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Measure for Measure

Posted October 1, 2003 By Dave Thomer

California’s recall circus – this round of it at least – is coming to a close. I have no idea how the next few days will play out, but that matters less to me than what the overall process has revealed – namely, the entire process is severely screwed up. Not just the recall, but the method of citizen involvement in government that it exemplifies.

This may seem like a surprising position for me to take. This site has at its heart John Dewey’s ideal of a participatory democracy, a society where everyday citizens have a much greater degree of control over their government than selecting representatives at pre-selected intervals. And as far back as I can remember, measures like the recall and the public initiative/referendum system have been hailed as major achievements by progressive reformers that helped citizens take back some of that control. At first glance, it seems like I should at least support the principle, even if I’m dissatisfied at how it’s playing out in a particular instance. Instead, I think these measures exacerbate the problem, and illustrate exactly how difficult it is going to be to really implement Dewey’s vision for a real democracy. Their solution to a world where voters have to make decisions with insufficient discourse and deliberation is to make voters make more decisions with insufficient discourse and deliberation, and that’s not helping anyone.

Let’s look at the California recall in particular, since that’s what’s in the news right now. To force a recall, one needs to get one percent of the number of people that voted in the last election to sign a petition in favor. Now, it may be that once upon a time a petition drive required a grass roots effort to go forth among the population and try to persuade others of the rightness of the cause in question. Today, petitions are a joke, and not just in California. One of the little sideshows of the Philadelphia mayoral election this year was the failed attempt of a third party candidate to get on the ballot; this candidate apparently got some amount of help from established petition gatherers, whose methods include hiring folks from homeless shelters to try and get people to sign. (They also included getting a whole bunch of people to sign who weren’t eligible to do so, as well as folks who decided to use joke names when they signed.)

Even if petitions weren’t useless, look at that threshold. One percent of the voters? (A little over a million Californians attached valid signatures to the recall petitions.) If we had that standard for, say, presidential elections, I think it’s safe to say we’d be entering our 12th straight year of recalls. Is that really the kind of government we want? One where elected officials would have to fear that any momentarily-unpopular decision could be used to force them into a recall election? Where they would have to be constantly fundraising to prepare themselves for such an eventuality? For Deweyan democracy to work, people need to carefully examine their options, not make decisions on the spur of the moment But the latter is what a recall scenario encourages. I’m all for an impeachment procedure where a corrupt official can be thrown out of office early – I disagreed with the impeachment of Bill Clinton, but I never had a problem with the procedure being used. Now, I have no real opinion on the recall of Gray Davis, but I know that the procedure stinks. If the official hasn’t broken the law, then he or she deserves the benefit of a full term to do the job he or she was elected to do.

Of course, the recall isn’t the only peculiarity of California politics. The state’s proposition system has gotten a fair degree of press over the years. At first glance, a system where individuals can work to get specific policy initiatives put on the ballot seems like a good idea, a way to bypass the special interests that surround any legislative body. But once again, without the proper nurturing environment, the system breaks down. Potential propositions get thrown on the ballot with insufficient explanation or context, which opens the way for hideously expensive ad campaigns designed to sway the vote. Just what democracy needs – more political advertising. (Sorry, my cynicism’s shining through today.) Plus, many of those propositions are designed to block the government from doing something – capping property taxes, requiring a supermajority for tax hikes, that sort of thing. Creating iron clad rules like this only reduces the flexibility that a society needs to deal with a problem, as Schwarzenegger advisor Warren Buffett pointed out at the beginning of the campaign before Schwarzenegger threatened Buffett with a few rounds of pushups if he ever mentioned it again.

Participatory democracy requires more than giving people more things to vote on. If some of these propositions and measures had to be discussed in community civic organizations and town meetings, for example, that would be big step up, especially if those organizations had access to experts who could help lay out the fine points and future implications of a particular decision. If you have to put propositions on the ballot, don’t make the qualifying test a meaningless hunt for signatures. Officially charter local deliberative bodies. Require a majority of them to approve a measure before it can show up on the ballot. In an ideal world, I’d go a step further and require voters to participate in these local groups before they’d be eligible to vote on the measure, although that would raise a host of other issues that need to be dealt with before such hands-on democracy is really practical, not the least of which is the question of whether there are minimum standards and obligations for participation in the process. In the end, I suppose that’s my biggest problem with recalls and propositions – they’re a piecemeal solution to a problem that demands a far more holistic treatment, and they provide the illusion of a more thorough democracy while in reality they work against it.

Filed in Public Policy
        

Rounding into Forms

Posted October 1, 2003 By Dave Thomer

Even though I tend to disagree with just about every major point in it, Plato’s Republic holds a warm spot in my heart. For one, it’s a well-thought-out and ambitious attempt to bring metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy and other topics together into one comprehensive treatment. This is no easy task, as I’ve discovered while poring through dozens of books by John Dewey to try and connect the pieces of his thinking together. For another, it’s the first book we really delved into in the first philosophy course I took at Fordham University, and without that course I doubt I’d have majored in philosophy, pursued graduate studies, or started this site.

Hmm. Maybe it’s time to rethink that warm spot.

At any rate, there’s far too much in Republic for me to synopsize in a single article, but there are a few of Plato’s arguments and examples that have become commonplace even in non-philosophical discourse that I’d like to use to start some discussion. These instances should also help illustrate how Plato helped to set the terms of philosophical debate for literally thousands of years afterward.
Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Philosophy
        

Can Satire Save Our Souls?

Posted October 1, 2003 By Dave Thomer

Rather than try and be funny in this particular essay, I decided to try and turn my keen analytical mind to a certain type of humor, namely the kind that helps restore my sanity when my keen analytical mind can no longer cope with trying to make sense of this mixed-up world. Satire can be cruel, vicious and mean, but it can be penetratingly insightful and even cathartic; I think it’s the form of humor that’s most likely to make you laugh until you cry.

Just for my own sense of clarity, I checked with the American Heritage Dictionary for a definition of satire, and I especially like the second: “Irony, sarcasm, or caustic wit used to attack or expose folly, vice, or stupidity.â€? Satire too often gets lumped in with parody – deliberate imitation of an existing work or style for comic effect – because parody can be a very effective means of satire; imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but it can also undermine the imitated by bringing its absurdities closer to the surface. But as much as I might enjoy, say, “Weird Alâ€? Yankovic retelling the plot of The Phantom Menace to the tune of “American Pie,â€? nothing’s really being attacked or exposed there. It’s all in good fun, and there’s no underlying message beyond having some good fun. And that’s great; by no means do I think that all wit should be caustic. Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Special Order Speeches
        

Game Over. Start Again? – Part 1

Posted June 1, 2003 By Earl Green

It began with two squares and one straight line. An entire industry grew from those inauspicious beginnings which would eclipse the music and movie industries in revenue and define whole generations. Video games are nothing new – in fact, they’re probably older than you think. And most of the controversy surrounding marketing the games is also older than you think – almost as old as the industry itself.

The story begins in the Brookhaven National Laboratory, where the need for a user-friendly public demonstration of a massive new room-filling computer system led programmer Willy Higginbotham to create a simple video ping pong game called Tennis For Two. Played not on a television monitor but an oscilloscope, this early precursor to Pong was created in 1958 – truly the first video game, even though it was part of a free public display and not for sale. In 1961, several budding hackers at MIT, led by Steve Russell, created a game called Spacewar on the somewhat less massive PDP-1 minicomputer. Still a hulking mainframe of a computer, the PDP-1 was manufactured and sold to many colleges, and Spacewar became a kind of killer-app demonstration of the machine’s abilities, distributed free of charge. Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Culture and Media
        

Contents: One House – Some Assembly Required

Posted June 1, 2003 By Pattie Gillett

Many of my single friends complain about the constant nagging they get from their friends and family to “find someone” and “settle down”. While I don’t doubt that that such nagging can get rather irksome after a while, I challenge any of these bachelors and bachelorettes to put up with the constant pressure Dave and I endured about our choice of dwelling unit.

“Why are you still renting?”

“You’re throwing money away!”

“When are you going to look for a house?”

“You need to start building some equity!”

“You guys are still in that apartment? How many years is that now?”

This pressure only intensified after Alexandra was born and people began to imply that it was nothing short of child abuse to live in a two-bedroom apartment with an infant.

While I will admit that towards the end, the apartment did get a bit cramped, Dave and I have several good reasons for waiting to buy a house. (Well, we think they’re good and since we’re the ones who are in the hole for thirty years to the mortgage company, we’re going stick with our opinion for now.) Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Special Order Speeches
        

Virtual Estate? Not Quite Yet

Posted June 1, 2003 By Dave Thomer

When we first learned that we were going to have a baby, we thought about renting a house. Eventually we came to our senses and realized that moving plus becoming parents was one more life-altering even than we were equipped to handle and decided to stick out the apartment one more year. This had another benefit, because when the next year rolled around, we were in a position to eschew renting and purchase a home of our own.

Now, let me make something clear from the start. I’m not one of those people who think that renting is ‘throwing away money.’ I can see a lot of circumstances where renting just makes more sense – you don’t need a lot of space, you don’t want to be tied to an area, you don’t want to worry about the maintenance, you’d like to take the money you save on a mortgage, property taxes and so on and invest in some other fashion, whatever. But we had reached a point where we wanted to have a little more sense of permanence and stability along with additional space, so for us, buying seemed the way to go. And being the 21st-century couple that we are, we wanted to use the Net and modern technology as much as possible. A pity it didn’t quite work out that way. Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Life in Practice
        

The Empire Is Back – Part 2

Posted May 1, 2003 By Dave Thomer

In May of 2001, DC announced that they would publish Mark Waid and Barry Kitson’s Empire, a series centered around a successful world conqueror and the intrigues that surround him. I talked to Kitson back then about the book and his plans; Now, Empire is finally back, with a reprint of the original issues now on the stands and a brand new issue slated to arrive in July. It seemed like as good a time as any to check back in with Kitson. The following conversation took place via e-mail in late April and early May:

DT: We’re coming up on almost two full years since the first announcement that Empire would move to DC. Can you talk a little bit about the process of getting the series going again? Has it taken longer than you expected?

BK: It has taken longer to get the book back in the schedules than we’d hoped — it was really just a question of logistics. Mark and I never actually stopped talking over ideas and plots for the series, but Andy Helfer had asked if I would help out on Titans and that ended up taking more time from my schedule than we’d expected. DC to their credit were very good about waiting to schedule Empire until we knew we could put all the time into it that we wanted. Empire means a lot to Mark and me so we really wanted it to be right this time!

DT: How much time do you like to devote to Empire? Is it something you feel you can work on simultaneously with another project, or do you have to focus on it exclusively?

BK: I always prefer to work on one thing at a time when I can. If I have more than one project in progress I’ll assign specific days to a single task – for example Monday = Cover for project ‘a’, Tuesday = Empire interiors. Usually with a story I like to work on it unbroken so I can get totally immersed in it. At the moment Empire is taking priority over everything else. If there’s a little down time on Empire for any reason then I’ll get to working on preparatory stuff for JSA etc.

DT: What’s it like coming back to a project like this after so much time away? Is it a challenge to figure out how a concept (and two stories) from 2000 fit into your thinking and style in 2003?

BK: Well as I said we really never felt like we left the project. We’ve actually been talking about Empire for a long long time. Well before the Gorilla Comics issues — in fact even before JLA Year One! The concept hasn’t undergone any major change since 2000 . . . just continued to evolve the more we discuss it. Fundamentally things are the same — we had most of the major ideas behind the first story arc pretty well mapped out when we began . . . the biggest difficulty is probably that we’ve had two years to think of new ideas we want to throw in so it gets harder and harder to fit everything into the structure we originally thought of! We probably have enough ideas to fill about twice as many pages as we actually requested for this first arc.

I guess you might feel world events have thrown the story into a somewhat different light too — but you’ll have to read the story to judge how that might work.

I think there is a slightly ‘different’ style to the artwork from the original issues– due to my ‘natural progression’ over the time that’s passed . . . it would have been nice to redraw some of the original pages perhaps but not really practical. (I’d probably redraw everything I’ve ever done given the chance 🙂 )

As far as the stories go, each issues was designed to be able to stand alone– the idea being that you could pick up any issue of Empire and get a whole story from it, but that story would take on extra significance if you had the whole series to refer to. Some things that might seem quite minor in #2 might take on a great significance in the light of #5 say.

The extra good news is that with DC reprinting the original Gorilla issues as #0 – everyone can get immediately up to speed with events if they’d like to!

DT: So if this first arc goes well, it won’t be lack of ideas that stops you and Mark from putting out more, I take it. Are you hoping to put out more miniseries somewhere down the road? What has to happen to make that feasible?

BK: If enough people enjoy Empire we’d pretty much like it to be an ongoing project. Basically if the market place is willing to support it we’d like to keep going until the whole saga is told. It’s a project that we both really enjoy and would like to keep working on whenever we can. Maybe releasing it in volumes — just as these first eight issues make up volume one. Joey Cavalieri our editor at DC has been really supportive and indicated that he’d be happy to take the hot seat again if things go well — so we’ll keep our fingers crossed that the readers enjoy it as much as we hope they will!

DT: On your website, you have the pencils for the cover of issue zero, along with an unused design for that cover. What’s the thought process that goes into designing a cover? What makes the final version better than the initial proposal? (See both designs.)

BK: With any cover I try to submit a whole bunch of sketches– all of which I like– and see how everyone else involved feels about them. Usually I have a personal favorite, but it’s always interesting to see how others react to the choices they see. In the case of the #0 cover I knew I wanted to have a lot of the cast on it so that readers would know the book is an ‘ensemble’ work rather than focused on one character. Because of the multi-layered nature of the book I had been using a montage approach on some of the covers– notably #1 and #2 and thought perhaps we should carry this over to the #0 issue, but I also really liked the idea of one dramatic image for this first . The image actually symbolically represents a lot of what the first series arc is about– but rather than explain that in detail, I’d best wait until everyone’s had a chance to read all the issues.

Anyway . . . when I submitted the two sketches everyone chose the one we used as being their favorite (it was the one I wanted to do too so that worked out well).

So to come back to your question– the choice really comes down to which design does every feel works best for the job we want it to do. With the #0 we wanted a design that would catch the eye– suggest something of the nature of the story and intrigue people enough to pick the book up. I think the rejected design did most of those things, but in a somewhat ‘quieter’ way than the one we chose– maybe it would have been better suited to a mid-run issue? Anyway– please feel free to check them both out and form your own opinions . . . as with most things artistic there’s no right or wrong answer 😉

DT: You just finished a run as artist for DC’s now-canceled Titans series. What do you think of your run on the book? What did you get out of the experience that you think will benefit your future projects?

BK: Hmmmm that’s a tough one! LOL! To be honest I never felt I got the chance to do with the Titans many of the things I would have liked. I really like the characters and very much wanted to draw them– I also had some pretty strong ideas of how I felt the book needed changing. Anyway — to cut a long story short – the book got caught up in the decision making processes at the company and sort of went into a holding pattern while its future was worked out. I guess the experience taught me that you can’t do as well as you’d like in those sort of circumstances. It was entirely my choice to stay with the book while it was in that position as I didn’t want to ‘abandon ship’ and leave the editor, writer etc. searching for an artist while it was happening, but it wasn’t really the assignment that I’d hoped for when I agreed to do it. Though I did enjoy drawing the characters the run was ultimately a little frustrating as I know we could have done better given the chance. I always want to give 100% creative input to any book I’m working on and I don’t feel I really had chance to do that on Titans. I guess the experience has taught me only to work on things in circumstances I am entirely comfortable with in the future! 🙂

DT: You have a couple of projects with DC’s JSA coming up as well, including a pretty lengthy one down the road. What can you say about that and your other upcoming work?

BK: The first JSA work is the lead story in one of the JSA-All Stars series that’s coming out the week of July 2nd — I think it’s in #3. Written by Geoff Johns and David Goyer, it’s a story featuring Dr. Fate. It was a real pleasure to draw! (See a page from this story.)

I think my enjoyment of the story must have shown in the artwork as when Peter Tomasi, the editor, saw the pages he decided to offer me a whole series featuring the JSA! I can’t reveal too much about it as yet, but it’ll be nearly 200 pages in length and a lot of fun to draw! 🙂

I’ve also been offered some work for Marvel which is quite exciting as I’ve not really had chance to draw many of their characters in the past.

DT: Is the JSA another case like Titans, where you had a previous fondness for the characters?

BK: Absolutely! There’s a special place in my heart for the JSA — I used to love the annual Justice League/Justice Society crossovers of the Silver Age — and just as with JLA Year One — with the JSA project I’m getting a chance to draw characters that were part of the excitement I got from reading comics as a kid. I’m doing the stories I always dreamed I’d get to draw when I first decided I wanted to draw comics!

DT: What is it in particular about the Fate story that you think turned out so well?

BK: Well basically I think it was a really well written story – and it was something of a change of pace, something a little different for me to tackle , but you’ll have to read it to understand how . . . I enjoyed being able to work on something that seems like it will have real repercussions in the characters’ lives. It was a real pleasure to work with Geoff and David — Geoff and I had been talking about working together for years and when the chance came up I was glad to grab it! I hope we’ll get the chance to do it again soon! It’s always nice working for Peter Tomasi too so everything about the project just ‘clicked,’ nicely.

DT: Do you think the experience on Titans would motivate you to try and take on more original projects like Empire down the road? Or do you think you can still feel comfortable in the somewhat tighter confines of company-owned characters?

BK: There are plus and minuses to both situations — certainly the freedom of owning a property like Empire is fantastic — it’s great to know you can take the story anywhere you like, but for the long-time comic fan in me there’s a real magic to being able to draw my version of long-standing characters, which is why the JSA project is such a treat for me! Ideally I’d like to continue to live in both worlds — making a choice would be very difficult. Doing one ‘company project’ and one ‘original’ project a year would be the perfect option I guess…but maybe that’s like trying to have the cake and eat it too!

DT: You’ve made a few comments about reviving your L.E.G.I.O.N. series down the road. How do the prospects look for that?

BK: At the moment they look a bit distant — we had been planning and had a proposal for a JLA/L.E.G.I.O.N. mini series to re-establish the characters in the DCU, but with the JSA series and Empire keeping me busy for the foreseeable future I can’t really see much chance of it coming about for some time. I would definitely like to work on the characters again — I thoroughly enjoyed all my time on the book and they seem very fondly remembered by an awful lot of fans so it would be nice to see them as an integral part of DC continuity again.

DT: A bit of a more general and technical question — what materials do you use in the various stages of putting a page together? How do you select those particular tools?

BK: Now that’s a question I could probably fill several pages answering. I have at least three different approaches to putting pages together and tend to opt for which ever one I feel like on any given day!

The one constant is to always start with a thumbnail sketch — very simply drawn and about 2 inches by three inches in size. This is where the basic content of each panel is decided on and the overall design of the page worked out. If you can tell what’s happening in these and they look interesting it’s a fair bet the page will work okay when you’ve drawn it up.

After this stage things can go all sorts of different ways. Sometimes I’ll then draw the whole page up full size in blue pencil – which doesn’t reproduce when scanned — and has a softer feel than regular pencil leads.

Sometimes I’ll draw a version of the page at reproduction size after the thumbnails the drawings at this stage will be mostly just outlines. When I do this I tend to next put the page under tracing paper and using felt tip brush pens fill in all the blacks so that I end up with a version of the page that has NO outlines only positive and negative spaces. It’s another way of being able to judge the mood of a page and how the reader’s eyes will be guided around the panels.

A third method is to draw roughs of each of the panels individually — scan them into a computer and put the page together as a composite based on the thumbnail design.

Whichever method I’m using at this point I end up with a scanned rough of the page in the computer. The great thing about getting to this stage is that once the roughs are in the computer you can manipulate the drawings in all sorts of different ways, resizing, flipping etc etc until you are really happy with how things are going to look. Through rather arcane processes in Photoshop I’ll then create a faint blueline version of the final page. I print this onto the board I’ll be using — so faint that it’s barely visible — and then go to work with a selection of pencils — again whatever feels right at the time, usually a combination of 0.3 automatic pencils and good old fashioned wooden ones.

Once the page is drawn, if I’m going to inks I use brushes almost exclusively. . . the only things I use pens for are straight lines and circles generally. I use Kolinsky sable brushes and India ink . . . which I usually boil for a while to get to decent thickness so that it gives a nice dense black. (See the progression of the cover for Empire 0 here.)

There’s loads more minutia and variations I could go into — but I think that roughly explains how I approach things.

BK: Well basically I think it was a really well written story – and it was something of a change of pace, something a little different for me to tackle , but you’ll have to read it to understand how . . . I enjoyed being able to work on something that seems like it will have real repercussions in the characters’ lives. It was a real pleasure to work with Geoff and David — Geoff and I had been talking about working together for years and when the chance came up I was glad to grab it! I hope we’ll get the chance to do it again soon! It’s always nice working for Peter Tomasi too so everything about the project just ‘clicked,’ nicely.

DT: Do you think the experience on Titans would motivate you to try and take on more original projects like Empire down the road? Or do you think you can still feel comfortable in the somewhat tighter confines of company-owned characters?

BK: There are plus and minuses to both situations — certainly the freedom of owning a property like Empire is fantastic — it’s great to know you can take the story anywhere you like, but for the long-time comic fan in me there’s a real magic to being able to draw my version of long-standing characters, which is why the JSA project is such a treat for me! Ideally I’d like to continue to live in both worlds — making a choice would be very difficult. Doing one ‘company project’ and one ‘original’ project a year would be the perfect option I guess…but maybe that’s like trying to have the cake and eat it too!

DT: You’ve made a few comments about reviving your L.E.G.I.O.N. series down the road. How do the prospects look for that?

BK: At the moment they look a bit distant — we had been planning and had a proposal for a JLA/L.E.G.I.O.N. mini series to re-establish the characters in the DCU, but with the JSA series and Empire keeping me busy for the foreseeable future I can’t really see much chance of it coming about for some time. I would definitely like to work on the characters again — I thoroughly enjoyed all my time on the book and they seem very fondly remembered by an awful lot of fans so it would be nice to see them as an integral part of DC continuity again.

DT: A bit of a more general and technical question — what materials do you use in the various stages of putting a page together? How do you select those particular tools?

BK: Now that’s a question I could probably fill several pages answering. I have at least three different approaches to putting pages together and tend to opt for which ever one I feel like on any given day!

The one constant is to always start with a thumbnail sketch — very simply drawn and about 2 inches by three inches in size. This is where the basic content of each panel is decided on and the overall design of the page worked out. If you can tell what’s happening in these and they look interesting it’s a fair bet the page will work okay when you’ve drawn it up.

After this stage things can go all sorts of different ways. Sometimes I’ll then draw the whole page up full size in blue pencil – which doesn’t reproduce when scanned — and has a softer feel than regular pencil leads.

Sometimes I’ll draw a version of the page at reproduction size after the thumbnails the drawings at this stage will be mostly just outlines. When I do this I tend to next put the page under tracing paper and using felt tip brush pens fill in all the blacks so that I end up with a version of the page that has NO outlines only positive and negative spaces. It’s another way of being able to judge the mood of a page and how the reader’s eyes will be guided around the panels.

A third method is to draw roughs of each of the panels individually — scan them into a computer and put the page together as a composite based on the thumbnail design.

Whichever method I’m using at this point I end up with a scanned rough of the page in the computer. The great thing about getting to this stage is that once the roughs are in the computer you can manipulate the drawings in all sorts of different ways, resizing, flipping etc etc until you are really happy with how things are going to look. Through rather arcane processes in Photoshop I’ll then create a faint blueline version of the final page. I print this onto the board I’ll be using — so faint that it’s barely visible — and then go to work with a selection of pencils — again whatever feels right at the time, usually a combination of 0.3 automatic pencils and good old fashioned wooden ones.

Once the page is drawn, if I’m going to inks I use brushes almost exclusively. . . the only things I use pens for are straight lines and circles generally. I use Kolinsky sable brushes and India ink . . . which I usually boil for a while to get to decent thickness so that it gives a nice dense black. (See the progression of the cover for Empire 0 here.)

There’s loads more minutia and variations I could go into — but I think that roughly explains how I approach things.

Filed in Comics
        

Fighting the FCC’s New Media Ownership Rules

Posted May 1, 2003 By Earl Green

I don’t know what scares me more – Congress gridlocking important bills over important issues to the point that they’re utterly ineffectual as lawmakers, or Congress uniting across party lines to defeat something that isn’t as obvious as a condemnation of terrorism. And whether you realize it or not, the latter is about to happen. On June 2nd, the Federal Communications Commission passed a regulation change that would’ve drastically altered the media landscape of America. And now, mere weeks later, members of the Senate Commerce Committee are planning to exercise a rare power of veto to send the FCC back to the drawing board.

The contested regulation change passed by the FCC would relax media ownership rules. In plain, simple language, this would place more media outlets – radio, TV and print – under fewer corporate masters. Existing FCC regs put a cap on how much of an audience share any given company can “own” nationally. Currently, broadcast entities can own stations reaching no more than 35% of the nationwide TV, radio and newspaper audience. The cap has been challenged before, and the resulting procedures are long and drawn out. Viacom most recently drew the FCC’s attention with its acquisition of CBS, giving it a whopping 42% of the nationwide market when added to the existing audience share covered by Viacom’s UPN affiliate stations. Other entities, such as Rupert Murdoch’s Fox network, have had to divest themselves of owned-and-operated stations run by the network itself to comply with the 35% cap.

What has happened in the wake of the regulation change passed by the FCC – the full details of which are expected to be announced on Monday, June 30th – has been unusual and almost comical: both Democrats and Republicans in Congress practically leaping to the defense of the 35% rule, each party fearing that the other party’s ideals would come to be represented in a larger portion of the country than its own. Democrats voice a fear of more conservative and – being an easy recent issue to use as an example – “pro-war” stances taking over the media, while Republicans fear a media spread of liberalism.

So whether they realize it or not, both parties, fearing the other’s influence, are joining forces to send the FCC’s regulation change back where it came from. Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Public Policy
        

It’s the Right Thing to Do – I Think

Posted May 1, 2003 By Dave Thomer

Harvard philosopher Hilary Putnam has argued that while Dewey’s pragmatism is a strong foundation for social ethics, it falls short as a means for individuals to answer questions about how they should act in a particular situation, or what they should believe – the questions through which we discover and become who we are. These are questions about what is the right thing to do at a given moment, and it is often the case that multiple options seem viable – it is not possible to eliminate, through some process of investigation or deduction, all but one option on the grounds that the others are obviously wrong or unsupportable, or that one response has no flaws while all others do. Putnam cites the case of Pierre, who must choose between leaving home to join the Resistance during World War II, or staying home to take care of his elderly and ailing mother. To a disinterested observer, both options seem viable, and there does not appear to be a rule or formula to settle the matter and provide an answer that would be universally agreed upon. “Neither of the alternatives he is considering is in any way stupid. Yet he cannot just flip a coin.”(1)
Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Philosophy
        

The Empire Is Back

Posted May 1, 2003 By Dave Thomer

In May of 2001, DC announced that they would publish Mark Waid and Barry Kitson’s Empire, a series centered around a successful world conqueror and the intrigues that surround him. I talked to Kitson back then about the book and his plans; Now, Empire is finally back, with a reprint of the original issues now on the stands and a brand new issue slated to arrive in July. It seemed like as good a time as any to check back in with Kitson. The following conversation took place via e-mail in late April and early May:

DT: We’re coming up on almost two full years since the first announcement that Empire would move to DC. Can you talk a little bit about the process of getting the series going again? Has it taken longer than you expected?

BK: It has taken longer to get the book back in the schedules than we’d hoped — it was really just a question of logistics. Mark and I never actually stopped talking over ideas and plots for the series, but Andy Helfer had asked if I would help out on Titans and that ended up taking more time from my schedule than we’d expected. DC to their credit were very good about waiting to schedule Empire until we knew we could put all the time into it that we wanted. Empire means a lot to Mark and me so we really wanted it to be right this time!

DT: How much time do you like to devote to Empire? Is it something you feel you can work on simultaneously with another project, or do you have to focus on it exclusively?

BK: I always prefer to work on one thing at a time when I can. If I have more than one project in progress I’ll assign specific days to a single task – for example Monday = Cover for project ‘a’, Tuesday = Empire interiors. Usually with a story I like to work on it unbroken so I can get totally immersed in it. At the moment Empire is taking priority over everything else. If there’s a little down time on Empire for any reason then I’ll get to working on preparatory stuff for JSA etc.

DT: What’s it like coming back to a project like this after so much time away? Is it a challenge to figure out how a concept (and two stories) from 2000 fit into your thinking and style in 2003?

BK: Well as I said we really never felt like we left the project. We’ve actually been talking about Empire for a long long time. Well before the Gorilla Comics issues — in fact even before JLA Year One! The concept hasn’t undergone any major change since 2000 . . . just continued to evolve the more we discuss it. Fundamentally things are the same — we had most of the major ideas behind the first story arc pretty well mapped out when we began . . . the biggest difficulty is probably that we’ve had two years to think of new ideas we want to throw in so it gets harder and harder to fit everything into the structure we originally thought of! We probably have enough ideas to fill about twice as many pages as we actually requested for this first arc.

I guess you might feel world events have thrown the story into a somewhat different light too — but you’ll have to read the story to judge how that might work.

I think there is a slightly ‘different’ style to the artwork from the original issues– due to my ‘natural progression’ over the time that’s passed . . . it would have been nice to redraw some of the original pages perhaps but not really practical. (I’d probably redraw everything I’ve ever done given the chance )

As far as the stories go, each issue was designed to be able to stand alone– the idea being that you could pick up any issue of Empire and get a whole story from it, but that story would take on extra significance if you had the whole series to refer to. Some things that might seem quite minor in #2 might take on a great significance in the light of #5 say.

The extra good news is that with DC reprinting the original Gorilla issues as #0 – everyone can get immediately up to speed with events if they’d like to!

DT: So if this first arc goes well, it won’t be lack of ideas that stops you and Mark from putting out more, I take it. Are you hoping to put out more miniseries somewhere down the road? What has to happen to make that feasible?

BK: If enough people enjoy Empire we’d pretty much like it to be an ongoing project. Basically if the market place is willing to support it we’d like to keep going until the whole saga is told. It’s a project that we both really enjoy and would like to keep working on whenever we can. Maybe releasing it in volumes — just as these first eight issues make up volume one. Joey Cavalieri our editor at DC has been really supportive and indicated that he’d be happy to take the hot seat again if things go well — so we’ll keep our fingers crossed that the readers enjoy it as much as we hope they will!

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