[LINK] Al Gore on democracy, TV and Net neutrality

[Robin Whittle]

Here is an excerpt from Al Gore's book "The Assault on
Reason" from:

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1622015,00.html

The full title is:

  The Assault On Reason

  How the Politics of Fear, Secrecy, and Blind Faith
  Subvert Wise Decision Making, Degrade Our Democracy,
  and Put Our Country and Our World in Peril

It is to be released on 22 May:

  http://www.amazon.com/Assault-Reason-Al-Gore/dp/1594201226



==========

Not long before our nation launched the invasion of Iraq,
our longest-serving Senator, Robert Byrd of West Virginia,
stood on the Senate floor and said: "This chamber is, for
the most part, silent - ominously, dreadfully silent.  There
is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the
nation the pros and cons of this particular war.  There is
nothing. We stand passively mute in the United States Senate."

Why was the Senate silent?

In describing the empty chamber the way he did, Byrd invited
a specific version of the same general question millions of
us have been asking: "Why do reason, logic and truth seem to
play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes
important decisions?"  The persistent and sustained reliance
on falsehoods as the basis of policy, even in the face of
massive and well-understood evidence to the contrary, seems
to many Americans to have reached levels that were
previously unimaginable.

A large and growing number of Americans are asking out loud:
"What has happened to our country?" People are trying to
figure out what has gone wrong in our democracy, and how we
can fix it.

To take another example, for the first time in American
history, the Executive Branch of our government has not only
condoned but actively promoted the treatment of captives in
wartime that clearly involves torture, thus overturning a
prohibition established by General George Washington during
the Revolutionary War.

It is too easy - and too partisan - to simply place the
blame on the policies of President George W. Bush. We are
all responsible for the decisions our country makes. We have
a Congress.  We have an independent judiciary. We have
checks and balances. We are a nation of laws.  We have free
speech.  We have a free press.  Have they all failed us?
Why has America's public discourse become less focused and
clear, less reasoned?  Faith in the power of reason - the
belief that free citizens can govern themselves wisely and
fairly by resorting to logical debate on the basis of the
best evidence available, instead of raw power - remains the
central premise of American democracy.  This premise is now
under assault.

American democracy is now in danger - not from any one set
of ideas, but from unprecedented changes in the environment
within which ideas either live and spread, or wither and
die.  I do not mean the physical environment; I mean what is
called the public sphere, or the marketplace of ideas.

It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of
our public discourse.  I know I am not alone in feeling that
something has gone fundamentally wrong.  In 2001, I had
hoped it was an aberration when polls showed that
three-quarters of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was
responsible for attacking us on Sept. 11.  More than five
years later, however, nearly half of the American public
still believes Saddam was connected to the attack.

At first I thought the exhaustive, nonstop coverage of the
O.J. Simpson trial was just an unfortunate excess - an
unwelcome departure from the normal good sense and judgment
of our television news media.  Now we know that it was
merely an early example of a new pattern of serial
obsessions that periodically take over the airwaves for
weeks at a time: the Michael Jackson trial and the Robert
Blake trial, the Laci Peterson tragedy and the Chandra Levy
tragedy, Britney and KFed, Lindsay and Paris and Nicole.

While American television watchers were collectively
devoting 100 million hours of their lives each week to these
and other similar stories, our nation was in the process of
more quietly making what future historians will certainly
describe as a series of catastrophically mistaken decisions
on issues of war and peace, the global climate and human
survival, freedom and barbarity, justice and fairness.  For
example, hardly anyone now disagrees that the choice to
invade Iraq was a grievous mistake.  Yet, incredibly, all of
the evidence and arguments necessary to have made the right
decision were available at the time and in hindsight are
glaringly obvious.

Those of us who have served in the U.S. Senate and watched
it change over time could volunteer a response to Senator
Byrd's incisive description of the Senate prior to the
invasion: The chamber was empty because the Senators were
somewhere else. Many of them were at fund-raising events
they now feel compelled to attend almost constantly in order
to collect money - much of it from special interests - to
buy 30-second TV commercials for their next re-election
campaign.  The Senate was silent because Senators don't feel
that what they say on the floor of the Senate really matters
that much anymore - not to the other Senators, who are
almost never present when their colleagues speak, and
certainly not to the voters, because the news media seldom
report on Senate speeches anymore.

Our Founders' faith in the viability of representative
democracy rested on their trust in the wisdom of a
well-informed citizenry, their ingenious design for checks
and balances, and their belief that the rule of reason is
the natural sovereign of a free people.  The Founders took
great care to protect the openness of the marketplace of
ideas so that knowledge could flow freely.  Thus they not
only protected freedom of assembly, they made a special
point - in the First Amendment - of protecting the freedom
of the printing press.  And yet today, almost 45 years have
passed since the majority of Americans received their news
and information from the printed word.  Newspapers are
hemorrhaging readers.  Reading itself is in decline.  The
Republic of Letters has been invaded and occupied by the
empire of television.

Radio, the Internet, movies, cell phones, iPods, computers,
instant messaging, video games and personal digital
assistants all now vie for our attention - but it is
television that still dominates the flow of information.
According to an authoritative global study, Americans now
watch television an average of 4 hours and 35 minutes every
day - 90 minutes more than the world average.  When you
assume eight hours of work a day, six to eight hours of
sleep and a couple of hours to bathe, dress, eat and
commute, that is almost three-quarters of all the
discretionary time the average American has.

In the world of television, the massive flows of information
are largely in only one direction, which makes it virtually
impossible for individuals to take part in what passes for a
national conversation.  Individuals receive, but they cannot
send.  They hear, but they do not speak.  The "well-informed
citizenry" is in danger of becoming the "well-amused
audience."  Moreover, the high capital investment required
for the ownership and operation of a television station and
the centralized nature of broadcast, cable and satellite
networks have led to the increasing concentration of
ownership by an ever smaller number of larger corporations
that now effectively control the majority of television
programming in America.

In practice, what television's dominance has come to mean is
that the inherent value of political propositions put
forward by candidates is now largely irrelevant compared
with the image-based ad campaigns they use to shape the
perceptions of voters.  The high cost of these commercials
has radically increased the role of money in politics - and
the influence of those who contribute it. That is why
campaign finance reform, however well drafted, often misses
the main point: so long as the dominant means of engaging in
political dialogue is through purchasing expensive
television advertising, money will continue in one way or
another to dominate American politics.  And as a result,
ideas will continue to play a diminished role.  That is also
why the House and Senate campaign committees in both parties
now search for candidates who are multimillionaires and can
buy the ads with their own personal resources.

When I first ran for Congress in 1976, I never took a poll
during the entire campaign.  Eight years later, however,
when I ran statewide for the U.S. Senate, I did take polls
and like most statewide candidates relied more heavily on
electronic advertising to deliver my message.  I vividly
remember a turning point in that Senate campaign when my
opponent, a fine public servant named Victor Ashe who has
since become a close friend, was narrowing the lead I had in
the polls.  After a detailed review of all the polling
information and careful testing of potential TV commercials,
the anticipated response from my opponent's campaign and the
planned response to the response, my advisers made a
recommendation and prediction that surprised me with its
specificity: "If you run this ad at this many 'points' [a
measure of the size of the advertising buy], and if Ashe
responds as we anticipate, and then we purchase this many
points to air our response to his response, the net result
after three weeks will be an increase of 8.5% in your lead
in the polls."

I authorized the plan and was astonished when three weeks
later my lead had increased by exactly 8.5%.  Though
pleased, of course, for my own campaign, I had a sense of
foreboding for what this revealed about our democracy.
Clearly, at least to some degree, the "consent of the
governed" was becoming a commodity to be purchased by the
highest bidder.  To the extent that money and the clever use
of electronic mass media could be used to manipulate the
outcome of elections, the role of reason began to diminish.

As a college student, I wrote my senior thesis on the impact
of television on the balance of power among the three
branches of government.  In the study, I pointed out the
growing importance of visual rhetoric and body language over
logic and reason.  There are countless examples of this, but
perhaps understandably, the first one that comes to mind is
from the 2000 campaign, long before the Supreme Court
decision and the hanging chads, when the controversy over my
sighs in the first debate with George W. Bush created an
impression on television that for many viewers outweighed
whatever positive benefits I might have otherwise gained in
the verbal combat of ideas and substance. A lot of good that
senior thesis did me.

The potential for manipulating mass opinions and feelings
initially discovered by commercial advertisers is now being
even more aggressively exploited by a new generation of
media Machiavellis.  The combination of ever more
sophisticated public opinion sampling techniques and the
increasing use of powerful computers to parse and subdivide
the American people according to "psychographic" categories
that identify their susceptibility to individually tailored
appeals has further magnified the power of propagandistic
electronic messaging that has created a harsh new reality
for the functioning of our democracy.

As a result, our democracy is in danger of being hollowed
out.  In order to reclaim our birthright, we Americans must
resolve to repair the systemic decay of the public forum.
We must create new ways to engage in a genuine and not
manipulative conversation about our future.  We must stop
tolerating the rejection and distortion of science. We must
insist on an end to the cynical use of pseudo-studies known
to be false for the purpose of intentionally clouding the
public's ability to discern the truth. Americans in both
parties should insist on the re-establishment of respect for
the rule of reason.

And what if an individual citizen or group of citizens wants
to enter the public debate by expressing their views on
television?  Since they cannot simply join the conversation,
some of them have resorted to raising money in order to buy
30 seconds in which to express their opinion.  But too often
they are not allowed to do even that.  MoveOn.org tried to
buy an ad for the 2004 Super Bowl broadcast to express
opposition to Bush's economic policy, which was then being
debated by Congress.  CBS told MoveOn that "issue advocacy"
was not permissible.  Then, CBS, having refused the MoveOn
ad, began running advertisements by the White House in favor
of the president's controversial proposal.  So MoveOn
complained, and the White House ad was temporarily removed.
 By temporarily, I mean it was removed until the White House
complained, and CBS immediately put the ad back on, yet
still refused to present the MoveOn ad.

To understand the final reason why the news marketplace of
ideas dominated by television is so different from the one
that emerged in the world dominated by the printing press,
it is important to distinguish the quality of vividness
experienced by television viewers from the "vividness"
experienced by readers.  Marshall McLuhan's description of
television as a "cool" medium - as opposed to the "hot"
medium of print - was hard for me to understand when I read
it 40 years ago, because the source of "heat" in his
metaphor is the mental work required in the alchemy of
reading.  But McLuhan was almost alone in recognizing that
the passivity associated with watching television is at the
expense of activity in parts of the brain associated with
abstract thought, logic, and the reasoning process.  Any new
dominant communications medium leads to a new information
ecology in society that inevitably changes the way ideas,
feelings, wealth, power and influence are distributed and
the way collective decisions are made.

As a young lawyer giving his first significant public speech
at the age of 28, Abraham Lincoln warned that a persistent
period of dysfunction and unresponsiveness by government
could alienate the American people and that "the strongest
bulwark of any government, and particularly of those
constituted like ours, may effectively be broken down and
destroyed - I mean the attachment of the people."  Many
Americans now feel that our government is unresponsive and
that no one in power listens to or cares what they think.
They feel disconnected from democracy. They feel that one
vote makes no difference, and that they, as individuals,
have no practical means of participating in America's
self-government.  Unfortunately, they are not entirely
wrong.  Voters are often viewed mainly as targets for easy
manipulation by those seeking their "consent" to exercise
power.  By using focus groups and elaborate polling
techniques, those who design these messages are able to
derive the only information they're interested in receiving
from citizens - feedback useful in fine-tuning their efforts
at manipulation.  Over time, the lack of authenticity
becomes obvious and takes its toll in the form of cynicism
and alienation.  And the more Americans disconnect from the
democratic process, the less legitimate it becomes.

Many young Americans now seem to feel that the jury is out
on whether American democracy actually works or not.  We
have created a wealthy society with tens of millions of
talented, resourceful individuals who play virtually no role
whatsoever as citizens.  Bringing these people in - with
their networks of influence, their knowledge, and their
resources - is the key to creating the capacity for shared
intelligence that we need to solve our problems.

Unfortunately, the legacy of the 20th century's
ideologically driven bloodbaths has included a new cynicism
about reason itself - because reason was so easily used by
propagandists to disguise their impulse to power by cloaking
it in clever and seductive intellectual formulations.  When
people don't have an opportunity to interact on equal terms
and test the validity of what they're being "taught" in the
light of their own experience and robust, shared dialogue,
they naturally begin to resist the assumption that the
experts know best.

So the remedy for what ails our democracy is not simply
better education (as important as that is) or civic
education (as important as that can be), but the
re-establishment of a genuine democratic discourse in which
individuals can participate in a meaningful way - a
conversation of democracy in which meritorious ideas and
opinions from individuals do, in fact, evoke a meaningful
response.

Fortunately, the Internet has the potential to revitalize
the role played by the people in our constitutional
framework.  It has extremely low entry barriers for
individuals.  It is the most interactive medium in history
and the one with the greatest potential for connecting
individuals to one another and to a universe of knowledge.
It's a platform for pursuing the truth, and the
decentralized creation and distribution of ideas, in the
same way that markets are a decentralized mechanism for the
creation and distribution of goods and services.  It's a
platform, in other words, for reason.  But the Internet must
be developed and protected, in the same way we develop and
protect markets - through the establishment of fair rules of
engagement and the exercise of the rule of law.  The same
ferocity that our Founders devoted to protect the freedom
and independence of the press is now appropriate for our
defense of the freedom of the Internet.  The stakes are the
same: the survival of our Republic.  We must ensure that the
Internet remains open and accessible to all citizens without
any limitation on the ability of individuals to choose the
content they wish regardless of the Internet service
provider they use to connect to the Web.  We cannot take
this future for granted.  We must be prepared to fight for
it, because of the threat of corporate consolidation and
control over the Internet marketplace of ideas.

The danger arises because there is, in most markets, a very
small number of broadband network operators.  These
operators have the structural capacity to determine the way
in which information is transmitted over the Internet and
the speed with which it is delivered.  And the present
Internet network operators - principally large telephone and
cable companies - have an economic incentive to extend their
control over the physical infrastructure of the network to
leverage control of Internet content.  If they went about it
in the wrong way, these companies could institute changes
that have the effect of limiting the free flow of
information over the Internet in a number of troubling ways.

The democratization of knowledge by the print medium brought
the Enlightenment.  Now, broadband interconnection is
supporting decentralized processes that reinvigorate
democracy.  We can see it happening before our eyes: As a
society, we are getting smarter.  Networked democracy is
taking hold. You can feel it.  We the people - as Lincoln
put it, "even we here" - are collectively still the key to
the survival of America's democracy.

=========

The question of "Net Neutrality" is complex and vexed:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality

The number of hours spent watching TV does seem to be very
high indeed, if a quick look at these Google results is
anything to go by:


http://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=america+tv+watching+hours

but I couldn't easily find up-to-date statistics.  I guess
they are counting broadcast TV, cable TV and DVD watching.

TV (along with hormones in food, lack of exercise, lack of
footpaths so people can walk and ride bikes safely in their
neighbourhood etc.) is surely responsible for some of the
obesity problem.

An article on TV's potential to bring on autism in
susceptible children is:

  Does Television Cause Autism
  Michael Waldman, Sean Nicholson and Nodir Adilov (2007)
 http://www.johnson.cornell.edu/faculty/profiles/waldman/autpaper.html

A campaign to get Al Gore to run for president, with a
petition and the opportunity to donate:

  http://www.algore.org