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The dead tree media is dying. Newspapers and weekly news magazines are wasting away before our eyes. Network broadcast news suffers from steeply declining ratings. It appears to be a natural death, like the death of buggy whip makers succumbing to the steady march of technology.

But it is not what it appears.

The Daily Caller broke the news that Journolist, a private email list of several hundred journalists and academic professionals, conspired to frame the news to support Barack Obama. Their discussions reveal a deep-seated hatred of conservatives, the then-current administration, and, yes, America itself. Chris Hayes of The Nation wrote about his outrage at ABC News. ABC was reporting on the racist, anti-American diatribes of Obama Pastor Wright, and Hayes thought it unseemly:

“Our country disappears people. It tortures people. It has the blood of as many as one million Iraqi civilians — men, women, children, the infirmed — on its hands. You’ll forgive me if I just can’t quite dredge up the requisite amount of outrage over Barack Obama’s pastor,” Hayes wrote.

Hayes urged his colleagues – especially the straight news reporters who were charged with covering the campaign in a neutral way – to bury the Wright scandal. “I’m not saying we should all rush en masse to defend Wright. If you don’t think he’s worthy of defense, don’t defend him! What I’m saying is that there is no earthly reason to use our various platforms to discuss what about Wright we find objectionable,” Hayes said.

You might expect a journalist at The Nation to be liberal, but what is shocking is not that Hayes holds these views. But that he advocates framing and molding the news coverage to support his political viewpoint. Lie, he says, in this very clever way.

More from The Daily Caller article:

“Part of me doesn’t like this shit either,” agreed Spencer Ackerman, then of the Washington Independent. “But what I like less is being governed by racists and warmongers and criminals.”

Ackerman went on:

I do not endorse a Popular Front, nor do I think you need to. It’s not necessary to jump to Wright-qua-Wright’s defense. What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically.

And I think this threads the needle. If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they’ve put upon us. Instead, take one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes *them* sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction.

Never mind that no one called Ackerman a race-baiter. Or noted that he besmirches the memory of thousands of victims of racism, those who were lynched, and those who struggled under Jim Crow. Using charges of racism to further a partisan point trivializes the suffering of those who lived under the yoke of oppression. Some disagreed with Ackerman, but not from an ethical standpoint. They disagreed from a purely practical standpoint: false charges would backfire.

I used to think media bias was unintentional, that reporters were, like everyone else, subject to the interpretations that their world view demanded. And that journalists, while they tried to obtain that nirvana-like state of “objectivity”, simply failed a portion of the time. Bias was unintentional, but somewhat inevitable.

But the scales have fallen from my eyes, and the evidence is clear: there is intentional bias, designed to further the reporter’s individual views and beliefs. The journalist is no longer the supplier of objective facts, but the broker of sectarian viewpoint.

The death of journalism is not a natural death, not borne of the modern era as a result of the relentless march of technology. The death of journalism is not a murder plotted by ignorance or apathy. The death of journalism is self-inflicted. It is a suicide.

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PlayOn is a “new media” company purporting to provide the means to stream on-line content from your PC to your living room XBox, PSP, Wii or media PC. For the most part, it works fine, most of the time, providing access to Hulu, CBS, and other online content providers.

The problem with PlayOn: their clumsy attempts to “monetize” the product. Right after buying a one-time “lifetime license”, they announced a “Premium Product” that would have a yearly subscription fee. Early adopters felt betrayed, and PlayOn reacted by announcing a “special price” for the first year of the subscription for those customers. At $4.95, it seemed like a reasonable compromise. Even though it still seemed like a broken promise, it was a $5 broken promise.

I clicked through to subscribe, and found the final insult. The annual fee, to increase to approximately $20 a year after the introductory rate, has to be purchased with a auto-renewal option on your credit card. This means in order to cancel the service you have to proactively remember your renewal date and act before the date arrives. I suspect PlayOn is banking — literally — on subscribers neglecting to be that proactive.

Sorry, PlayOn. You lost me.

I’m usually not that cynical, but I no longer trust this company. They have exhibited, at least, their ignorance of even mediocre customer service skills. Today I received a notice from them that I shouldn’t question, yet I find myself wondering if this is just the first of many events tto encourage premium subscriptions:

We recently had a technical hiccup that affected many of our PlayOn Basic users, where they couldn’t view content from many of the channels included in the Basic license, such as Hulu and Netflix. This was a bug on our part, and we sincerely apologize!

I’m not usually a member of fever swamps, tucking tin foil into my cap and watching out for black helicopters, but as I said, I don’t trust them. This probably was simply a software bug, but the nagging doubt is there.

I may continue to use the “basic” product that will, I’m sure, be more and more limited as the downward spiral of a once promising company has the life squeeze out of it by bad decisions.

xbmc, an open source “front end” for your Xbox and media center PCs, is the likely successor. An active user community is developing scripts to stream Hulu and other on-line content providers from within xbmc. Yes, Virginia, there is a place where the promise of free software is alive and well.

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Sometimes, a local event can illustrate the problem of state and federal regulations run amok. The local newspaper in Ventura, CA, The Star, has a column by Colleen Carson that recounts a chain of events when a residential house painter spilled some paint inside his van:

A while later, he came outside to get something from his van and froze in his tracks.

Before his eyes were two firetrucks, each staffed by three firefighters, including paramedic and hazardous-materials specialists. There were two city of Oxnard code compliance officers. A Harbor Patrol vessel had been dispatched. A California Department of Fish and Game warden also responded. The scene was short only moon suits and a hovering helicopter.

In all, 13 public officials arrived on the scene.

California has strict laws governing the type of paint that can be sold. The painter was using the proper paint. It was low “VOC”, water based latex paint. The painter followed the procedures he learned in obtaining his contractor’s license, mopping up the spilled paint with rags he saved to dispose of properly. But some of the paint had dripped onto the driveway, so he mopped that up and then washed the residue off with a hose.

In Southern California, all run off from lawns, driveways and streets ends up in the ocean. All storm drains lead there eventually. Regulations on the type of chemicals that can be used are stricter than in other areas of the country. Students holding car washes as fund raisers have to be careful that the sudsy water doesn’t go down the storm drain.

The painter’s mistake was washing off the driveway with a hose, and allowing the water to leave the property. According to one official, that made a small spill into a “40 or 50 gallon hazardous spill”.

He has been billed for $534 by the Fire Department for their response. And he faces up to $25,000 in fines for violating the California Health and Safety codes.

Of all the hazards in California, regulation and over-reaction are the pre-eminent ones.

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Michael Baron is attending the Aspen Ideas Festival, an annual event that “is a conversation-packed exploration of some of the most important ideas and pressing issues we face”. I’m sure the event if full of serious people making serious faces at serious topics. And probably a bore-fest. But Baron is surprised by what he is hearing:

I note that enthusiasm for Barack Obama and his administration seems to be conspicuously missing. Lloyd Grove has a pungent account in The Daily Beast titled “The Elite turn against Obama,” based on speeches by Niall Ferguson and my former boss at U.S. News Mort Zuckerman on economic policy.

Grove’s article in The Daily Beast is searing. Some quotes:

“The real problem we have,” Mort Zuckerman said, “are some of the worst economic policies in place today that, in my judgment, go directly against the long-term interests of this country.”

[...]

“We are, without question, in a period of decline, particularly in the business world,” Zuckerman said. “The real problem we have…are some of the worst economic policies in place today that, in my judgment, go directly against the long-term interests of this country.”

“If you’re asking if the United States is about to become a socialist state, I’d say it’s actually about to become a European state, with the expansiveness of the welfare system and the progressive tax system like what we’ve already experienced in Western Europe,” Harvard business and history professor Niall Ferguson declared during Monday’s kickoff session, offering a withering critique of Obama’s economic policies, which he claimed were encouraging laziness.

“Long-term unemployment is at an all-time high in the United States, and it is a direct consequence of a misconceived public policy.”

Its one thing for pundits and economists to proffer critical opinions from the lectern, but quite another when even the elite entertainment crowd chimes in:

This was greeted by hearty applause from a crowd that included Barbra Streisand and her husband James Brolin. “Depressing, but fantastic,” Streisand told me afterward, rendering her verdict on the session. “So exciting. Wonderful!”

Brolin’s assessment: “Mind-blowing.”

As if that weren’t enough, Grove quotes new media tycoon Arianna Huffington:

He said jobs were going to be his No. 1 priority—there’s a huge disconnect between Washington and what’s going on out in the country. The president’s economic team kept talking about a ‘cyclical’ problem. Larry Summers said jobs were a lagging economic indicator. All these things are simply wrong. The president put all his trust in the wrong economic team—an economic team that didn’t understand what was happening.

Baron notes that there were “even occasional notes of nostalgia for George W. Bush” among the rich folks gathered there.

Before conservatives smile and enjoy their moment of schadenfreud, Richard Fernandez of Belmont Club has some sobering thoughts:

The interesting question is what happens if enough people lose faith in the administration and find that even after they’ve affixed the blame the downward momentum still continues. Will the country have a ‘Thresher moment’ and lack the time and energy to set things right? In 1963 the USS Thresher which was the newest, fastest SSN [submarine] in the US Navy was on a test dive off Cape Cod. It probably sprang a leak at test depth. There at the edge of its envelope, the leak triggered the worst possible response: an automatic reactor shutdown. Without the power to drive itself to the surface the Thresher continued to sink. They blew ballast. But something unexpected happened: in those conditions the high pressure air cooled and froze the pipes. She had plugged herself and sank ever deeper until the depths claimed her.

That terrible loss of reserve energy just when the system needed it most is the biggest threat that the Obama bleed-off of resources poses. The presumption is that once enough political erosion has occurred then someone will blow the ballast and the sub will surface. What must be factored in is time. Nations don’t turn on a dime. The gigantic programs initiated by the administration will bear a momentum not easily reversed.

Government spending is no substitute for real jobs, created by private industry, that employs real people. The Obama administration tried to apply 1940′s Keynesian solutions to a 21st century problem, and succeeded only in introducing uncertainty. So much uncertainty that business will not take the risk of adding jobs to their payroll.