Vee vill decide vat is good for you!
Communications innovators and content entrepreneurs need to keep an eye out for a resolution wending its way through the amendment stage towards adoption by the EU Parliament. It reads a great deal like a charter for obligatory public funding for the cultural self-anointed.
The resolution is available in PDF next to a strongly supporting article here.
The author is an Estonian socialist MEP called Marianne Mikko. Those who grew up in free societies, she says, may lack the special insight about the need to protect democracy that she gained from living under totalitarianism.
Her special insight? The all-seeing and all-wise state must regulate the media to ensure that ‘good’ content is not driven out by ‘bad.’ Wow.
The draft resolution has 24 lettered paragraphs setting out the issue, and 14 suggestions about what to do. Item F reads: “whereas the primary concern of media businesses may be profit, media remains an ideological and political tool of considerable influence, which should not be treated solely on economic terms.”
Given that the amount of money a given media business makes is directly proportional to its popularity, Mikko appears to have come to the standard bureaucratic conclusion that 'the public' can't be trusted to make the right decisions and need to be shown the correct path by... bureaucrats.
MEPs can only recommend, but the European Commission (EC) does occasionally take note of what the assembled expense-account abusers have to say. The EC commissioned an ‘independent study’ of media pluralism and will issue a ‘public consultation’ document later this year.
Then, if it feels like it, it will enact something, the MEPs will rubber stamp it and it will become a law that takes precedence over individual national legislation. How we used to laugh when Communist regimes did that, and called it democracy.
Left and right alike favour prescriptive regulation
The Spring 2008 edition of Regulation magazine contains a good summary (440KB pdf) of the “economic terms” MEP Mikko dislikes. Stanford Public Policy Professor Bruce Owen points out that left and right favour prescription in order to achieve outcomes they regard as self-evidently correct.
“The right seeks to reduce the availability, both to themselves and others, of objectionable media content that threatens family values,” Owen writes. “The left sees powerful ‘media barons’ dominating an increasingly concentrated industry and distorting media content to serve their own corporate or political interests.”
While Owen illustrates his article with US examples, it might have been written with Mikko’s draft in mind. “To achieve practical solutions to real problems,” he concludes, “it is only necessary to agree with each other that our moral instincts, like most instincts, are not automatically relevant or mindlessly applicable to public policy decisions.”
Corporatism
The governing philosophy of the entire EU enterprise is corporatism, a doctrine evolved over a century ago by Roman Catholic thinkers in response to the threat of Communism. Wikipedia provides a reasonable introduction, although it omits the doctrine’s British incarnation as the ‘Third Way,’ trumpeted by closet Roman Catholic Tony Blair at the beginning of his time in office.
In corporatism, power is formally vested in associations of special interest groups. What we might call the EU mentality cannot be called hostile to the market forces that are breaking up traditional oligopolies: it is, quite simply, unable to comprehend them. Sadly, those who think of themselves as ‘progressive’ are now the most backward-looking.
Newspapers are on the way out. The old TV channels are haemorrhaging viewers. Nobody thinks universities are the depositaries of wisdom anymore. Political parties will never recover the mass base they once enjoyed. All of them are now just special interests, frantic to preserve their privileges.
The Mikko resolution has its sights set on politically incorrect media concentration such as Berlusconi’s in Italy. Actually, the secret of his success is the same as our very own Rupert Murdoch’s – give people what they want.
It’s what people show they want by paying for it that offends the self-anointed.
