Why, you ask? As a way of subsidising media outlets, especially newspapers. The electronics in question would cover everything from computer and game consoles to digital cameras, with the resulting sum used to subsidize media outlets. It’s one of many suggestions that is a part of the FTC’s discussions about the Future of Journalism.
Some of the other suggestions :
-Making a journalism section of AmeriCorps, a federal program that gets training and public service work for American youth.
-Increased funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
-Set up tax credits for news organizations and for all journalists, allowing them to reduce their expenses.
-Provide investigative journalism grants to universities and then let the students at those schools conduct investigative reports for media companies.
-Setting up a broadcast spectrum tax of 7 percent on commercial radio and television broadcasters. Those broadcasters would be relieved of any obligation to devote time to ‘public interest programming’, and the money would be used to fund other media outlets.
Now, the reasons behind this are sound. Newspapers are spending resources on journalists and reporting and investigation only to have aggregator sites like Google and Yahoo take that content and post it up. Those other sites drive the traffic to themselves, and spent nothing to contribute the content. This certainly does present a problem.
However, some of these suggested ideas go well beyond the spectrum of fairly billing those who are using this content and charging consumers who don’t necessarily have anything to do with even reading any of it. That strikes in to territory marked as patently unfair.
The FTC will be holding roundtable discussion on this topic on June 15th, and will be available via webcast.
June 12th, 2010 
Cliff Riseborough 
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