Al Gore Invented Free Speech
I came here today because I believe that American democracy is in grave danger. It is no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know that I am not the only one who feels that something has gone basically and badly wrong in the way
How many of you, I wonder, have heard a friend or a family member in the last few years remark that it's almost as if America has entered "an alternate universe"?
The easiest way to tell if you are in an alternate universe: Does everyone else have a goatee?
I thought maybe it was an aberration when three-quarters of Americans said they believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on September 11, 2001. But more than four years later, between a third and a half still believe Saddam was personally responsible for planning and supporting the attack.
On the other hand, more than four years later, half of former 90’s vice presidents still believe that Saddam Hussein didn’t fund terrorists and can’t grasp the concept that the war on terror isn’t just about who was directly personally responsibly for 9/11
At first I thought the exhaustive, non-stop coverage of the O.J. trial was just an unfortunate excess that marked an unwelcome departure from the normal good sense and judgment of our television news media. But 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.
24 hour news is news mixed with entertainment. People are intrigued and entertained by news about celebrities and the good or bad things they do. People are entertained by tales of crime. That’s why crime shows like CSI and Law & Order are popular. There’s nothing wrong with people being entertained or intrigued by the news instead of just informed. If you think the news isn’t giving you the news you want to hear, turn it off. It’s not like there’s no other way to get your information (more on this later).
Are we still routinely torturing helpless prisoners, and if so, does it feel right that we as American citizens are not outraged by the practice? And does it feel right to have no ongoing discussion of whether or not this abhorrent, medieval behavior is being carried out in the name of the American people? If the gap between rich and poor is widening steadily and economic stress is mounting for low-income families, why do we seem increasingly apathetic and lethargic in our role as citizens?
Mr. Bush, when did you stop beating your wife? Many American citizens are outraged by the torture of prisoners. It might be something to be outraged about, but it didn’t actually happen. It didn’t happen in Abu Gharib (except when Saddam Hussein was in power, when it was frequent). What happened in Abu Gharib was soldiers abusing and humiliating prisoners illegally for their own entertainment. It didn’t happen in
On the eve of the nation's decision to invade
The decision that was then being considered by the Senate with virtually no meaningful debate turned out to be a fateful one. A few days ago, the former head of the National Security Agency, Retired Lt. General William Odom, said, "The invasion of
will turn out to be the greatest strategic disaster in
But whether you agree with his assessment or not, Senator Byrd's question is like the others
that I have just posed here: he was saying, in effect, this is strange, isn't it? Aren't we supposed to have full and vigorous debates about questions as important as the choice between war and peace?
If you believe that Senators decided how to vote based upon debate on the Senate floor, I’ve got a bridge in
Those of us who have served in the Senate and watched it change over time, could volunteer an answer to Senator Byrd's two questions: the Senate was silent on the eve of war because Senators don't feel that what they say on the floor of the Senate really matters that much any more. And the chamber was empty because the Senators were somewhere else: they were in fundraisers collecting money from special interests in order to buy 30-second TV commercials for their next re-election campaign.
Yep, the things that happen on the Senate floor don’t matter, outside of the actual voting. But what do you expect? Do you want your Senator to come home to you and say: “I was going to vote for the war, but then Senator Byrd gave a good speech so I changed my mind.” Doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in their decision making process.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, there was - at least for a short time - a quality of vividness and clarity of focus in our public discourse that reminded some Americans - including some journalists - that vividness and clarity used to be more common in the way we talk with one another about the problems and choices that we face. But then, like a passing summer storm, the moment faded
I’m not sure that this paragraph says anything meaningful. I think it’s untrue to say
that
In fact there was a time when
I can’t find the literacy statistics for 1776, but I know that illiteracy in
Their faith in the viability of Representative Democracy rested on their trust in the wisdom of a well-informed citizenry. But they placed particular emphasis on insuring that the public could be well- informed. And they took great care to protect the openness of the marketplace of ideas in order to ensure the free-flow of knowledge.
The values that Americans had brought from Europe to the
Indeed, the self-governing republic they had the audacity to establish was later named by the historian Henry Steele Commager as "the Empire of Reason."
Our founders knew all about the Roman Forum and the Agora in ancient
Their world was dominated by the printed word. Just as the proverbial fish doesn't know it lives in water, the
Though they feared that a government might try to censor the printing press - as King George had done - they could not imagine that
Yes, everybody and their dog in
And yet, as we meet here this morning, more than 40 years have passed since the majority of Americans received their news and information from the printed word. Newspapers are hemorrhaging readers and, for the most part, resisting the temptation to inflate their circulation numbers. Reading itself is in sharp decline, not only in our country but in most of the world. The
Newspapers are becoming less popular. It’s not just TV though, it’s the Internet. With the advent of the Internet, writing is becoming more common, not less. The reason is because anybody (like me) can do it and distribute cheaply. I can get all the information in the newspaper on the Internet, and I get it faster.
Radio, the internet, movies, telephones, and other media all now vie for our attention - but it is television that still completely dominates the flow of information in modern
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 that the average American has. And for younger Americans, the average is even higher.
Most of that time watching television is not spent watching Fox News. It’s for entertainment.
The internet is a formidable new medium of communication, but it is important to note that it
still doesn't hold a candle to television. Indeed, studies show that the majority of Internet users are actually simultaneously watching television while they are online. There is an important reason why television maintains such a hold on its viewers in a way that the internet does not, but I'll get to that in a few minutes.
I’ve already made one Al Gore Internet joke.
Television first overtook newsprint to become the dominant source of information in A
They were a tougher sort back then. They had to walk barefoot in the snow to the newsroom, uphill both ways.
But all the while, television's share of the total audience for news and information continued to grow -- and its lead over newsprint continued to expand. And then one day, a smart young political consultant turned to an older elected official and succinctly described a new reality in
But some extremely important elements of American Democracy have been pushed to the sidelines. And the most prominent casualty has been the "marketplace of ideas" that was so beloved and so carefully protected by our Founders. It effectively no longer exists.
Yep. If it’s not on TV, it didn’t happen. For example, Al Gore didn’t make this speech and I didn’t write an article about it.
The idea that the “marketplace of ideas” is dead is incorrect. Does anybody really believe that there’s only one fountain where all of
It is not that we no longer share ideas with one another about public matters; of course we do. But the "Public Forum" in which our Founders searched for general agreement and applied the Rule of Reason has been grossly distorted and "restructured" beyond all recognition.
What exactly was the “Public Forum” before? Yes it’s different now. It’s faster and more available. We invented new media. There was no “restructuring”, there was innovation and evolution.
And here is my point: it is the destruction of that marketplace of ideas that accounts for the "strangeness" that now continually haunts our efforts to reason together about the choices we must make as a nation.
Reason together? What, did all of
Whether it is called a Public Forum, or a "Public Sphere" , or a marketplace of ideas, the reality of open and free public discussion and debate was considered central to the operation of our democracy in
In fact, our first self-expression as a nation - "We the People" - made it clear where the ultimate source of authority lay. It was universally understood that the ultimate check and balance for American government was its accountability to the people. And the public forum was the place where the people held the government accountable. That is why it was so important that the marketplace of ideas operated independent from and beyond the authority of government.
It’s like Al Gore is living in an “Alternate Universe”, where people were allowed to say things before and now are not. Did the Bush administration close down Daily Kos last week and I missed it? Did they seize the CNN building? NBC News? The New York Times?
The three most important characteristics of this marketplace of ideas were:
1) It was open to every individual, with no barriers to entry, save the necessity of literacy.
This access, it is crucial to add, applied not only to the receipt of information but also to the ability to contribute information directly into the flow of ideas that was available to all; 2) The fate of ideas contributed by individuals depended, for the most part, on an emergent Meritocracy of Ideas. Those judged by the market to be good rose to the top, regardless of the wealth or class of the individual responsible for them; 3) The accepted rules of discourse presumed that the participants were all governed by an unspoken duty to search for general agreement. That is what a "Conversation of Democracy" is all about.
The Barriers to entry are lower than ever. Look what I’m doing right now. As for number 2, if there’s no perfect marketplace for goods, there’s definitely no perfect market places for
ideas. If Rush Limbaugh has an idea it will probably spread further even when it’s a bad idea because he’s popular and he has charisma. If John F. Kennedy said something in 1961, it would spread farther because he was popular and had charisma and because he was president. The same was definitely true for Franklin Roosevelt, who had many bad ideas but no TV to help him spread them. As for the third point, it’s part of that myth that everybody was nice in politics
“back then”. Aaron Burr dueled to the death with Alexander Hamilton in 1804 because of personal slurs
What resulted from this shared democratic enterprise was a startling new development in human history: for the first time, knowledge regularly mediated between wealth and power.
The liberating force of this new American reality was thrilling to all humankind. Thomas
Jefferson declared, "I have sworn upon the alter of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." It ennobled the individual and unleashed the creativity of the human spirit. It inspired people everywhere to dream of what they could yet become.
And it emboldened Americans to bravely explore the farther frontiers of freedom - for African Americans, for women, and eventually, we still dream, for all.
And just as knowledge now mediated between wealth and power, self- government was
understood to be the instrument with which the people embodied their reasoned judgments into law. The Rule of Reason under- girded and strengthened the rule of law.
But to an extent seldom appreciated, all of this - including especially the ability of the
American people to exercise the reasoned collective judgments presumed in our Founders' design -- depended on the particular characteristics of the marketplace of ideas as it operated during the Age of Print.
Once again,
Consider the rules by which our present "public forum" now operates, and how different they are from the forum our Founders knew. Instead of the easy and free access individuals had to participate in the national conversation by means of the printed word, the world of television makes it virtually impossible for individuals to take part in what passes for a national conversation today.
Inexpensive metal printing presses were almost everywhere in
accessible and operated by printers eager to typeset essays, pamphlets, books or flyers.
Television stations and networks, by contrast, are almost completely inaccessible to
individual citizens and almost always uninterested in ideas contributed by individual citizens.
My god, how can I possibly express my ideas without TV?
Ironically, television programming is actually more accessible to more people than any source of information has ever been in all of history. But here is the crucial distinction: it is accessible in only one direction; there is no true interactivity, and certainly no conversation.
The number of cables connecting to homes is limited in each community and usually forms a natural monopoly. The broadcast and satellite spectrum is likewise a scarce and limited resource controlled by a few. The production of programming has been centralized and has usually required a massive capital investment. So for these and other reasons, an ever-smaller number of large corporations control virtually all of the television programming in
Media consolidation is inevitable, and it’s a process. New media is created, and merges with old media. Ask the late William Randolph Hearst. Many of the large companies that control new media haven’t been around that long. Time-Warner was purchased by AOL, a company that has only
existed for 25 years.
Soon after television established its dominance over print, young people who realized they were being shut out of the dialogue of democracy came up with a new form of expression in an effort to join the national conversation: the "demonstration." This new form of expression, which began in the 1960s, was essentially a poor quality theatrical production designed to capture the attention of the television cameras long enough to hold up a sign with a few printed words to convey, however plaintively, a message to the American people. Even this outlet is now rarely an avenue for expression on national television.
TV never covers small protests and makes them look bigger than they actually are anymore. Just ask Cindy Sheehan.
So, unlike the marketplace of ideas that emerged in the wake of the printing press, there is virtually no exchange of ideas at all in television's domain. My partner Joel Hyatt and I are trying to change that - at least where Current TV is concerned. Perhaps not coincidentally, we are the only independently owned news and information network in all of American television.
It is important to note that the absence of a two-way conversation in American television also means that there is no "meritocracy of ideas" on television. To the extent that there is a "marketplace" of any kind for ideas on television, it is a rigged market, an oligopoly, with imposing barriers to entry that exclude the average citizen.
You’ve suffered through half of this speech to find the truth – it’s an ad for Current TV. A network that makes Senator Byrd’s speeches on C-SPAN look exciting. Sadly, Al is far from done
talking.
The German philosopher, Jurgen Habermas, describes what has happened as "the refeudalization of the public sphere." That may sound like gobbledygook, but it's a phrase that packs a lot of meaning. The feudal system which thrived before the printing press democratized knowledge and made the idea of America thinkable, was a system in which wealth and power were intimately intertwined, and where knowledge played no mediating role whatsoever. The great mass of the people were ignorant. And their powerlessness was born of their ignorance.
TV has made us a bunch of powerless Serfs. I’m pretty sure that Fox News owns the land I live on.
It did not come as a surprise that the concentration of control over this powerful one-way medium carries with it the potential for damaging the operations of our democracy. As early as the 1920s, when the predecessor of television, radio, first debuted in the
there was immediate apprehension about its potential impact on democracy. One early American student of the medium wrote that if control of radio were concentrated in the hands of a few, "no nation can be free."
As a result of these fears, safeguards were enacted in the U.S. -- including the Public Interest Standard, the Equal Time Provision, and the Fairness Doctrine - though a half century later, in 1987, they were effectively repealed. And then immediately afterwards, Rush Limbaugh and other hate-mongers began to fill the airwaves.
What the fairness doctrine does is allow the government to decide what’s fair. If the government decided your radio program was taking one point of view, it could force you to put a different point of view on the air. Rather than a “marketplace of ideas”, you have central government distribution of ideas. Before the Fairness Doctrine was removed, you didn’t have two-sided political speech on radio, you had very little political speech. No one wanted their radio to be subject to the federal government telling them what point of view to put on the air. The removal of the Fairness Doctrine allowed speech to flow on radio again. Some people just don’t like things that others are saying and would rather they stopped talking.
And radio is not the only place where big changes have taken place. Television news has
undergone a series of dramatic changes. The movie "Network," which won the Best Picture Oscar in 1976, was presented as a farce but was actually a prophecy. The journalism profession morphed into the news business, which became the media industry and is now completely owned by conglomerates.
The news divisions - which used to be seen as serving a public interest and were subsidized by the rest of the network - are now seen as profit centers designed to generate revenue and, more importantly, to advance the larger agenda of the corporation of which they are a small part. They have fewer reporters, fewer stories, smaller budgets, less travel, fewer bureaus, less independent judgment, more vulnerability to influence by management, and more dependence on government sources and canned public relations hand-outs. This tragedy is compounded by the ironic fact that this generation of journalists is the best
trained and most highly skilled in the history of their profession. But they are usually not allowed to do the job they have been trained to do.
In the information age, it takes less people to do the same amount of work, even reporting.
The present executive branch has made it a practice to try and control and intimidate news organizations: from PBS to CBS to Newsweek. They placed a former male escort in the White House press pool to pose as a reporter - and then called upon him to give the president a hand at crucial moments. They paid actors to make make phony video press releases and paid cash to some reporters who were willing to take it in return for positive stories. And every day they unleash squadrons of digital brownshirts to harass and hector any journalist who is critical of the President.
Taking this point by point:
“The present executive branch has made it a practice to try and control and intimidate news organizations: from PBS to CBS to Newsweek”. CBS I’ll discuss below. The Newsweek complaint regards the untrue Koran story they posted which led to riots in foreign countries. Scolding Newsweek for their irresponsibility is controlling and intimidating according to Al Gore. Freedom of the press does not give the press a pass from criticism. As for PBS, it’s a government entity so there’s a conflict of interest in the first place. What the Bush Administration did was say that there should be balance. I thought Al Gore liked having the feds decide what balanced speech is?
“They placed a former male escort in the White House press pool to pose as a reporter”. There’s no evidence that Jeff Gannon, referred to in this line, was hired by the White House. But hey, just because there’s no proof doesn’t mean the claim can’t be made. It’s funny that liberals make such a big deal out of Jeff Gannon’s sexuality.
“They paid actors to make phony video press releases.” They weren’t phony video press releases, they were real video press releases, and the
“paid cash to reporters who were willing to take it in return for positive stories.” Not reporters, political pundits, or pundit, as there’s only one case of money for advocacy. To be fair, it was a bad policy and a waste of money. It also destroyed the pundit’s career.
“And every day they unleash squadrons of digital brownshirts to harass and hector any journalist who is critical of the President.” One might say that the people on the Internet who agree with the president are exercising their influence in the marketplace of ideas by disagreeing with other ideas. If the president really had an army of yes men, would there be some much wailing and gnashing of teeth about the Harriet Miers nomination from the right-wing of the Internet?
For these and other reasons, The US Press was recently found in a comprehensive international study to be only the 27th freest press in the world. And that too seems strange
to me.
Not me. People can come up with statistics to prove anything. 14% of people know that.
Among the other factors damaging our public discourse in the media, the imposition by management of entertainment values on the journalism profession has resulted in scandals, fabricated sources, fictional events and the tabloidization of mainstream news. As recently stated by Dan Rather - who was, of course, forced out of his anchor job after angering the White House - television news has been "dumbed down and tarted up."
It’s funny, that Gore complains about fabricated sources and fictional events while quoting from Dan Rather. Dan Rather angered the White House by running a story with fake documents on 60 Minutes II on CBS; even after it was obvious the documents were faked in Microsoft Word, Rather refused to back down on the story.
The coverage of political campaigns focuses on the "horse race" and little else. And the well-known axiom that guides most local television news is "if it bleeds, it leads." (To which some disheartened journalists add, "If it thinks, it stinks.")
In fact, one of the few things that Red state and Blue state
They don’t trust the CBS Evening News, or the NBC Nightly News, or ABC World News Tonight.
Clearly, the purpose of television news is no longer to inform the American people or serve the public interest. It is to "glue eyeballs to the screen" in order to build ratings and sell advertising. If you have any doubt, just look at what's on: The Robert Blake trial. The Laci Peterson tragedy. The Michael Jackson trial. The Runaway Bride. The search in
And more importantly, notice what is not on: the global climate crisis, the nation's fiscal catastrophe, the hollowing out of
One morning not long ago, I flipped on one of the news programs in hopes of seeing information about an important world event that had happened earlier that day. But the lead story was about a young man who had been hiccupping for three years. And I must say, it was interesting; he had trouble getting dates. But what I didn't see was news.
They aren’t covering what Al Gore wants them to cover, so there must be something wrong. Personally, I don’t think there’s a Global Climate Crisis or a National Fiscal Catastrophe and I’m not concerned about our supposed Hollowing Industrial Base so I guess I think the news is doing just fine. If Al wanted some up to date news on the subject, why not go to the Internet? (This is another obvious location for an Al Gore joke). This underscores Al Gore’s problem with the national news: It doesn’t say what he wants it to say. Unfortunately for Al, no one wanted to invest in a liberal news network (Gore’s original plan), so he had to create Current TV.
This was the point made by Jon Stewart, the brilliant host of "The Daily Show," when he visited CNN's "Crossfire": there should be a distinction between news and entertainment.
And it really matters because the subjugation of news by entertainment seriously harms our
democracy: it leads to dysfunctional journalism that fails to inform the people. And when the people are not informed, they cannot hold government accountable when it is incompetent, corrupt, or both.
Attacking Tucker Carlson on Crossfire hardly makes Jon Stewart brilliant. Jon Stewart was calling the kettle black. He wants to be taken seriously buy if he’s taken seriously in a negative way he can just say that he’s entertainment. There’s no reason why the news can’t be entertaining. Even serious news sources fail to inform people properly. Just ask Stephen Glass.
One of the only avenues left for the expression of public or political ideas on television is through the purchase of advertising, usually in 30-second chunks. These short commercials are now the principal form of communication between candidates and voters. As a result, our elected officials now spend all of their time raising money to purchase these ads.
Glad to see Al Gore admit that political ads are free speech. If only the majority of the Supreme Court felt that way, we’d be in business.
That is why the House and Senate campaign committees now search for candidates who are multi-millionaires and can buy the ads with their own personal resources. As one consequence, the halls of Congress are now filling up with the wealthy.
I remember back when poor people ran congress instead of rich people. That was a great time. The streets were paved with gold.
Campaign finance reform, however well it is drafted, often misses the main point: so long as the only means of engaging in political dialogue is through purchasing expensive television advertising, money will continue by one means or another to dominate American politics. And ideas will no longer mediate between wealth and power.
And what if an individual citizen, or a 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 they are not even allowed to do that.
Moveon.org tried to buy ads last year to express opposition to Bush's Medicare proposal which was then being debated by Congress. They were told "issue advocacy" was not permissible. Then, one of the networks that had refused the Moveon ad began running dvertisements by the White House in favor of the President's Medicare proposal. So Moveon complained and the White House ad was temporarily removed. By temporary, I mean it was removed until the White House complained and the network immediately put the ad back on, yet still refused to present the Moveon ad.
I agree campaign finance reform misses the point: use of money for advertising is free speech. But average Americans can help finance TV ads. The networks have a right to choose not to show those ads. Quite frankly, they should be allowed to say “I don’t like what your point of view so I won’t show your ad”. It’s called freedom.
The advertising of products, of course, is the real purpose of television. And it is difficult to overstate the extent to which modern pervasive electronic advertising has reshaped our society. In the 1950s, John Kenneth Galbraith first described the way in which advertising has altered the classical relationship by which supply and demand are balanced over time by the invisible hand of the marketplace. According to Galbraith, modern advertising campaigns were beginning to create high levels of demand for products that consumers never knew they wanted, much less needed.
Yes, advertising does convince people to buy a product they wouldn’t have otherwise bought. If it didn’t there wouldn’t be any advertising, and no commercial TV. And what who is to say what people need? People do lots of things they don't need to do, but will enjoy.
The same phenomenon Galbraith noticed in the commercial marketplace is now the dominant fact of life in what used to be
Our democracy has been hallowed out. The opinions of the voters are, in effect, purchased, just as demand for new products is artificially created. Decades ago Walter Lippman wrote, "the manufacture of consent...was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy...but it has not died out. It has, in fact, improved enormously in technique...under the impact of propaganda, it is no longer plausible to believe in the original dogma of democracy."
If people’s opinions are bought, what is the price? Why does the candidate with more money lose sometimes? Couldn’t they manufacture consent? Isn’t it possible that in a free society, people can still make up their own minds?
Like you, I recoil at Lippman's cynical dismissal of
Psuedo-scientific studies, like the ones that say that the
I don't know all the answers, but along with my partner, Joel Hyatt, I am trying to work within the medium of television to recreate a multi- way conversation that includes individuals and operates according to a meritocracy of ideas. If you would like to know more, we are having a press conference on Friday morning at the Regency Hotel.
If I’m going to listen to any more of this, there better be refreshments.
We are learning some fascinating lessons about the way decisions are made in the television industry, and it may well be that the public would be well served by some changes in law and policy to stimulate more diversity of viewpoints and a higher regard for the public interest. But we are succeeding within the marketplace by reaching out to individuals and asking them to co-create our network.
Changes in law? If the people aren’t saying what Al Gore wants them to say, he’ll make sure the government steps in to fix the problem.
The greatest source of hope for reestablishing a vigorous and accessible marketplace for ideas is the Internet. Indeed, Current TV relies on video streaming over the Internet as the means by which individuals send us what we call viewer-created content or VC squared. We also rely on the Internet for the two-way conversation that we have every day with our viewers enabling them to participate in the decisions on programming our network.
Even if somehow this makes Current TV sound appealing, I strongly advise you not to watch. For your own sake.
“The greatest source of hope for reestablishing a vigorous and accessible marketplace for ideas is the Internet?” What’s happening on the Internet right now? How clueless is Al Gore?
I want to close with the two things I've learned about the Internet that are most directly relevant to the conference that you are having here today. First, as exciting as the Internet is, it still lacks the single most powerful characteristic of the television medium; because of its packet-switching architecture, and its continued reliance on a wide variety of bandwidth connections (including the so-called "last mile" to the home), it does not support the real-time mass distribution of full-motion video
Well, it does support it. In fact, it’s more common all the time. With all of the broadband available to the consumers, I think the problem is on the side of the distributor whose expenses make it impractical to distribute instead of on the “last mile”.
Make no mistake, full-motion video is what makes television such a powerful medium. Our brains - like the brains of all vertebrates - are hard-wired to immediately notice sudden movement in our field of vision. We not only notice, we are compelled to look. When our evolutionary predecessors gathered on the African savanna a million years ago and the leaves next to them moved, the ones who didn't look are not our ancestors. The ones who did look passed on to us the genetic trait that neuroscientists call "the establishing reflex." And that is the brain syndrome activated by television continuously sometimes as frequently as once per second. That is the reason why the industry phrase, "glue eyeballs to the screen," is actually more than a glib and idle boast. It is also a major part of the reason why Americans watch the TV screen an average of four and a half hours a day.
It is true that video streaming is becoming more common over the Internet, and true as well
that cheap storage of streamed video is making it possible for many young television viewers to engage in what the industry calls "time shifting" and personalize their television watching habits. Moreover, as higher bandwidth connections continue to replace smaller information pipelines, the Internet's capacity for carrying television will continue to dramatically improve. But in spite of these developments, it is television delivered over cable and satellite that will continue for the remainder of this decade and probably the next to be the dominant medium of communication in
Yes, video is appealing. And I think that Gore’s bold prediction that TV will be popular for the next 5 years and maybe even the next 15 will come true.
The final point I want to make is this: 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 Worldwide Web. We cannot take this future for granted. We must be prepared to fight for it because some of the same forces of corporate consolidation and control that have distorted the television marketplace have an interest in controlling the Internet marketplace as well. Far too much is at stake to ever allow that to happen.
We must ensure by all means possible that this medium of democracy's future develops in the mold of the open and free marketplace of ideas that our Founders knew was essential to the health and survival of freedom.
Blah, blah, blah. If you’re reading this, did you really read the whole article? I doubt it. Al Gore speeches are pretty boring. It’s a good thing he can say it. It’s too bad there’s no free marketplace of ideas so somebody could listen to him.