CNN Sees the Light

Kudos to CNN for announcing that video footage of its June Presidential debates - one for Democrats, and one for Republicans - will be available to the public with no restrictions.

Given that all worthwhile portions of the debate will be up on YouTube and the like regardless of whether distribution was restricted, the net impact of CNN's announcement is largely symbolic.

But that symbolism is welcome and important indeed, and shows that CNN is ahead of the pack of older media in understanding the suicide of a policy that attempts to keep video and audio under copyright lock and key, as if we were in the 19th century. Except, of course, there was no video, and preciously little audio, back then. (The phonograph was invented in 1877 - see my The Soft Edge: A Natural History and Future of the Information Revolution, for more.)

Once upon a time - in fact, just a few years ago - CNN and 24/7 news were new media themselves. When CNN was created in the early 1980s, it was the newest, hottest thing around in the dissemination of news. Many myopic observers of the TV industry predicted its imminent demise.

They were wrong, and cable as a source of both news and entertainment has at least as much cultural impact now as traditional broadcast media, and in some cases - such as coverage of the long run-up to the election - clearly more.

Yet the thinking of old media, which misjudged the impact of cable just two decades ago, now, ironically, controls it. MSNBC is, after all, NBC; Fox is Rupert Murdoch; and CNN is ultimately Time Warner.

Of the three, Rupert Murdoch and Fox have been the most forward thinking - taking over MySpace was a brilliant move - but old-media lawyerism still afflicts it, too. The on-air dust-up between Bill Clinton and Chris Wallace (on Fox News Sunday) was quickly put up on YouTube last Fall - only to be taken down when a Fox lawyer threatened YouTube. Fortunately for the American public - and Fox News - a brighter mind at Fox quickly reversed that policy. Everyone won, including Fox News, which got higher ratings. NBC went through a similar dance a little later, when it initially demanded that YouTube take down the video of Saturday Night Live's hilarious "Dick in a Box".

Old-media and their outdated policies playing any role in new media news and entertainmnent makes no sense, given that old-line broadcast television is losing viewers so quickly that barely a week goes by without some dire report about shrinking audiences. NBC's ratings on one dismal evening last month were the lowest in twenty years. The CBS Evening News - once the proud leader in TV news - is now dead last in the three evening news reports which all together attract only a third of the viewers who once came home right after to work to watch the news. (Insiders call CBS the Carapace Broadcasting System - the largely empty shell of what was once the great Columbia Broadcasting System, in particular its television news division.) But that's no surprise - CBS is run by Viacom, and Viacom the dinosaur has no 24/7 all-news cable operation, and regularly bellows at YouTube and anyone it deems to have threatened its precious and outmoded senses of copyright. Viacom's attorneys must have been graduated from the same medieval law schools as the attorneys who sling copyright for the RIAA.

So good for CNN for making a statement in the face of the antiquated running of mass media. CNN, once the new kid on the block, now has a chance to lead the charge again - this time, for media in synch with the lifestyles and thirst for information in the digital age, for people who want information and news at their own, not the networks', convenience, who see YouTube as a boon not a threat, as our nation gears up for what will be one of the most significant elections in its history.