When an industry begins to enter decline due to inability or unwillingness to compete fairly in the open market, you can hear the stampede of well-heeled shoes rushing headling from K street to Pennsylvania Avenue all the way from Antarctica.
Textiles, farming, milk, ranching, logging, mining, steel, airlines, banking, telemarketers...and now the main sewer media.
What, then, is the future for traditional media?
Why, an episode of clinging to state patronage for continued power and influence, that's what.
The heights of media power aren't pandering to the Bushies because they're sucked in by his vision, charm, character or politics. Hardly.
They're pandering because they must, because without massive official subsidization, they are dead.
The answer is to associate with a political movement that gets the clue -- that the new wave of evolution in politics is not proselytyzation but participation, not top-down orchestration of thought and action but market-instant consensus formation and concentration of resources at the speed of light...well, of traffic, anyway.
We have seen within both the traditional major parties a battle for influence, among persons of both ideologies, who 'get it', and have made the effort to move their own interests into the 21st century and, not coincidentally, make best efforts to lock their ideological rivals out of power.
The net effect of the competing efforts to cybernize the Democratic and Republican parties is to enhance the awareness of traditionalists on both sides of the aisle, those either incapable or unwilling to adapt to the times, that their day is coming, that their straits are desperate, and they do what threatened industries do -- lobby for protection, concentrate, make bids for monopoly.
We see this trend within the Democratic Party, a rail quite often against the DNC and other leading groups for their apparent complicity with the far more rampany reaction on the other side of the aisle.
But rest assured -- when push comes to shove, it will be much more difficult for the party in power to adapt than otherwise.
I would submit that is why there are both strengths and weaknesses in both GOP and Dem approaches to current-era telecommunications, and that they are artifacts of the configuration of divided government during the Nineties -- when cell phones and Internet(s) first made their appearances...and the parties made their first moves in earnest into cyberspace.
For the Pubs, the focus was on obtaining what they lacked -- Dominance, high-profile, center stage, concentrated power. You know, the presidency. There were practical issues, as well, mainly keeping the corporate-theocratic coalition going; a strong, unifying figure was required. Why? They coveted what Clinton was -- exactly that.
For the Dems, who had their uniter/non-divider on hand, the focus was on understanding how the party of the people had lost power in Congress -- on understanding both what the Pubs had done right and the Dems had done wrong, then reconstituting grassroots, action-driven politics using the extant technologies. On getting down to a simple, visceral message -- We're not just for you, America. We are you. You know, what the Pubs had for a decade since -- a strong, activist base.
But the times, they do keep a-changin', and now the Pubs are in absolute mastery of politics...and for some reason, desperate for even more power.
Why? Because they are a threatened industry, for despite holding all the official marbles, despite lavish media celebration of all things Republican -- most people in my neck of the woods just don't like admitting publicly that they vote Republican.
And that's a curious image problem for a party that is making a bid to quash minority dissent on permanent additions to the judiciary, on the presumption that there will never be dissent -- never be competition -- ever again.
For rest assured, the singular fate of protection-seeking industries is failure.
And looking back at the last single-partisan hegemony -- the Soviet Union -- the lesson applies to politics, as well, I think.