools, let’s refer to a system of education which most of us can readily relate to in order to understand what’s really going on here: Hollywood movies.

In The Patriot starring Mel Gibson, we learned that under-trained and under-armed American militia hid behind trees in the woods and waited for the British troops to ride up.  They would then open fire without warning, attempting to take out the officers first in order to instill chaos among the remaining soldiers, thereby making it easier to pick them off and wipe them out.

In that sense, American militiamen were the colonial version of IEDs (improvised explosive devices).

A rather unsettling thought, is it not? 

For their part, the British thought such tactics by the militia were as cowardly and ungentlemanly as we do now about Taliban roadside attacks on U.S. military convoys in Afghanistan.  But both the militia and the Taliban used/use what little military tactics in war they had/have at their disposal against a superior enemy military force.  As they say, all’s fair.

And what red-blooded American can ever forget the 1967 World War II classic The Dirty Dozen starring Lee Marvin?  And who did we root for in that story, the Americans or the Germans?  And what was the plot of that movie again?  Oh, yeah: “A U.S. Army Major is assigned a dozen convicted murderers to train and lead them into a mass assassination mission…”

Gulp.

This is why I say Hassan wasn’t a terrorist.  He didn’t attack a subway train or a nightclub or a shopping mall populated by civilians.  No, he attacked enemy soldiers on an enemy military base.  And he used what he had at his disposal – a surprise attack on unarmed soldiers which gave him a tactical advantage.

Most of us probably consider this attack cowardly, but it was right out of Sun Tzu’s Art of War textbook:

“You can be sure of succeeding in your attacks if you only attack places that are undefended. . . .He who is skilled in attack flashes forth from the topmost heights of heaven, making it impossible for the enemy to guard against him.  This being so, the places that he shall attack are precisely those that the enemy cannot defend.”

Like the Soldiers Readiness Processing Center at Fort Hood, Texas.

Not that we Americans shouldn’t be outraged by the attack.  We should.  But part of our outrage should be directed against the idiots who decided that American military personnel need not be armed and protected at all times on a military installation during a time of war, even on American soil.

Maj. Nidal Hassan was an enemy infiltrator.  Or maybe he was a modern-day version of Benedict Arnold…a traitor.  Either way, his was an act of war.  And a very successful one.  The U.S. response should now be two-fold.

First, give Maj. Hassan a fair trial in a military court, followed by a swift PUBLIC execution by hanging or firing squad.

Second, force the Pentagon and the White House to wake up, smell the coffee and recognize that we are, indeed, in a real war whether we like it or not.  The current “rules of engagement” which require our soldiers to fight with two hands tied behind their backs is getting them killed needlessly and unnecessarily.

You wanna get bin Laden and his gang?  You do it the same way Jimmy Malone told Elliot Ness to get mobster Al Capone in The Untouchables:

“You said you wanted to get Capone. Do you really wanna get him? You see what I’m saying is, what are you prepared to do? . . . If you open the can on these worms you must be prepared to go all the way. Because they’re not gonna give up the fight, until one of you is dead.  You wanna know how to get Capone? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. THAT’S the Chicago way! And that’s how you get Capone. Now do you want to do that?”

Rightly or wrongly, the can on these Muslim extremist worms was opened a long time ago.  They can’t be reasoned with. They can’t be negotiated with.  Like a rabid dog, they won’t give up until one of us is dead.  And they’ve now sent another 13 of our soldiers to the morgue.

It’s long past time to either surrender or….

Take the handcuffs off, unleash the dogs of war on these religious barbarians, call down the thunder – and may God have mercy on their cold, dark hearts, because the United States military sure as hell won’t.  No better friend; no worse enemy.  THAT’S the American way.  Or at least, it should be.

What are you prepared to do, President Obama?

Chuck Muth is president of Citizen Outreach, a non-profit public policy grassroots advocacy organization.  The views expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Citizen Outreach.  He may be reached at chuck@citizenoutreach.com