BY DAN
KENNEDY
Notes and observations on
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click
here.
Monday, February 02, 2004
Kerry and the lobbyists. In
case you missed it, here
is the Saturday report by the Washington Post's Jim VandeHei
on John Kerry's reliance on campaign contributions by lobbyists. The
nut:
Kerry, a 19-year veteran
of the Senate who fought and won four expensive political
campaigns, has received nearly $640,000 from lobbyists, many
representing telecommunications and financial companies with
business before his committee, according to Federal Election
Commission data compiled by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive
Politics.
That $640,000, as it turns out, is
more than any senator has received from lobbyists over the past 15
years.
The New York Times
covers
much of the same ground.
Of course, this pales when compared
to the special-interest money that George W. Bush has raised. But
anything that dilutes the Democratic message is potentially
troubling. It's not hard to imagine Bush flinging this charge at
Kerry in a debate, should Kerry be fortunate enough to win the
Democratic nomination.
And on television, everything
flattens out, with Bush's anticipated $200 million looking more or
less equivalent to the pittance that Kerry is likely to bring to the
table.
Mixed messages. The
Zogby
tracking polls now show
John Edwards up by five in South Carolina and Wesley Clark just
barely ahead in Oklahoma. Kerry seems to have solid leads in Arizona
and Missouri.
What does this mean? Who knows? I
suspect that the Clark campaign is dead, but that the general hasn't
figured it out yet. That leaves Edwards as the last man standing,
unless Howard Dean's strategy of winning by losing every primary
catches on.
Could it be that, after Tuesday,
the nomination will essentially come down to a Kerry-Edwards
face-off? If nothing else, it would confirm John Ellis's
"Rule
of Two."
Post-radio radio. For some
time now, I've watched with bemused disdain as various critics wax
rhapsodic over satellite radio. This
piece, by Dan DeLuca in
yesterday's Philadelphia Inquirer, is typical.
I'm not saying DeLuca's wrong -
heck, I've never heard XM or Sirius, the two competing services.
Rather, I'm saying that his and others' enthusiasm is misplaced.
Corporate consolidation destroyed free radio. Now, to replace it,
there's something fairly cool, except that you have to pay a monthly
fee. For this I'm supposed to celebrate? And it's still a top-down,
corporate-owned model.
There's another, ground-up model
that is slowly coming into focus. I'm not quite sure what to call it,
but for now let's call it "MP3 to Go." Let me explain it by telling
you what I did this morning.
Just before I left for work, I
downloaded Christopher
Lydon's two-part interview
with Franz Hartl and Dan Droller, two young political activists who
are behind something called Music
for America. I've written
about Lydon's MP3 interviews before. This time, though, I was able to
skip the time-consuming step of burning what I'd downloaded onto a
CD.
The secret: iTrip, a little gizmo
from Griffin Technology that plugs into my iPod and transmits an FM
signal to my car stereo. Mrs. Media Log got me one for Christmas, but
it's taken a lot of trial-and-error to get it working
properly.
First, because we live in an urban
area, signal interference made it all but useless. I solved that by
finding a heretofore undiscovered button on my dashboard that lets me
lower the antenna. Then, the extraordinary bass that the iPod puts
out was threatening to blow my car speakers - until I found a "Bass
Reducer" setting that brought the boom-boom down to something like a
normal level.
How was the interview? Well, okay.
Hartl and Droller are a couple of idealistic kids who got involved in
the Dean campaign last March, after the mainstream media virtually
ignored the massive February 15 protests against the then-pending war
in Iraq. There's a lot of blather about "open-source politics," the
power of blogs, the Internet as an organizing tool, and the like.
They're certainly not wrong - for that matter, I think they're
heading in the right direction. But this probably sounded a lot more
compelling a few months ago, when Lydon first posted it.
The larger point is that radio - or
something like it - may slowly be evolving in a DIY direction even as
corporate owners push homogenized garbage over the free airwaves and
hypersegmented content over the satellite services.
"MP3 to Go" isn't by definition a
free, grassroots service. For instance, if you go to Audible.com,
you'll find all kinds of things you can pay for - audio books, or
recent broadcasts of NPR fare such as All Things Considered
and Fresh Air, allowing you to time-shift your listening. But
the point is that the satellite is closed. "MP3 to Go" is open,
available to money-making and free services alike.
"MP3 to Go" is by no means at the
tipping point: it's still a pain in the ass. (Although the popularity
of file-sharing shows that plenty of people will do it.) But it's an
incredibly promising technology for inventing a new kind of radio,
and one that isn't the least bit dependent on the corporate model
that we've all come to detest.
If someone can figure out a way to
eliminate another step or two, this is going to take off.
posted at 11:19 AM |
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Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
