blogger interrupted

Via email, which I am reprinting in full without asking for permission.  I don’t ask someone for permission to print their emails if they are coming after my First Amendment rights from behind a Pulitzer whose husband is a sitting US Senator.

Anybody can do what you do — take superficial pot shots at something that you don’t know much about.  It’s like writing a movie review that slams a movie that you never saw, or a book review that slams a book that you never read.   I’m sure you’ve never read our analysis.

I read every single word of the 51 pages of frippery Marburger manages to squeeze out of one long overturned precedent from 1918, which if Marburger had read the link I sent him, he would know.  I even sent him the link at no charge!

I hope that you have a strong background in either economic or legal theory to enable you to analytically appraise what we suggest.

Funnily enough, I do!  I used to be an attorney, and if I turned in to my first year research and writing professor at Case what David Marburger squeezed out of a long overturned precedent from 1918, I’d be told to rewrite it or else get an F.

I’m sure that I can expect from you a vitriolic reply in response.

My brother & I devoted over 400 hours of research, thinking, and writing into that analysis — all at no charge to anyone and at no one’s request.

You wanna tell your 1st year research and writing professor that after 400 hours of research and thinking all you came up with for your proposal to gut the First Amendment was one case from 1918 which Congress explicitly overturned?

We are concerned that the underproducing of news reports is inevitable under the current legal regime, and that means the underproducing of information that bloggers need for formulating comments and the underproducing of information upon which we all rely for public oversight of the friends and neighbors who manage our government.

The “underproducing of news reports” is already happening, not under any legal regime, but under your client’s business model, lack of professionalism, and stunning incompetence which has proven a total failure for some number of decades.

In the end, free-riding drives down ad rates for everyone.  That will cause — and is causing — all originators of news content to go out of business unless they settle for underproducing news.   This is no new theory — they teach free-rider theory and substitution theory in sophomore economics courses.   It’s just that free-rider theory did not threaten the survival of originators of news until the Internet allowed free-riders to compete directly for advertisers and readers on the same medium at the same time.

Last I looked, “free rider theory” wasn’t in the Bill of Rights.  My free speech rights will outweigh your client’s right to not be free ridden upon, every single time, unless your absurd legislation is enacted by your client’s columnists US Senator husband.

It’s like the fable of the Little Red Hen.   She asks each of the barnyard animals to help her cut the wheat, grind the wheat into flour, and to bake the bred.  They all say “no.”  She bakes the bread, and they all say they’ll help eat the bread.   The twist is that the Little Red Hen opens a roadside stand to sell the bread.  The law compels her to allow the other animals to take some of her loaves, open competing roadside stands, and drive her out of business by undercutting her price.  She can’t match their prices because her labor costs are so much higher than theirs.   The law compels her to allow them to use the fruits of her labor to drive her out of business.   That’s not free market or First Amendment.  That’s Russian Revolution-style economics.

How’s this for Bolshevism – newspaper’s paid attorney hands Pulitzer columnist whose husband is a sitting US Senator his “paper” and asks her to lobby her husband from attorney client’s property for a federal mandate to give client money.  Not even Pravda could pull that off with a straight face.  Appears neither you, nor your client, nor your client’s editors, has any problem with that little sweetheart deal.

It’s like in the movie Dr. Zhivago.   The doctor comes home to his big mansion as the Russian Revolution has taken hold.  He finds the townspeople living in the home that he built or bought.  The revolutionary gov’t leaders tell him that the law has changed — the law now requires him to share his big home with the townspeople.

No, it’s more like the movie “I’m An Incompetent Attorney Whose Client’s Business Model Is Failing, GET ME OUTTA HERE.”  Wherein the attorney hands client’s Pulitzer columnist federal legislation to lobby her US Senator husband from client’s property.

That’s the way American law works today for the news business.   That is the opposite of a free market, where you get to reap what you sow.  Instead, the government compels you to allow others to reap what you sow to the point of driving you out of business with it by exploiting the huge savings in labor costs that the government is providing to you.    In America today, the government compels originators of news to subsidize free riders.   That ain’t the free market.

If the free market puts your client out of business, Mr. Marburger, I will be thrilled to see your idea of ethics, constitutional law, and transparency go down the toilet with them.  Say hi to Connie.