Americans hate big companies that wield monopolistic power. Americans hate lies more.
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In 1912, lung cancer was rare. So rare that professors told medical students they may never see another case. By the 1930s, a rise in cigarette consumption paralleled a rise in lung cancer. In ’54, the American Cancer society said smoking 35 cigarettes a day means you’re 40x more likely to get lung cancer. The Surgeon General warned that smoking was bad for us in 1964. It took another 30 years for state attorneys general to sue big tobacco for knowingly killing us. 1994. Eighty-four years from rare to epidemic.
We knew. We knew they knew. And, we were upset. But, we didn’t get really angry until we learned they lied. Tommy Sandefur, a former Chairman of Brown & Williamson Tobacco testified to Congress in 1994, “I believe that nicotine is not addictive.”
Russell Crowe is many things. One of them is a damn good actor. In Gladiator, he made us care enough about figurines that when his friend buried them with him… waterworks. In Beautiful Mind, you believed he was nuts. And, a genius. But, for my money, his best work was in The Insider. No fights in the Colosseum. No fights in his mind. Just a man who blew the whistle on the lies big tobacco told. Crowe as whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand, PhD. on CBS’s 60 Minutes, “I believe he perjured himself.”
You know the story. The state attorneys general sued the four largest tobacco companies for $206B. For killing us. And, for lying about it.
B&W hired Dr. Wigand to enhance the effect of nicotine and to make cigarettes more addictive.
Major tobacco companies are in the “nicotine delivery business.” They just don’t admit to making smoking more addictive, marketing it to children, lying to the public, or forming a conspiracy to deny its hazards. Despite the fines, they don’t accept responsibility for past illegal acts.
Does that sound like anything that happens these days?
It was Thursday afternoon. The debate was going to start soon. California lawmakers passed bill SB 1327. I knew you’d be busy. So I analyzed the details. Y’all are welcome.
The Bill finds and declares big media companies “use their control of essential online platforms… to generate enormous economic rents.” We are addicted to their products. They work to make us more addicted. They market these services to children. Despite paying fines, they deny past illegal acts. The key input to their product is our personal data. It’s “highly valuable.” They use this information to, “sell digital advertisements.”
They explain that the biggest companies reap the biggest rewards. Small companies can’t leverage data on a scale to make an impact. And they go on to explain that digital media is not like TV, print, broadcast, or other traditional media that doesn’t leverage personal data.
I’ll say it, media is in the “dopamine delivery business.” And, people want them to pay. So, California is going to tax (basically) the parent companies of Google and Facebook $500M over the next five years. Feel free to start getting excited.
Those monies will go to support local media. TV stations, newspapers, and media outlets defined in the all the ways you’d expect in a government bill. You’re feeling this now, right?
Thursday was a big day for California media. There’s windfall coming that will help them do the work they keep telling us is critical to us and to our democracy.
Now, there will be some missteps. There were with the Tobacco settlement.
State governments used the cigarette money to fill budget holes, build golf courses, or even subsidize the tobacco industry. And, funny story, when there’s money, everyone wants it. Like say the America Lung Association who notes that only 2% of funds are going to prevention. More should. Presumably they’re the ones who should get that money.
We don’t know where this media money will go. There’s a decent chance some of it will be wasted. The biggest dollars will go to the biggest people.
But, at least, we nailed those big tech media bastards! Right? I mean that was the point of all this. We don’t like big companies who wield monopoly power. We like news. Well, we don’t like-like it. We don’t like it enough to actually support it directly with our dollars. But at least they’re not liars. We hate liars more than we hate big.
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Hey, so, funny story. I missed the debate analyzing all this. But, I heard President Biden had a tough night. I couldn’t tell from the commentary if he had a cold or if age caught up with him.
Looking for answers, I looked to Dylan Byers for the real deal. He was a reporter at Politico and co-founded Puck News. His bio tells you all you need to know, “Ace media reporter Dylan Byers lets readers into his notebook as he reports on the biggest stories (and egos) in the industry.” See.
Here was his tweet.
In February, several members of the White House press corps told me there should have been *more* coverage of Biden's age, not less:
“The amount of time we spent talking about it versus the time we spent reporting on it was not the same. There should have been tougher, more scrutinizing coverage of his age earlier.”
They knew.
The people who were supposed to tell us the truth shielded it from us. And, instead of being upset about it… instead of pushing for lawsuits against these big news outlets the way we wanted tobacco (and asbestos) companies to pay, we… handed them money.
We need a Jeffrey Wigand, an insider to tell us what’s what in media. Maybe Dylan can be that guy. Russell Crowe could play him. This a damn good story and he’s a damn good actor.