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Following Up
In line with my last few posts, here are a few items from this week’s news:
The day after I posted about the reshaping of digital journalism, the New York Times announced Josh Barro, a young writer whom I have praised here before, would be joining up with David Leonhardt’s politics and economics venture. Barro is making the move from BusinessInsider.com, where, despite his brief tenure, it seemed likely his departure was inevitable when BI signed Hunter Walker as its Politics editor several weeks back. The pace of the roster shuffling in the online media world reminds me of nothing if not major league baseball’s off-season, where teams attempt to remake themselves with free-agent signings.
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Following the vacating of the FCC’s “net neutrality” rules in January by the Federal Court of Appeals, there has been an outbreak of activity on several fronts, accompanied by an attendant amount of comment. The biggie was the announcement of the acquisition of Time Warner Cable by Comcast. The two companies made the case that they do not compete against each other in almost any cable market, so there would no diminution in market competition. The whole cable TV market competition is a complete canard pushed by these mega-corps. The real-issue is last-mile connection to the Internet via broadband. Comcast will be in a dominating position in terms of end-users with little or no choice for obtaining broadband services.
While the smart money seems to be betting that the Comcast-TWC merger will be approved, the outcry from a number of sources means the issue will stay in the forefront for the near-future. The announcement that Netflix, a company whose ability to provide its streaming videos was threatened in an environment where giants Comcast and Verizon could exact tribute for allowing Netflix unfettered access to their end-users, had reached an agreement with Comcast to pay just such a tribute has elicited a load chorus of “I told you so’s” from a variety of sources. In a mildly unusual move, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, announced the Committee would hold hearing on the proposed merger beginning in late March. Stay tuned or, should I say, don’t log off.
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Michael Dunn, the Florida man who fired ten shots into a vehicle with four unarmed teen-agers, killing 17-year old Jordan Davis, was found guilty of 3 counts of attempted murder, but the jury hung on the first-degree murder charge in Davis’ killing. Dunn is a white man, the three surviving teens and the murdered Davis, black. At issue, as it was in the case of George Zimmerman’s trial earlier last year in his shooting of Trayvon Martin, is Florida’s “stand your gound” law. As Carl Hiaasen put it in his column, “Florida’s spongy self-defense law… essentially allows the use of lethal force if a person feels threatened. True or not, practically anybody who shoots another person can say they feared for their lives…”
It is interesting that Florida ranks in the bottom 20% in the proportion of gun owners to overall population.* It is apparent that the Floridians that do carry handguns are willing to use them.
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