Truthiness - A Status Report

I started this blog in late 2010.  I posted my first contribution on October 21st.  I made several other posts that same day.  Some of these early posts were about housekeeping issues (e.g. "Introduction" and "Correction policy").  A post that straddled the boundary between housekeeping and actual content was "DUMBTH, the blog".  In that one I explained that I had originally intended to call the blog "dumbth" but I couldn't because someone had already taken that name.  Mixed in with all this first day activity was another post:  "dumbth, truthiness, and Steve Allen".

Steve Allen was a great comedian.  He is mostly forgotten now because he died nearly 15 years ago.  The "dumbth, truthiness, and Steve Allen" post is quite short in comparison to my later work, say this post.  Even so, it hits the highlights of the carrier of a true giant in the comedy business.  Here let me go with just one of those highlights:  He was the first host of "The Tonight Show".  Yes, the very same show that Jimmy Fallon currently helms.  Allen hosted from 1954 to 1957, truly the stone age of television.  The impetus for this post came from the last broadcast of "The Colbert Report" on December 18th.  The connection between "dumbth" and "truthiness" and, therefore, between Allen and Colbert is the fact that the meaning of the two words is essentially identical.

Steven Colbert did not coin the word "truthiness".  But he gave it the meaning we all now associate with it in his opening broadcast on October 17th, 2005.  Truthiness is the willingness to search for truth not by applying evidence, logic, and intellectual examination, in short a "fact based" approach.  Instead, instinct, "gut feelings", "what feels right", what is comfortable or convenient, is used, a "faith based" approach.  In fact things have progressed to the point where faith trumps facts.  Many in the faith community argue that faith must be upheld because it is contradicted by fact.  People who factor facts into their faith are belittled ("oh ye of little faith") and discounted.

Allen in his time waged battle against this kind of thinking under the banner of "dumbth".  Colbert has continued the fight merely substituting "truthiness" for "dumbth" but championing the same message.  So how is this long running battle going?  Badly.  In his last show Colbert ran off a list of the things that had not changed in the nine years his show ran.  The list is truly depressing but accurate.  The forces of "truthiness" are still besting the forces of "truth".  Now nothing in the decades, if you count the Allen era, has convinced me that I am on the wrong side.  "Truthiness" is still wrong and "truth" is still right.  But a position can not hold out so long without strong support so I am going to outline some of the pro-truthiness players.

The first group I want to go after are journalists.  Journalists should be pro-truth.  What, after all, is news if it isn't "what's actually going on".  Unfortunately, in the world we now live in, of the two words in the phrase "news business" the second word, "business", now turns out to be by far the more important.  The news business is no longer driven by an imperative to deliver the "news you can use".  It is driven by the need to deliver eyeballs to advertisers in order to increase ad revenue.  Conflict, real or manufactured, and fear, justified or not, turn out to be the best way to attract eyeballs.  So all conflict is presented as real whether it is or isn't and all fears are presented as legitimate whether they actually are or are not.  And investigating to see if a conflict is real or a fear is justified is just not done.  Doing so would get in the way of attracting eyeballs.

Now this is not how the news business presents itself.  To hear them tell it they are all "fearless seekers out after truth".  And sometimes they are.  They fearlessly seek out the "truth" about the poor and powerless and about anyone who is a well documented boogeyman (unless that boogeyman is a major sponsor).  The distance between true journalism and what is now practiced has been on display for all to see in a particularly egregious manner for the past couple of weeks.  It has to do with the Senate torture report.

The news contained in the report is pretty much all bad.  And the coverage has not been all bad.  The principal findings of the report have been well reported.  And the story has evolved in the sense that some findings were highlighted in the beginning.  Then as time has passed coverage of those findings have decreased (both the press and the audience have a low tolerance for boredom so it is critical to change up the coverage).  But it has been replaced by an emphasis on other findings.  As the coverage has "evolved" the public has been exposed to pretty much all of the principal findings.  That's good so what's bad?  Well, that is a little more complicated.

There has been a lot of push back from members of the Bush Administration and from the right wing.  And this push back has been well covered in the sense of giving these people "equal time".  It is in what is called the framing (a technical term) that I find fault.  These people are not presented the way they should be.  To understand where I am coming from let me step back and talk about journalistic standards.  Specifically, what constitutes "good" information as opposed to "bad" information.  And here I am talking from a strictly journalistic perspective.  So I don't care whether it is "good news" or "bad news".  I care about how much weight a good journalist should give to a piece of information.  And here's where the problem lies.

Let's look at the Senate report.  Well, technically it's not the report.  The report itself is over 6,000 pages long.  What has been released is a "redacted" (various short (sometimes only a word or two) "sensitive" sections have been blacked out) version of the executive summary.  This consists of two short (several pages long) documents and the 499 page main document.  Both the 6,000 page main report and the 500 page executive summary are based on what is purported to be 6,000,000 pages of CIA documentation.  The 6,000,000 page main trove is supposed to be everything the CIA had on the torture (euphemistically called "enhanced interrogation" - I'm not going to dignify what went on by using the euphemism) program.

The executive summary contains nearly three thousand footnotes.  A specific CIA document is referenced for every quotation and fact in the report.  The 6,000 page main report is supposed to contain something like 30,000 footnotes.  But it is not currently available to the general public so it is theoretically off limits.  I say "theoretically" because these kinds of things have a habit of being leaked when it is convenient.  The fact that it has not been leaked leads me to believe that the CIA brass has not found it convenient to leak from it.  I further conclude that the long report is completely consistent with the contents of the executive summary.  And here I am wandering into the realm of bad journalism.  I have done this deliberately to show you what it looks like and to show you how easily it can be done if care is not taken.  Why is it bad journalism?  Because it can't be checked so I am making unsupported allegations.  The torture report is available for download on the Internet.  That's what I did.  Then I read the whole damn thing.  Back to the part that you can read for yourself, the stuff that is checkable.

The torture report (actually the redacted version of the executive summary but from here on out I will just use "torture report") is carefully written and completely supported by specific documents.  These documents were the internal "work product" of the CIA and were not intended for public consumption.  They were not "prettied up".  Instead they were intended to be accurate and to clearly communicate up and down the chain of command.  They are the most reliable kind of document for a report to depend on for its analysis and conclusions.  The report conforms to the highest standard of journalism.  If you are looking for a source you can depend on it doesn't get any better than this.  So on one side of the argument you have a reasoned position that is massively supported by the best kind of documentation.  You have the "holy grail" of journalism.  Now let's look at the other side.

Is there a "good journalism" way to object to the report and its conclusions?  There certainly is.  The strength of the torture report is potentially its weakness.  Let's say the report incorrectly quotes a CIA document or lifts a quotation out of context.  That would be bad, very bad.  Or let's say that there were other documents in the CIA trove that contradicted the documents the torture report depends on.  This would be bad if the report did not acknowledge these other documents, characterize them accurately, and then address the contradictions.  This potential objection would be bad but not as bad as the first kind of possible objection.  Next in line in terms of badness would be a case where there were documents that contradict the documents the torture report depends on.  This would be bad but the badness would be mitigated by the question of why they were not included in the 6,000,000 page trove.  The committee can not be blamed for not studying documents they did not have access to.  Any of these would be an example of a serious objection to the report.  But I have not seen any examples of any of these potential objections being made.

Instead we get vague objections that the report is wrong or missed something but that's the point.  They lack specificity to the point where they can't be checked.  "But the supporting documentation for my objection is classified" one might argue.  To which I counter "if it's convenient all kinds of classified material finds its way out into the public view".  And, except for the objections the report has already knocked down, the objections I have seen are so vague, so lacking in specificity, that it is essentially impossible to check them.  And assume for a minute that I had some super-security level of access so that I could check the supporting documentation.  I wouldn't know where to start as no reference to any specific document or documents is provided.  A "journalist" operating in this manner would immediately become the poster child for bad journalism.

This is also a problem with confidential sources.  In most cases they can not be checked up on.  Vast amounts of negative information was leaked during the Clinton "whitewater, et al" scandals.  Much of it later turned out to be bogus.  But it was not demonstrated to be bogus until years after it was initially leaked.

An example of leaked information was quickly shown to be bogus occurred during the 2004 Bush - Kerry Presidential campaign.  A bunch of documents that showed that Bush had engaged in hanky panky to avoid going to Vietnam during the war of the same name were loudly trumpeted by CBS.  It was quickly shown that the documents were counterfeit.  Dan Rather lost his job as anchor of the evening news show on CBS but no one has ever disclosed where the bogus documents came from.  In this case a "legitimate newsmen" decided to let himself be fired in order to protect the identity of a confidential source that was an out and out liar.  Is it any wonder that people leak confidential information to the press?  They know their secret of their identity is safe even if the leaked information is completely bogus.  So here we have an example of unsourced information being treated as reliable even though we now have a long history of some of this information being bogus.  That's really bad journalism.  But it is also standard operating practice for the "journalists" who cover politics.

And in the case of the torture report "but wait - there's more".  It is not just a situation where unsourced and vague material is treated as being on an equal footing with well sourced and very specific material.  Much of the opposition has resorted to "ad hominem" attacks.  This type of attack involves attacking the messenger rather than the message.  "That person is a bad person" or "that person is a liar" are examples stripped of their veneer of civility.  The issue is not whether the messenger is a good or bad person.  It's whether what they are saying is true.  It is also not whether the person lies a lot.  It is whether the person is lying in this instance.  Now it may increase the odds if the person actually is a bad person or a liar.  But at a minimum it is incumbent upon the person making the ad hominem attack to substantiate the allegation that the person is in fact bad or a liar.  This is rarely done.  Instead the charges are repeated ad nauseam and, unfortunately, routinely passed on by "journalists" to the general public.  I understand why the charge is made.  It works and part of the reason it works is because "journalists" happily pass this sort of thing along.  They do so even if the person or people making the charge never provide any evidence to back the charge up.  Why?  Controversy is good for ratings.

In the modern era if the news media is reporting on a "suspect" or on someone who has been charged with a crime but not yet convicted, they will insert some version of the word "alleged" in the appropriate places.  "The defendant is alleged to" or the "alleged crime" is how these situations are now routinely handled.  Now someone who has a poor track record for credibility should receive little or no coverage.  But I guess it is at least sometimes appropriate to hear them on "free speech" grounds.  The poster child for this kind of thing is Vice President Cheney.  He has been shown to be wrong over and over on many things but particularly on the CIA torture program.  Yet he finds a home on the Sunday morning interview shows pretty much whenever he wants one.  His remarks are never appropriately framed in a way that is analogous to the way people suspected of run of the mill crimes like murder are framed.  Instead of being framed with something that conveys the fact that he has been shown to be wrong over and over with respect to the subject he is about to opine on he is not framed at all.  He is just presented in a straight forward manner as if he is completely credible and what he has to say deserves out attention.

And Cheney routinely engages in ad hominem attacks and vague references to unspecified "proof".  The best that can be said on behalf of Cheney is that the torture report documents a systematic effort to deceive the Executive Branch, the branch that Cheney was a part of when he was Vice President.  On the other hand, Cheney is well known for having rooted around in the raw data looking for terror threats he thought the CIA was overlooking.  A tour through the raw data by Cheney or any of his close advisors after the torture program got under way would have easily turned up evidence that the program was being run badly and that it was not turning up good intelligence.  But somehow this never happened, if we can believe what Cheney now says.

The "torture report" coverage is just the most well documented and black and white example of the news media treating poor sources as good sources when it suits them (when it is perceived to be a ratings getter).  And they treat good sources as if they were poor sources when the good sources reveal the wrong thing (something that for whatever reason will be bad for ratings or otherwise be inconvenient).  We see this over and over.  (Insert any number of whistle blowers here.  Edward Snowden was initially treated very badly by the press.  He is still treated badly in some circles.  Again with the Snowden case, we have one side providing detailed and specific documentation to back up their charges and the other side making ad hominem attacks and making vague "damaging national security" and "getting CIA agents killed" charges, all without any serious proof.)  Before I leave this subject I want to review one more example of a poor source being consistently treated as if he was a good source.  Pretty much the entire carrier of John McCain is a classic example of this.

McCain first came to prominence during the "savings and loan scandal" of an earlier era.  He was caught carrying water for someone who had generously contributed to his campaigns.  The same person was eventually thrown in jail for massive fraud.  Apparently what McCain learned was "don't get caught" doing favors in this kind of situation rather than "don't provide cover for people being investigated without first making sure they actually are clean".  He then went on to cultivate a reputation for being a "maverick", someone who would buck the Republican party line if his high minded beliefs required him to.  Then he started running for President.  He quickly found out that his "maverick" beliefs got in the way of getting the nomination.  They were popular with the general public but unpopular with the kind of Republican that showed up to a caucus or voted in a primary.

So he dumped them all and by "all" I mean all.  The position he is most noted for is his anti-torture position.  He was shot down over North Vietnam and tortured extensively so he comes by that conviction honestly.  But when information on the CIA torture program first started leaking out he carried water for the Bush Administration.  He added some weasel words but the message he conveyed was that he was ok with what they were doing.  He is now supportive of the Senate torture report and critical of his Republican colleagues but he no longer aspires to run for President.  And you can go pretty much up and down the line.  You can find McCain on one side of an issue at one time and on the other side at another time.  But he too is a popular guest on the Sunday interview shows and his remarks are widely reported across the media.  And they are never framed with any kind of "he's a flip flopper" warning to alert the casual viewer.

Another example is the coverage of Obamacare.  It is a mystery to some why the program is unpopular when it is polled.  The official Republican line is "it's unpopular because it is a bad program".  But it has done and keeps doing what its supporters said it would do.  And if you ask people about the "Affordable Care Act" (it's official title) it immediately becomes about 10% more popular than if you call it Obamacare.  And here's the real clincher.  If you poll each component separately ("do you like kids being able to stay on their parent's insurance until they are 26" or "do you like insurance companies being unable to deny coverage due to preexisting conditions" or "do you like the fact that insurers can no longer put a cap on lifetime payouts" or . . .) every provision of Obamacare is wildly popular as soon as you take it out of the Obamacare context.  People even like the exchanges.  The only real complaint they had was that initially they didn't work.  As soon as they were fixed people flocked to them in droves.  And a year later 80% like what they found.

The reason "Obamacare" is unpopular is due to a very successful campaign to do what it takes to make it unpopular.  A classic example is the whole "death panel" "debate".  Everywhere we turned for at least two years we were told that Obamacare included government run death panels that were going to "come after grandma".  The law included no such death panels.  And death panels actually existed at the time of the "debate".  It's just that they were run by the insurance companies.  They denied coverage or slowed service delivery to save insurance companies money.  The official line from the media is "well, if that is true why didn't Obama and the Democrats push back?"  They did.  But various conservative individuals and groups pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into pushing the "government death panels" message.  The Democrats did not have nearly as much money with which to get their message out.

And Republicans relentlessly pushed the "government death panel" argument at every opportunity and the media gave them lots of opportunity.  What was really going on?  The media was reaping vast amounts of income from the anti-Obamacare ads and controversy is good for ratings.  If the "government death panel" "debate" went away the media would have had to work to gin up another "controversy".  It would not have been hard to dig around a little and find out that the "government death panel" argument was bogus.  And you could go down the line on the other arguments against Obamacare.  They were mostly bunk too.  But the news media never has done the minimal amount of digging necessary to get to the truth.  After trumpeting the many bogus "controversies" about Obamacare it would have embarrassed the media to be found so wanting at the end of the day.

At one level the argument for paying attention to any news source is "we are trustworthy".  But on so many stories so many news purveyors have turned out to be anything but trustworthy.  Subconsciously the public knows this.  The popularity of the news business is only slightly higher than that of the politicians they cover.  People know they are being lied to in the sense that they do not receive "fair and balanced" news.  And in some cases they are being outright lied to.  The problem is so pervasive that people are stuck for some way to find reliable news.  Mostly people just throw up their hands and give up.  Another symptom of this is to ask what sources the public does trust.  The answer turns out to be comedians.  Jon Stewart has consistently been rated as more trustworthy than any mainstream journalist for many years now.  He is a comedian that does a fake news show.  He is using the format of a news show as the foundation of the humor he is pushing.  And the people who watch him know it.  But he does a better job of conforming to journalistic standards than professional journalists do and at a subconscious level this comes through.  The Stewart show makes a lot of stuff up.  But they are very careful to flag the made up stuff as made up.  So the viewers know what is trustworthy real news and what is "just for fun" stuff.

Colbert is a more extreme example of the same thing.  He created an entirely fake persona supposedly modeled after Bill O'Reilly - the highest rated talking head on Fox.  Everyone (with the possible exception of a few conservatives who think he is real) knows its a fake.  It's a put on.  So his audience recognizes the fakery and flips it inside out exactly as Colbert expects.  The mainstream news organizations frequently use the excuse that "it's too complicated and hard to explain" to doge their responsibility to explain the important.  Aaron Sorkin demonstrated that while explaining complicated things may be hard it is not impossible.  He consistently explained complicated political issues on his TV show "The West Wing".  And he did it in such a way that the viewing public could understand the explanation.  While he was doing this he also had to put out a show that got high ratings by attracting and keeping a large audience.

And then there is the example of Colbert doing actual real news 'splainin (with apologies to Ricky Ricardo).  Colbert devoted a considerable amount of time over the years to campaign finance laws.  He got an award for doing it better than anyone else.  And he did it in the way recommended to writers for centuries:  "show - don't tell".  He actually set up his own superpac.  He went through the process step by step and demonstrated that what he was doing was completely legal.  He then went on to show all the things superpacs could legally get away with doing by actually doing them.  And he did it in a way that his audience thoroughly enjoyed.  In effect he force fed them a bunch of legalese and kept them coming back for more.  That's supposed to be impossible.  It's not that these things can't be done.  They can.  And it's not that doing them will depress ratings.  Sorkin's and Colbert's ratings were very high.  The traditional news outlets decided that since they couldn't figure out how to do it then it must actually be impossible so they didn't even try.  And when they did try it was obvious they were being half hearted so the audience tuned out and they used their failure as further proof of the impossibility of doing this sort of thing.

So the news business have actively been supporting truthiness for reasons that seem sensible to them.  Anybody else?  Well, say you sell a product that is essentially the same as a number of similar products made by others.  How do you market it?  A classic example is headache tablets.  There are only a few ingredients.  The old standard was aspirin.  Now it is Ibuprofin, Naproxin, and a couple of others. But all the popular headache remedies on the market rely on the same few ingredients.  And they have all been in high volume production for some time so there is not a lot to be squeezed out of manufacturing costs.  This is a common problem across the board for companies selling products.  They need to convince you to buy their product and not the other guy's.  So what do they do?

Well, sex sells.  So you drape a babe over your car or you dress a supermodel in your clothes or whatever.  Even the spokesmodel for perfume is always supergorgeous.  For whatever reason pretty girls work on women as well as on men.  The problem is that everyone in the ad business has known for a long time that sex sells so it has been overused.  There is now a science of how sexy you want your spokesmodel to be.  The idea is that less sexy is more trustworthy, at least in some cases.  So the spokesmodel for Progressive Insurance is good looking but not gorgeous.  It's tough selling a "me too" product so marketers look for whatever advantage they can get.

And while you are flailing around for a new idea that hasn't already been done to death consider this?  If you can't honestly market your product as being better then who is easier to fool, either into believing your product actually is better when it is pretty much indistinguishable from the other products, or by using another kind of pitch like sex.  Some other popular alternatives to using sex to sell are "we're more All American and wholesome than those other guys" or "out product will remind you of good old days" or "salt of the earth families use our product so you should too".  The new standby is "our product is all natural".  Crude oil, Uranium, and Arsenic are just a few of the "100% all natural" things out there that you definitely should not eat.  Put simply, dumb people are easier to sell to than smart people.

Dumb people tend to swallow whatever message the marketer is putting out.  Smart people tend to take the message apart and see if the arguments for why they should buy your product actually make sense.  This increases the chances that your message will be ineffective and your marketing campaign will fail.  So corporations like to sell to dumb people.  The chances of a successful sale are higher.  So it is in the best interests of corporations to dumb down the population.

This is especially true of corporations that do business in areas that the public is uncomfortable with.  The current best example of this is Koch Industries.  Koch Industries specializes in equipment and services for the oil industry.  The Koch's (Charles and David) want the oil industry to grow and prosper so they can sell more stuff to them.  Koch is also known for cutting corners.  They think they can make more money if there is less regulation of the oil industry in particular and society in general.  It is possible to use a tight regulation regime to gain an advantage for your business. If your products and services conform to all the regulations and your competitors' don't then this gives you a decided advantage.  It also encourages you to support these regulations and their tight enforcement.  Koch doesn't do business this way.  Frankly, the Koch brothers want to dumb down society as they see that as advantageous to their business and to them personally.  They have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in this belief.

Another industry that has followed the Koch model is coal.  Frankly, there is no "tight regulation" regime that is advantageous to the coal industry as a whole nor to any of the major players.  Coal is the "cheap energy" fuel.  Pretty much any market for coal can be displaced by some other commodity.  The reason coal still sells is that it is usually the cheapest option.  But low cost is almost always the only benefit coal has on it side.  So the smart move in the coal business is to drive down costs.  And that usually means more destructive mining and processing options and more dangerous operating practices.  Doing deep mining involves lots of labor and is hard to automate.  Cutting corners on safety equipment, using worn out equipment and skipping or minimizing maintenance cuts costs.

Pit mining, where you dig a big pit to expose the coal can be automated.  You can go with supersize equipment to keep your labor costs low.  "Strip and leave" processes where you don't properly restore the land after all the coal has been extracted saves massive amounts of money. Explosives are cheap.  So blowing off the tops of mountains in order to get at the coal underneath makes sense.  And gravity provides an assist to getting the blown up rock out of the way.  So the coal industry has blown the top off of a lot of mountains in the last few decades.  In the abstract no one likes any of this.  People like safe mines paying top wages.  People like open pit and mountain top mine sites to be cleaned up after the coal is gone.  And they like pollution and other issues dealt with thoroughly and carefully while the pit is operating.  So the coal industry has a massive public relations problem.  If they operate properly they go out of business, or so they believe.  So they have to sell unpopular propositions to the public.  This is much easier to do if the public is dumb and uninformed.  So that's how the coal industry likes things.

But wait, you say.  While it may be understandable that some industries or companies want to behave this way what about society as a whole?  There you run into a dilemma that has been with us for centuries called "the tragedy of the commons".  It works this way.  Suppose there is a field that people graze sheep on and suppose it is owned "in common", say by the local town.  Ideally you want to graze as many sheep on the commons as it can handle but no more.  This maximizes the aggregate good.  But each sheep belongs to a specific person.  So what happens if Charles (in honor of Charles Koch) grazes a few extra sheep on the commons?  Not much.  The commons deteriorates but slowly.  It's only a few sheep.  But who gets all the benefit of the overgrazing and pays only a small part of the cost?  Our boy Charles, that's who.  He sees a net benefit for behaving in a way that hurts the commons.  All the other sheep owners suffer some cost and derive no benefit so they suffer a net loss.

So what do they do?  They do the same thing David did.  They add sheep.  It doesn't take long for the commons to be trashed and for everyone to lose.  If the benefit goes to individuals when they overuse a common resource but the cost of overuse is widely distributed you have a "tragedy of the commons" situation.  And when you do things usually go as you would expect.  We have seen this in the fishing industry, for instance.  Individuals catch the fish and derive the benefit when they sell them so they want to catch as many fish as they can just like our sheep man David.  But a fishing grounds is a common.  In case after case a particular fishing ground has been overfished.  The fish population quickly crashes and pretty soon no one is making any money out of that fishing ground.  It has taken a generation for fishermen to figure out how the TOTC (tragedy of the commons) scenario applies to fishing and accept much tighter and rigorously enforced fishing quotas.  This has resulted in a number of fisheries recovering and the case for tight regulation becomes easier to sell to fishermen every year.  When it comes to the fishing industry, we are not out of the woods but things are finally on a positive trajectory.

That's all well and good for something like coal mining or fishing but does this apply more broadly?  I give you Wal-Mart.  Wal-Mart is famous for its value proposition.  They are able to sell goods very cheaply and still make a nice profit.  How?  The Wal-Mart answer is that they have made their whole operation very efficient from end to end.  They have done this so well that they are just better at it than anyone else.  One thing they have done is outsource manufacturing to China.  That may be a good or bad idea but it has nothing to do with TOTC.  But there is another thing Wal-Mart does.  They keep their labor costs down, way down.  They do this by paying low salaries, keeping hours down, and by providing almost non-existent benefits to most of their employees.  Wal-Mart touts their employee health insurance package, for instance.  But it is structured in such a way that most employees can not afford it so few sign up.  Wal-Mart gets the PR benefit of offering health care without incurring the cost of actually providing it.

But let's back up and ask a basic question:  can Wal-Mart employees afford to shop at Wal-Mart?  One answer is that they can't afford to shop anywhere else.  And that's the justification Wal-Mart uses.  But if Wal-Mart had to depend on customers whose income was similar to typical Wal-Mart employees they would be out of business.  The recent recession (which we are still coming out of) has been hard on Wal-Mart because their traditional customer base was hit hard.  It doesn't matter if something is cheaper at Wal-Mart.  If you have no money at all you still can't afford to buy it.  In summary. the Wal-Mart model is a TOTC model.  They depend on other businesses paying better than they do.  Those people who work elsewhere can afford Wal-Mart.  But at a societal level this doesn't work.  Those other businesses "go to school" on Wal-Mart and adopt similar business practices including paying Wal-Mart wages.  It takes a while for this to work out.  There are still lots of businesses paying better than Wal-Mart wages so Wal-Mart is starting to see its business recover as the economy gets slowly better.  But its a race to the bottom and the bottom is not pretty.

Wal-Mart likes dumb customers.  They want people to be just smart enough to see the low prices but not smart enough to figure out the bigger picture.  And this is true of many in the business community.  For instance, a TOTC variation takes place in the high paid high tech industries.  There the trick is to import smart people from the rest of the world.  The rest of the world absorbs the cost of finding these smart people and educating them.  Then the high tech company gets the benefit of a cheap employee, at least cheap relative to the cost of someone who is home grown.  We see top Tech people talking the talk about supporting STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) education.  But at the same time they use every dodge in the book to lower their taxes and lobby fiercely for the right to import more foreigners.  This is what the H-1B visa fight is all about.  Again, this trick is easier to pull off if people are not paying attention, if they are or act dumb.

It would be nice to say that things are moving away from Truthiness and toward Truth but they are not.  I will report immediately if I see any signs of a real light at the end of the tunnel.  Colbert is not lost to us. He will be taking over "The Late Show" on CBS from Dave Letterman sometime in 2015.  It is widely reported that Letterman's last show will be on May 20th but I have not heard a firm date for when Colbert will start.  Colbert is abandoning his "conservative bloviater" character as part of the switch.  But I think he will just change his tactics to those more compatible with his new personna.  He will continue to fight the good fight.  I wish him complete success.  And I note that John Oliver, another graduate of Stewart's "The Daily Show", is doing a great job with his "Last Week Tonight" show on HBO.

I enjoy writing this blog.  But Colbert and Stewart and Oliver are much more effective than I am at waging war on Truthiness.  And I am OK with that.  I don't care how we win or who gets credit for the win.  I only hope that we win.  As with Global Warming, the longer we wait the more it costs us in the present.  With Global Warming the longer we wait to start taking effective action the worse the situation will become.  This will mean that larger, more disruptive, and more expensive actions will ultimately be required.  This is also true with the Truthiness problem, but hopefully to a lesser extend.  As time goes by we will have done more stupid things so more messes will need cleaning up.  And we will have more dumb people who will need more education.  But I don't think the costs are accumulating as rapidly as with Global Warming so the situation is not as dire.  That's the best I can come up with for a "glass half full" type rosy scenario.  If you don't find that very reassuring imagine how I feel.



    

Faith Based Conflict Resolution

We humans are a contentious bunch.  We get into disagreements over anything from the smallest and least important things (did the ref get the call right last night or not) to the largest and most important things (world war).  And some times resolving the conflict is unimportant.  Whether the ref got the call right may be more about having something to chew over at the water cooler than it has to do with the actual call.  But in many cases it is important to resolve the conflict. So when it is important to come to a satisfactory resolution what mechanisms are available to us?

Theoretically there are many possible mechanisms.  But I want to limit myself for the purposes of this piece to mechanisms that operate in a faith based world.  So let's take a deeper dive into this world.  The place of religion in the world has not always been the way it is now.  Take, for instance, the ancient Greeks.  They had a glimmering of what we now take to be the modern "scientific" world.  The foundations of mathematics, logic, astronomy, medicine, and other disciplines were laid down then.

And the ancient Greeks had a strong religious tradition.  But it was far different from our modern one.  It featured a large number of gods, all squabbling with each other like children, and often more interested in their own battles with other gods than in what was going on with lowly humans.  This allowed for a lot of confusion and contradiction within religious belief.  As one god ascended and another was pushed to the background the expectations of how humans should behave would change.  So there was a lot of flexibility surrounding what constituted appropriate behavior.  It depended on which god was up and which god was down or on which god you were trying to get on the good side of at a particular time.  And what passed for science at the time was very limited so it had nothing to say about many important aspects of human life.  It effectively represented a poor alternative to religion.

And this was true everywhere for a long time.  But religion, at least western religion, evolved from polytheism (many gods) to monotheism (one god) and to an expectation that religious teaching would govern all of morality and much else.  There was no other game in town.  And this was reasonable.  Religion is effectively an appeal to power.  The smartest and most powerful come to have control of the levers of political and religious (often the same thing) power.  If your options are "go with a random guess" and "go with what the rich and/or powerful say" then rich/powerful will be right more often than the random choice.  This is not to say that this is a good answer.  It is to say that it is the better of the answers available.  In summary, there was a rational argument for religion for a long time.

Then in roughly the mid-1600's a viable alternative arose.  It was called the enlightenment.  "Enlightened" thinking depended on reason, analysis, and individualism, what we now call "the scientific approach".  By about 1650 this approach had wrought miracles.  Newtonian mechanics allowed the orbits of planets to be calculated to a heretofore unimaginable precision.  Telescopes, microscopes, and other scientific tools opened worlds previously undreamed of to investigation.  Advances in chemistry, metallurgy, and other aspects of the manufacturing art, made it possible to make things more cheaply and easily or to make new things that could not even been made before.  And this enlightenment way of thinking did not depend on religion or on authority (i.e. powerful people).

This was widely seen by religious people as a direct attack on their beliefs.  Many in the enlightenment movement did not see it that way.  Descartes was a mathematical genius from a very early age.  He revolutionized mathematics while still a young man.  Then he retired into theology and completely stopped doing mathematics.  Newton followed essentially the same trajectory.  His early years were devoted to science and mathematics.  His later years were primarily devoted to religious activities.  Obviously these two and many others saw no inherent conflict between science and religion.  But the people on the other side, the people who devoted their entire lives to religion and never engaged in scientific activity, saw the enlightenment as a direct attack on religion.  A win for the enlightened way of thought inevitably meant a defeat for the religious way of thought.

And they were at least partly right.  Religious people abandoned rationality.  They decided a core tenet of religious thinking was that it was unprovable, that a rational approach was antithetical to a religious approach.  The path to religiosity was "faith" not fact.  A person was expected to hold to a religious belief in spite of any "fact" that might be seen as being in opposition to that belief.  Facts were no longer important.  Only faith was important.  If you believed that an "enlightenment" way of thinking was inherently anti-religious, and religious people came to believe this in overwhelming numbers, then this rejection of fact and embrace of faith was a completely appropriate response.  And this move away from anything smacking of enlightenment thinking has been the hallmark of the relationship between science and religion ever since.

For the purposes of most of the remainder of this piece we are going to assume that the "faith" people are right.  Then we are going to see how this "faith based" approach affects conflict resolution.  To do this we are going to start by studying a very artificial conflict.  Specifically:

Consider two people:  Smith and Jones.  Smith believes one thing, call it "Red", and Jones believes another thing, call it "Blue".  Now if it is possible to reconcile Red and Blue such that they both are true then there is no real conflict.  So assume that if Red is true then Blue must be false, and vice versa.  Now we have a conflict.  And there are no facts involved.  Why?  Because in a "faith based" world facts are not important.  This is our extremely artificial conflict   It is simple but it contains all the necessary components.  So how do we come to a reconciliation?

Well, you . . .  No! that doesn't work because it depends on some fact or another.  Well, how about . . .  No!  That doesn't work either because again facts come into play.  In fact, we quickly find that there is only one approach left:  power.  If Smith can overpower Jones (or vice versa) then Smith can impose Red on Jones (or Jones can impose Blue on Smith).  Smith can have the loudest voice, or the strongest muscles, or the sharpest sword, or the biggest gun (or army), or the best political connections, or whatever.  But it all ends up coming down to power.  The more powerful win because they can impose their will on the less powerful.

We see this playing out over and over all the time.  The more powerful are able to use power to impose their will or belief system on the less powerful.  I came at this from a slightly different perspective in http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2011/12/what-is-science.html.  There I was talking about conflicts between someone with a science perspective and someone with a religious perspective.  Here I am going to confine myself to conflicts where both people approach the conflict from a religious perspective.  But let me lift a quote from my previous post because it is about a conflict between religious beliefs so it fits right in with the current discussion.

Your God loves your people and hates mine, he folds his strong arms lovingly around the white man and leads him as a father leads his infant son, but he has forsaken his red children, he makes your people wax strong every day . . . while my people are ebbing away like a fast-receding tide, that will never flow again. [“Eyewitness to the Old West”, Richard Scott, ed., page 129]

Here Chief Seattle, a Native American is talking about the collision between his religious beliefs and that of the white Christians who have invaded his homeland.  Ultimately, the Christianity of the white culture is overwhelming the animist religion of Chief Seattle and other natives.  (Many Native Americans are either trying to hold on to their old religious beliefs or revive them but most Native Americans have given up.  They see their old religions not as "religious" but as "cultural".  Among those who hold religious beliefs, most now hold Christian religious beliefs.)  And the reason Christianity triumphs is because of its power.

"God loves your people and hates mine" couldn't make the power-based argument more clear.  And the small scale conflict that Chief Seattle is speaking of was writ large in the conflict over religion that played out between Europeans and the native inhabitants of the Americas: North, Central, and South.  In every case and in every location the combination of military technology and disease that the Europeans could bring to bear on the natives overpowered them.  Conversions stemmed not from any inherent superiority of the religion of the Europeans as compared to the locals but to the raw power the Europeans were able to bring to bear.  The Chief Seattle "he makes your people wax strong every day . . . while my people ebb away" scenario played out in hundreds of locations over hundreds of years all over the Americas.  The modern result is that the Americas are overwhelming composed of Christians of one stripe or another from top to bottom and everywhere in between.

And we saw a similar dynamic play out more than a thousand years ago.  The location was different as was the religion.  Shortly after the death of their prophet Moslems took up the sword and began an era of conquest.  The ultimate result was that the Middle East, North Africa, and large swaths of Asia are now Moslem.  As with the early conquests in the Americas where Spain in particular felt it had an explicit mission to convert the natives, the armies of Islam also saw it as part of their mission to convert the conquered and they largely succeeded.  In this case, as with the Christian conquest of the Americas, the principal reason for success was that the new religion was backed by great military, economic, and political power.  Next, let me go from the large, whole countries and great armies, to the small, two men.

The two men were Martin Luther and Pope Leo X.  They had a conflict over a point of faith.  And although the conflict ultimately entered a phase involving a lot of blood and thunder it started out as a war of words and ideas.  Luther was no general.  He was an intellectual and a theologian.  So he did what any self respecting intellectual and theologian would do he posted his "95 theses" on the door of the local church.  At that place and time that was the way you offered a debate.  And you constructed your opening argument in the form of a number of "theses", what we would now call steps in a logical proof.

I have read an English translation of his theses.  I am not impressed.  I think his argument is poorly constructed.  But that does not mean I think his conclusion was wrong.  I would have constructed a different (and, IMHO better) set of theses but I would have ended up at pretty much the same place.  So what was the beef?  The Pope was doing a major refurbishment of St. Peter's church in Rome.  Not surprisingly it was costing a bloody fortune and going wildly over budget.  So the Pope needed a lot of money.  So he sold "indulgences".  An indulgence is a "get out of jail free".  You "contribute" X bucks and you get a free card that allows you to commit some sin, to steel, or commit adultery, or whatever.  The more serious the offense the indulgence covered the higher the cost.  A Berlusconi "bunga bunga" party would cost serious money, for instance.  And, as far as I can tell, if you wanted to commit murder and you were willing to cough up enough dough, you could buy an indulgence for that.

Luther's argument was that indulgences were a bad thing.  It's hard to disagree with that sentiment.  So what should Leo do?  He could say "oops - we're going to not do indulgences any more" or he could come up with an argument as to why Luther was wrong and indulgences were actually ok.  And initially this whole thing was no big deal.  It was an obscure theological argument put forward by some German Monk guy that no one had even heard of.  So let a bunch of egg head theologists duke it out while the rest of us get along with our lives.  That's roughly how Luther probably figured it would go.  He did not start out to create a revolution.  He started out to win a debate.  The issue might have been important to him.  And he might have hoped to make big changes in how the church operated (e.g. no more indulgences).  But initially neither Luther nor anyone else thought this was going to blow up into a big deal.  That is until the response came down.  Well actually it didn't.  The first response was no response.  As time passed the conflict started gaining traction and more people became interested in how things would play out.

Then after a couple of months of silence some friends of Luther got an idea.  They translated the theses from Latin to German, printed up a bunch of copies (the printing press had recently been invented), and started sending them all over Germany.  In its day that was better catnip than posting nude pictures of celebrities would be today.  All of a sudden lots of Germans were would up and paying attention.  The silence from the Leo camp continued.  And the longer the silence persisted the more people all over Europe became aware of the conflict and got interested in the outcome.

Finally, more than six months after the original post, the Pope put out a response in the form of an Encyclical, a letter from the Pope outlining the official word on some theological issue.  He took some fairly minor shots at Luther's argument but mostly he said in effect "Luther:  As a monk you took an oath of obedience.  I order you on your oath to knock it off and shut up".  This was seen for what it was: a raw power play.  And the response to this was not what the Pope expected.  Instead of Luther and everyone else falling into line like good little soldiers the Protestant Revolution happened.

The history of the Catholic Church in this case and of other churches in other cases is rife with these kinds of situations.  Rather than addressing the issue on its merits the method of resolving the conflict devolves to a base test of power and may the most powerful win.  And this kind of "argument from power" manifests itself in many ways.

The first of the Ten Commandments of The Bible in short form is generally stated as "I am the lord thy god.  Thou shalt not put strange gods before me."  This is not "There is only one god and it is me."  It is "There is more than one god but ,trust me, I am the most powerful so don't pay any attention to those other clowns."  This is an argument from power.  And certainly the Chief Seattle argument echoes this.  Roughly translated it is "your white man god is more powerful than our native American gods so we're screwed".

In the middle ages it was common to see two armies marching out to the battle field.  Each would have its own set of church eminences in tow.  One army is going to win and the other lose.  What's going on?  Well, god must have shined his favor on the victorious side.  And the fact that he did so means that the winning side must be somehow more good than the losing side because god couldn't possibly get something like this wrong.  And, in a manner similar to what I have outlined above, this same sort of thing was not restricted to the field of battle where a clash of great powers was involved.  It also played out in one on one conflicts.

"Trial by combat" was an accepted method of settling legal disputes.  If you didn't like what a medieval court decided or if you wanted to skip that whole "trial in a court room" process many jurisdictions allowed nobles to instead have the issue settled using trial by combat.  You (or your designated champion) would joust against the other guy (or his designated champion).  Since god was watching and since god was just, whoever won must have been more right.  There is a wonderful book called "The Last Duel" by Eric Jager that describes the last legally sanctioned trial by combat in France.    The trial took place in 1386.

Most moderns are mystified by the whole "Salem Witch Trial" thing.  But it is just a variation on the trial by combat concept.  If a woman is a witch (i.e. evil) then god would know.  So if you dunk her in water (or subject her to some other trial) and she drowns (or otherwise dies) it must be true.  If she is actually a good woman god will save her somehow.  It's the same idea.

And that's the problem with conflict resolution in a "faith based" environment.  It all ends up boiling down to power in the end.  Consider the "appeal to reasonableness" tactic.  The idea is that both parties sit down and work it out like reasonable men.  But how does Smith convince Jones (or vice versa)?  Appeals to logic or data are ineffective because of "faith".  And one side could abandon his position.  But that just means he is weak compared to the other guy or the original conflict was not worth engaging in.  Ultimately the only tactic that is effective in this environment is the power tactic.  And do we really want to decide all conflicts by a test of power?

This is what has happened to our politics.  The media no longer cares who has the facts on their side.  And, for the most part, the general public goes along with this.  They mostly don't are what the facts are either.  Everybody lines up behind their side and we have a test of power.  One side turns out to be more powerful and they win.  In this environment is it any wonder that everyone is disgusted with everyone?  But for the most part no one is arguing for the change that would make a difference, a change from a faith based approach where only beliefs matter to an approach where facts matter more than beliefs.  Why?

Well, there's that whole "inconvenient" thing.  In the world of science it is frequently true that everybody is wrong.  An outcome where everybody is wrong is the only one that is worse on our egos than an outcome where we are wrong.  I will restrict myself to one example.  There was a long conflict in science about the nature of light.  Newton believed light was composed of particles.  Other lesser lights took the position that it was made of waves.  Each side could point to experiments that positively proved that the other side was wrong.  But each side figured that there was a way to patch their theory up so that the problems with it could be made to go away.  And so the factions went back and forth for literally hundreds of years.

And then Einstein (and some other people that I am going to skip over in order to keep things simple) came along and said "you are both wrong".  Light is made up of things called photons.  In some circumstances photons behave like particles and in other circumstances photons behave like waves.  And in still other circumstances they behave like something completely new.  Again to keep things simple I am going to skip the details but the bottom line is that in some circumstances photons can become "entangled".  All I am going to say by way of explanation is that neither particles nor waves do entanglement.  In the end everybody (at least everybody before Einstein) turned out to be wrong.  That's as embarrassing as it gets.  And no one likes to be embarrassed.

This whole "everybody is wrong" thing happens all the time in science.  It is just part of the whole science thing and scientists have had to learn to live with it.  And so getting embarrassed in this way is taken as a kind of badge of honor by scientists.  "It happens to the best of them" turns out to be literally true.  Even Einstein got important things wrong.  In their heart of hearts scientists would not be human if they didn't secretly wish that risking (and frequently experiencing) embarrassment wasn't part of the job.  But it is.

People generally like to avoid placing themselves in situations where they risk embarrassment.  That's a reason to avoid science and go the "faith based" route.  If you are stubborn enough and are willing to ignore enough you can have faith and never be embarrassed.  That is not an option if you go the science route.  And lots of people are embarrassed for other reasons where science is involved.  They know they should understand it better and pay more attention to it.  But they feel they can't understand it even if they try.  And, since they don't understand it and believe they never will, they are also concerned that it is all just a snow job to put something over on them.  So they just stay away.  This makes it easier for others like the tobacco industry to put things over on them.  In effect they have been thrown back to the pre-enlightenment era.  They see their options as picking a random choice or picking an "authority".  By not knowing any science they frequently pick the wrong authority and we all pay the price.

The Impending death of TV

But wait, you say, TV is doing fine.  There are a zillion cable channels and streaming is a big thing and getting bigger.  And you would be correct to say so.  But the title is a bit of a cheat.  By "TV" I first mean traditional "over the air" broadcast TV.  But I think that cable TV's days are also numbered.  It will just take a little longer.  And if broadcast TV no longer exists and cable TV no longer exists I contend that "TV" is dead.  Whatever is still around would be something else.  So, as is my wont, let's dive into a little history.  The first public demonstration of a complete TV system (cameras, TV sets, control rooms, etc.) took place at the 1939 New York World's Fair.  That makes TV 75 years old.  I confidently predict that it will be dead before it turns 100.  I actually expect broadcast TV to be gone within about 10 years and cable TV to disappear less than 10 years later.  How and why?

TV, like a great many things, is a prisoner of its technology.  In 1939 the technology of the day was barely capable of doing TV.  The equipment was complex, expensive, finicky, and inflexible.  Pictures were captured at a few locations on the fairgrounds and delivered to TV sets located at a few other locations on the fairgrounds.  But it got a lot of publicity, it was successful as a proof of concept, and it provided a foundation on which improvements could be built.

Then things pretty much stopped because of the outbreak of World War II.  That is, work stopped on TV itself.  But considerable progress was made in improving the technological foundations of TV.  So when the war ended people were very excited about the future of TV.  And some of what had been hard in 1939 was now much easier and some of what had been impossible in 1939 was now possible.  So what was possible?

TV cameras and studios were possible.  TV sets were possible.  But it was all pretty expensive.  And there was the "chicken or egg" problem.  To sell TV sets you need TV shows.  But to justify the cost of building TV studios and doing production you need an audience who would view the commercials that would pay for all of it.  But people took the leap of faith and built the studios praying that once they were on the air people would buy sets.  And they did.

But cameras were expensive and finicky.  They also needed a lot of power and light to work.  So they were only practical in a studio situation.  And the only way to get the shows to the viewers was to broadcast it over the air like radio stations were doing.  So that's what people did.  And in the beginning it was nearly impossible and also very expensive to send a signal more than about 50 miles.  The solution, was also one taken from radio.  Special cables were built to connect one city to another.  They had to have extremely high performance for the time so they were very expensive to build and maintain.  So at first only a few cities in the northeast were hooked together.  Then the cable was extended down the east coast.  Then it was further extended across to the west coast, but initially only to California.  Over the decades the system of TV cables for shipping signals from city to city was extended to more and more of the country until finally, pretty much every city of any size was "on the cable".

So these early TV stations were pretty isolated.  That meant that there were few or no opportunities to get a live feed from elsewhere in the country.  So these stations did a lot of local production.  At one time pretty much every TV station in the country had their own local host for a children's show that they ran in the "after school" slot in the early evening.  And pretty soon someone figured how to hook a movie projector to a TV camera.  This made it easy for TV stations to broadcast old movies.  Hollywood had lots of old movies around that they would rent cheaply to the TV stations.  So soon pretty much every TV station ran movies at various times of the day.

Then someone said "hey, let's hook up a movie camera to a TV set".  That made it easy but fairly expensive to get TV shows from "on the cable" TV stations to "off the cable" TV stations.  The TV stations in Seattle, the area I live in was an "off the cable" station for a long time.  Much of the surviving material from the early era of TV comes from Seattle.  East coast shows would be put on the cable to San Francisco.  The San Francisco station would "Kinescope" (the name of the TV to film process) the show and put the film on a plane to Seattle.  After a delay of less than a day (light speed in those days) the show could be aired in Seattle.  Once the show aired no one wanted the film any more.  So a lot of it ended up in the garages of station employees where it was discovered years later.  Why use this clunky method?  Because at that time Kinescopes worked better than anything else.

Seattle, had a different problem that turned out to be important to the evolution of TV, lots of geography.  Seattle is a hilly town.  And for technical reasons broadcast TV signals go in a straight line and do not go through hills.  So one of the local stations came up with an idea.  Why not put an antenna on the top of the hill and run feeds to all the houses on the shadow side of the hill?  It was called Community Antenna TV or CATV for short.  This morphed into cable TV and grew to the behemoth that the cable industry is now.

Anyhow, Seattle eventually got hooked on to the cable (old style usage) and the CATV idea pioneered in Seattle spread to the rest of the country and blossomed into cable TV, or cable (new style) for short.  We'll get back to cable in a minute.  But first, some questions.

Why use kinescopes, the film based technology, as a recording technology?  The answer, of course, is that originally that was the only functional technology.  Kinescopes were replaced by video tape when videotape technology became available.  Similarly, why was TV originally black and white?  The answer here is similar.  Technology initially could not do color.  Color TV sets had to be developed.  Color TV cameras had to be developed.  Then color studio technology and broadcast technology and cable (old style usage of the word) had to be developed.  CBS was the first group to develop a usable color system.  But the broadcast signal was not compatible with black and white.  TV stations would have had to broadcast two different signals on two different channels, one for the black and white system and one for the color one.  Although complex, this might have happened.  But before a decision could  be made RCA, then a giant electronics company that happened to own NBC, developed a "compatible" system.  One signal would be broadcast.  Black and white sets would effectively not see the color components so they would do their black and white thing without needing any modification.  Color sets would know how to process the additional information to put a color picture on their screens.  It took a lot of technological advance to allow the market share of color to overtake that of black and white.  But the technology advanced, costs declined, and after a while, black and white sets disappeared completely.

The changes from kinescopes to video tape and from black and white to color were evolutionary.  They required technology to advance and for money to be found to develop and deploy the new technology.  They also required manufacturing methods to advance so that the cost of the new more complex equipment could be brought down to the point where people figured the additional cost of color was a good deal.  All this happened so TV moved on smoothly.

And there was another area where things moved on smoothly as new technology replaced old technology and that's on the CATV/cable front.  (We're back!)  CATV started out as an effort of one TV station in Seattle to get their signal to the back side of some hills.  When the original CATV system was built there was only one TV station.  But soon there were several.  The CATV technology was upgraded to handle multiple channels.  Then it was upgraded some more to pull in stations that were further away but still in the general area, stations that could be pulled in using sophisticated antennas and the like.  But it was still impractical to pull in stations that were far away.  A cable (old style) could be built but it was just too expensive to pay for itself.  But the technology rapidly improved in terms of the number of channels that could be handled.  There just weren't enough channels to fill all the slots.

And there was another problem.  People quickly noticed that the picture on their TV was a lot better when their TV was hooked up to the CATV system than it was when they used their own antenna.  And many people used inexpensive antennas nick named rabbit ears.  The good news was that the rabbit ears were easy manipulated when you needed to change their orientation, something you often had to do when switching from one station to another as each station's transmission antenna was in a different direction.  The bad news was that rabbit ears seemed to require constant fiddling even if you weren't changing the channel.  None of this fiddling was necessary if you were getting your signals from the CATV system. So people who technically didn't need to hook up to the CATV system did so anyhow.  The fees were low so it was a cheap price to pay to avoid all the fiddling.  So, in spite of the fact that they only gave you access to a few channels, CATV systems became quite popular.

And these two facts, the fact that CATV systems were popular and the fact that CATV systems often had extra unused channel slots was noticed by Ted Turner.  Along with everything else there was another technological advance.  Since things were working pretty well people were putting up lots of TV stations.  The original 12 channel setup called VHF (which actually enabled only about 6 channels in a particular market for technical reasons) was extended to include something called UHF, which added about 60 additional channels (30 or more useful channels).  People were lazy so they mostly stuck with the original VHF channels and, for technical reasons the UHF channels didn't work as well, but a UHF channel could be run profitably if you were careful.  And Turner owned channel 17 in Atlanta.  Turner changed the call letters to WTCG (for Turner Communications Group) and later to WTBS (for Turner Broadcasting System).  It was initially a modest business making a modest profit.

Remember kinescopes.  They were replaced by video tape systems.  Remember the cable systems that were used to send signals between cities.  They worked pretty well but they were very expensive to build and to maintain.  Then along came communications satellites.  Satellites are very expensive.  But with relatively small and relatively inexpensive antennas two TV stations could share programming by relaying it through the satellite.  Soon it became less expensive to do this than to use the cable.  And then it became a lot less expensive.  Turner was the first to notice this and marry it up with the two CATV facts that Turner had noticed.

Turner leased a satellite channel and purchased a satellite antenna for channel 17.  Then he offered to give his WTBS signal away to CATV systems.  (He made his money on the advertising.)  All they had to do was buy the downlink satellite antenna.  And he helped them with that too.  (The more CATV systems that signed up the higher advertising rate he could charge.)  The combination was wildly successful.  WTBS soon started calling itself a superstation and other superstations quickly followed.  It didn't matter that the WTBS feed was not that different from the feed of local stations that were already on the CATV system.  It was a novelty.  Then Turner got broadcast rights to all the Atlanta Braves baseball games.  It didn't matter that the Braves were not very good.  There were lots of CATV systems in markets that had no major league baseball team.  We now know how popular broadcast sports are but it was a surprise when Turner pioneered it with the Braves.  There were a lot of legal problems to be worked out to make superstations successful.  But Turner worked them all out.  And he proved that all the technological problems could also be solved.

WTBS started out as just another local UHF TV station.  But Turner turned it into the first superstation.  He then pioneered CNN, a 24 hour news channel, another idea no one else had thought of.  Here too others quickly got in the game and found other formulas.  We how have ESPN for Sports, various shopping channels, various religion channels, various channels that provide their own TV shows, etc.  In this latter category HBO pioneered the idea of high end shows for a "small" extra fee.  But we also now have any number of channels like A&E or USA that provide fodder that is indistinguishable from TV shows found on the old line networks.  A typical cable package now includes hundreds of offerings catering to pretty much any taste out there.  And CATV is now just "cable" and "cable" is so ubiquitous that most people are unaware of the old usage of "cable" to refer to the method networks like ABC, NBC, and CBS used to deliver their shows to their local "affiliate" stations around the country.

And a lot of this evolution of CATV to cable was enabled by technological improvements.  And a lot of this was evolutionary rather than revolutionary.  Using satellites instead of the city to city cable system was a matter of changing the technology while leaving the functionality alone.  And CATV systems went from one channel to several channels to a couple of dozen channels to about a hundred channels to about a thousand channels as they evolved into cable systems.  But the change was solely in the number of channels that could practically be accommodated.  The functionality was left unchanged.

And before I leave this subject let me ask a question.  Do you like your cable system?  For upwards of 90% of cable customers the answer is "NO".  Cable companies have added features over the years, principally more channels.  But the fees they charge have gone up too.  Most customers believe the "value proposition", how valuable the service is as compared to the cost, has deteriorated.  In the old days people would happily sign up with a CATV system to get essentially what was available to them for free because the small fee the CATV system charged seemed like a good deal.  You got less hassle (no more fiddling with the rabbit ears) and a better picture.  Now the cable fees seem sky high, you are roped into getting a bunch of channels you don't want in order to get the few you do want, and customer service sucks.  Does this sound like an opportunity?

And, while all this technological evolution has been going on in the TV business there are whole other industries that use the same technology base as TV but have heretofore had no connection to the TV business.  The key industry for the purposes of our discussion is the computer business.  The computer business bumped along for years with only the most marginal connection to TV.  The studios that make the TV shows figured out early that they could sex up their shows by putting a bunch of computers in them.  That was pretty much as much of a connection as there was for a long time.  Then the computer business started churning out small inexpensive machines that used a GUI, a Graphical User Interface.  The display used as a computer screen is a CRT, essentially a souped up TV set.  And at some point it became apparent that the process used to generate the "Graphical" on a computer could be used to produce images for purely entertainment purposes.  And this observation is the foundation of the now massive computer games industry.  Computers became adept at creating and manipulating images and, for that matter, sound.  So computers could be used in the production stages of making TV shows.  Interesting but not revolutionary.

But the computer industry also spent decades getting better and better at hooking computers together in networks.  The original "long haul" computer networks (akin to the old city to city cable system used behind the scenes by TV networks) were pathetically slow.  But they kept getting faster.  And over decades the technology for linking literally billions of computers together, what we now know as the Internet, was developed and implemented.  And then there was a technological breakthrough.  Long haul fiber optic cables were developed.  These cables had vastly more capacity than the old long haul computer network equipment.  They were also simpler and cheaper to operate.  Soon they had more capacity than the city to city cable system TV was using.  They even had more capacity than satellite TV links.  It was now possible to send vast amounts of data from one computer to another anywhere in the world.  Sending a live TV signal from one place to the other went from being expensive and requiring a bunch of specialized equipment and expertise to being no big deal.

In the early days TV sets were manufactured in far greater numbers than computer displays so most CRTs were manufactured to meet TV specifications not computer specifications.  But in the '80s that changed.  And the computer CRTs were better.  You could slot in a computer grade CRT in to replace a TV screen but you couldn't slot a TV grade CRT in to replace a computer screen.  So manufacturers started making all computer grade CRTs and using the crappy ones to support the TV market.  And the computer grade CRTs kept getting better and better as computer users demanded higher and higher resolution.  So the performance gulf between a computer grade CRT and a TV grade one continued to grow.  And the market for computer grade CRTs grew at a faster rate than the market for TV grade ones.  At some point all TV grade CRT manufacturing shut down.

Then the "flat screen" revolution happened.  Technology was developed to create a flat thin computer display.  This was a massive improvement over the old CRT, a bulky device that had to extend quite a distance behind the screen.  And the inside of this big device had to be kept in a continuous vacuum.  So the whole thing had to be strong enough so it wouldn't implode.  And that meant it had to be heavy.  As soon as flat screens of sufficiently high quality and sufficiently low price became available the CRT market collapsed.  And remember, all this flat screen technology, even in the early days, had all the capabilities necessary to be used as a screen for a TV.

In fact, remember the whole "compatible" color discussion above.  Compatibility has always been very important in TV.  None of the new stuff can obsolete the old stuff to the point where the old stuff stops working.  So the quality of the TV experience was frozen at the level attainable in the early '70s.  This was definitely not true in the computer business.  Ways were found to introduce bigger, better, faster, displays that did not obsolete the old ones to the point that the old ones would stop working.  So computers kept getting better and better while, for the most part, TVs stayed the same.

This impasse on the TV side was finally broken by the "high definition TV" war.  The Japanese had pretty much taken over the manufacture of CRTS both for TVs and for computers.  At some point they became impatient with the fact that TVs were frozen while computer displays were moving ahead.  And they saw an opportunity to squeeze the modest amount of non-Japanese CRT manufacturing left completely out of business.  So they came up with a new specification for a high definition TV.  They said they would roll it out in Japan and work to roll it out in the rest of the world.  And at this time there were several competing TV standards.  While a computer screen could be sold anywhere in the world because there was only one standard, several different TV models had to be made, each set up to work within the standards of each market.  So a single world wide high definition TV standard had a lot going for it from the Japanese perspective.

This initiative scared the bejesus out of the U.S. electronics industry.  U.S. manufacturers had once dominated the market the way the Japanese now did.  If the Japanese succeeded then it looked like it was over forever for U.S. manufacturers.  So they went to work.  Some of them noticed that the Japanese standard was essentially a souped up version of the old TV standard.  In short hand it was an "analog" standard.  But the computer business, still dominated by U.S. players like Microsoft, used what was short handed as "digital" standards.  And remember these digital standards had permitted the flexibility necessary for allowing new computer displays to get better while allowing the old ones to keep working.  So coming up with a "digital" high definition specification was proposed.  The immediate question was "could it be made to work at a reasonable price"?  With the computer display business as a foundation the answer was "yes".  The next question was "could it be made to fit broadly within the current system"?  Here there were problems.

Originally the amount of bandwidth necessary to get things to fit seemed excessive.  Then someone suggested compression.  This is a mathematical technique for shrinking the amount of data it takes to represent an image.  There are lots of blobs in a typical TV picture where every "pixel" is the same.  Why not send the pixel value along once then add instructions for where to put it.  Compression was quickly found to solve the bandwidth problem.  It was easily shown that TV pictures could be compressed enough so that the new digital high definition transmission would take up the same amount of bandwidth as the old analog TV channels.  This meant that some old "analog" channels could be flipped into new "digital" channels without having to change anything else.  Then it came down to cost and feasibility.  Could this new much more complex equipment be built and could it be built for a reasonable price.  As we now know, the answers to these questions turned out to be "yes". We have completed the transition of broadcast TV from "analog" to "digital" and from "standard definition" to "High definition".  But it was done in such a way as to leave the old "TV" system pretty much in place.

And that's the end of the history lesson.  To recapitulate, we have a "TV" system that looks pretty much like it has for many decades.  Oh, we now have lots more channels and we have high definition but it is pretty much the same system.  This  is ridiculous.  We could do a much better job of it.  But we are locked into the current system.  Or are we?  Powerful forces like things as they are.  The networks like it.  The local TV stations like it.  The cable companies like it.  And it turns out a lot of cable channels like ESPN like it.  But there are some cracks starting to appear in the system.  The most obvious is You Tube.  You can download vast quantities of video from You Tube.  And, from a technical point of view, You Tube videos are the equal of anything you can get on TV.  So You Tube could completely replace TV if all we have to worry about are technical issues.  More original content is uploaded to You Tube in a day than any single person could watch in a lifetime.  But most of it is crap.  So, while You Tube shows that there is another way, in its current form it does not represent a threat to the "TV" system.  The "TV" system consistently delivers higher quality content.  So, by itself, You Tube is not enough to do TV in.  Fortunately, there is more out there than just You Tube.

Remember HBO?  Their business model is "deliver premium content at an affordable price premium".  The most obvious company to follow this model but in a non-TV way is Netflix.  They are using the same business model.  They just replace the "TV" delivery system with the "Internet download" delivery system.  In the same way that HBO made a splash with shows like "Sex and the City" and "The Sopranos", Netflix has made a splash with "House of Cards" and "Orange is the New Black".  They have been successful enough with this model to attract competition.  Amazon is trying to do the same thing with there  "Prime" service.  They have rolled out "Alpha House" and other shows.  And guess who is also joining the "streaming" set?  HBO!  HBO has announced that they are going to make all their content (current and historical) available as a web based streaming service called "HBO Go".

The success of Netflix shows that an alternative to the current "TV" delivery system can be successful from a business perspective.  But can we go "all the way" to completely replacing the "TV" system?  If it could be pulled off it would be another "disruptive technology" success.  Disruptive technology succeeds by meeting an old need in a new way that is very damaging to the "old way" companies.  For this to be possible there must be weaknesses and inadequacies in how the "old way" companies do business.  It turned out that there were certainly weaknesses and inadequacies in the music business.  Is the same true for the "TV" business?  Well let's take a high level look at the pieces.

TV shows are made by studios, networks and other content providers.  The digital revolution has already swept over the production operations of these organizations and left them largely unchanged.  The tricks and tools are cooler but the process is pretty much the same.  The process at its best is driven by creative people and there is no technological replacement for creative people.  Content providers want to be paid for their work but they pretty much don't care who pays as long as the check is big enough.  They are just as happy to cash a Netflix check as they are to cash an NBC check.  And that's a problem for the down stream players.

The next step is the aggregators, the people who purchase the shows, collect them together, and send them along.  Currently these are people like the aforementioned NBC and its old line network brethren like ABC.  But they are also, intermediate aged players like A&E or USA.  And the list extends right down to the newest cable channel on the block.  These aggregators then do deals with the cable companies like Comcast.  Then (if you have bought the right cable package) the show is available to you the viewer on your TV set.  But in some cases there is another level that still exists but we have largely forgotten about, the local "broadcast" TV stations.  Fare provided by the old line networks like NBC doesn't go straight to Comcast.  Instead the local station pretends to broadcast it and Comcast pretends to pick it up "off the air" and send it along to your home over its local cable system.

Most people have forgotten but local TV stations still actually broadcast their signal.  You can buy the digital equivalent of the old rabbit ear antenna for about $50 and pick their signal up for free, at least theoretically.  In principal you can sever your connection to the likes of Comcast (or whoever your local cable provider is). And, other than the $50 up front cost, it's free.  But just as in the old CATV days it is sometimes hard to pick up a good signal and you are limited to the local TV stations that are nearby and not on the other side of a hill or other obstruction.  And this is a problem for the old line "TV" system.  If local TV stations stopped broadcasting they would save a lot of money.  Transmitters soak up a lot of electricity and keeping a TV tower in good repair is not cheap either.  And, as long as they maintained their connection to the cable company, most people would not notice if they stopped broadcasting because very few people actually view local station content by picking it out of the air.  So why not just stop broadcasting?

Because, due to the traditional "broadcast" nature of their business a local station is granted an exclusive license on network content for their broadcast area.  What this means in practical terms is that the cable company pays a fee, a rather hefty fee, for the right to use the signal of the local TV station.  And there is a federal "must carry" law that requires cable operators to make a deal with all the local broadcast TV stations.  This rather tenuous legal foundation for all this nonsense is what guarantees a large chunk of the local station's revenue.  And that revenue stream can easily be the difference between a profitable operation and one that runs at a loss.  So for local stations it is imperative that the current system remain in place.  It would be easier and cheaper for Comcast to pick the NBC feed off the satellite just like they do with A&E but current law requires them to jump through these unnecessary hoops that benefit the local stations.  Nobody cares that we the viewer don't see any benefit.

And remember how the local stations used to provide a lot of local content.  Well, since then most of that local content has disappeared.  There are no local kids shows. And if you want to see old movies you'll have to go to one of the cable channels that specialize in that sort of thing.  Most of what they broadcast today is network content or syndicated shows provided by one or another of the usual cast of content providers.  There are two areas where local stations are still very active.  That is news and sports.  College and professional teams used to do deals with local stations to carry non-network games.  And most games fell into this category.  But now pretty much every pro game is broadcast by one network or another.  So if the game shows up on a local station's broadcast then it's because the station has the rights through one network affiliation or another.  And the same thing is rapidly overtaking college sports.  The big football conferences are all forming "sports channels" that specialize in the games of the schools that are members of the conference.  The era when a local TV station could do a stand alone deal with a local college to broadcast some or all of its games is rapidly coming to a close.

That leaves news.  Local stations broadcast a lot of news.  But much of it is repetitive.  It is common to have a 90 minute block of local news in the evening.  But this mostly consists of the same thirty minutes of content repeated three times to accommodate the varied schedules of viewers.  And regional "all news channels" are emerging.  There is one in my area that covers my state (Washington) and a couple of adjacent states.  There is a lot of repetition here but they seem to have plenty of time to cover all the news for the entire region at least as thoroughly and often more thoroughly that the local stations do.  This is already a cable channel.  It is not broadcast over the air.  I see these kinds of operations as a viable replacement for the news operations of local stations.

So local stations seem completely unnecessary.  But cable operators are safe, right?  Well, you remember how everybody hates their cable operator?  And remember the part about cable operators having to compensate local broadcast channels.  Well, this whole "compensate" thing is true up and down the cable lineup.  It is most obvious with premium channels like HBO.  But, with the exception of the religion channels and the shopping channels the cable companies pay for everything.  That's why bundling is so important to them.  Do you like sports?  How about hunting and fishing stuff, or science stuff, or history stuff, or geography stuff, or nature stuff, or reality shows, or game shows?  Somewhere in that list is at least one thing you don't like and probably several things you would just as soon do without.  But you are subsidizing it, all of it.  Cable operators bundle things together so that you will be forced to get a lot of things you don't like or don't care about in order to get a few things you like.  You end up subsidizing everything in the bundle whether you like it or not.

You don't pay a lot to subsidize any one channel.  But you subsidize a lot of channels and it adds up.  And, since the cable companies get money for carrying them, pretty much everyone gets the religion channels and the shopping channels, even though most viewers would rather do without one or both of those categories.  I doubt a typical viewer watches content from even 10% of the channels offered.  They would much rather get a much smaller list of channels consisting of only the ones they are actually interested in.  But they are not given this "a la carte" option.  Neither the cable companies nor the studios want to take the chance that "a la carte" will translate to "less money for me".  So here you have a situation where the general public wants a la carte by a vast margin but the cable industry for their own reasons does not want to offer it to them.  So, if Internet streaming could offer viewers an a la carte experience especially if it turned out to be cheaper than the current cable model then, assuming it worked well, people would flock to it.

And, as I said, we are moving toward it.  We are seeing high quality original content being offered by Netflix, Amazon, HBO (soon) and others.  That's the good news.  But it is not currently possible to duplicate the cable experience with Internet streaming.  You can 't get old line network content (NBC, etc.) first run on the web because web access to this content has been blocked so far.  A company called Aereo thought they had figured out pull this off.  Technologically, it's a piece of cake.  The problems are legal.  They lost their case in the U.S. Supreme Court recently and just filed for bankruptcy.  It may be possible to get around the legal obstacles that brought Aereo down but no one has figured out how yet.

I think I have convinced you that there are no technical problems left stopping the creation of an alternative to the current "TV" system.  So the problems lie elsewhere.  And you may have already figured out one of the big ones.  I have listed Netflix, Amazon, and HBO as content sources.  I haven't talked about others like Hulu that offer access to TV content from the old line networks.  But it is available on delay and not everything is available.  (And CBS does not make its shows available to Hulu.  You have to go somewhere else to find them.)  Hulu is only the most well known site providing streaming access to "TV" content.  There are others.  And that's a problem.  For all that we dislike cable companies, they are a "one stop shopping" provider.

I can get my local stations, my cable stations (like A&E, USA, etc.) my "free" sports channels like ESPN, my premium channels like HBO, and on and on and on, all from the same cable company.  I may have to pay a lot of money to get them all.  But once I hand a chunk of change over to the cable company once a month I am all set.  To try to do this on the web I have to pay a fee to Hulu (to get premium content).  I then have to pay another fee to Nerflix, and another fee to Amazon, and another fee to HBOGo, etc.  Its a lot of money.  It's also the opposite of "one stop shopping".  Trying to put together a cable-like package right now may end up costing more than cable.  And I can't just change the channel.  I have to switch from this application (or web site) to that application to the other web site.  That's the opposite of what made the original CATV experience so popular.  So we're not there yet.

But I think we will eventually get there.  The first thing I expect to go is the "broadcast" operations of local TV stations.  The FCC is about to auction a big chunk of radio spectrum.  Everybody expects it to go for fantastic amounts of money.  The spectrum will go to open up things up for smart phones and other mobile devices.  And people definitely want to be able to "watch TV" on their smart phone or tablet while they are out and about.  If we shut down the broadcast part of local TV stations then this will free up another big chunk of radio spectrum.  No one thinks we are at the end of the growth curve for mobile devices so someone will be willing to pay fantastic amounts of additional money for this additional spectrum if and when it becomes available.  Frankly, the only thing that is keeping the local stations broadcasting is their concern that this would fatally weaken their negotiating position with the cable companies.  Maybe they can be bought off with a big limp sum payment.

But I think that local TV stations are already in trouble even if they can keep things as they now are.  I think the business climate has turned against them.  Advertisers have plenty of options and I think it is harder and harder for the local stations to deliver eyeballs efficiently.  If networks could dump them and deal directly with the cable companies it would save them a lot of money and hassle so they would be willing to throw their local "partners" overboard if they thought it would help their bottom line enough.  So on one side you have local TV stations.  They are heavily wired into the political system at the local and state level but depend on their network partners to handle things at the national level.  If that support at the national level dries up they are in big trouble.  And the critical decisions in all this are made at the national level.  On the other side you have the cable companies.  Getting rid of the local stations eliminates a bunch of headaches and, assuming they can get a better deal directly from the networks, it saves them money.  And the mobile types really want the spectrum.  They are not currently making a push because they are busy dickering for the spectrum now coming on the market, spectrum that was freed up by the transition for analog to digital TV.  They also believe that if they got in a fight they would lose.  It is bad idea to make powerful people mad at you and then not get what you are fighting for.  But they will have digested the new spectrum within a couple of years.  And if the political position of the local stations continues to weaken they may decide they can win the fight.  At that point it will be "go in with all guns blazing".

So I see local TV stations first losing the over the air part of their business then just losing.  And local TV stations are a key component of the "TV" system.  The other, and currently bigger component, is the cable operators.  They are still very powerful because they are very profitable and they have leveraged their money and the favors they can do for politicians.  Remember, Comcast, for instance, owns both NBC and MSNBC.  They can be very nasty or very nice to politicians who are out of favor or in favor.  I think they are mostly not that blatant.  Instead they have a giant lobbying operation and contribute generously to political campaigns.  But there is no doubt that they are heavyweight players in D.C.

They will fiercely defend their turf.  But ultimately they can be done in in the same way the music industry was done in.  There is a large pool of potential customers who are dying to get out from under their thumbs.  And there is lots of money that could be stripped out of their operation.  A "lean mean" Internet operation has lots of ways to undercut them on price and beat them on service, all at the same time.  No one has figured it out yet.  The Hulu people tried to be the single source for all things television, as long as it was second run.  They were done in by squabbling among the executives that run the various companies involved.  This opened the door to people like Netflix and Amazon.  But none of these new players look like they have cracked the riddle of how to provide a cable-like "one stop shopping" experience.  But this is not a technology problem.  It's a political problem.  Theoretically, it is also a legal problem.  But, with the right politics, the law can be changed.  I believe this problem too will be solved.  And I think it will be solved in less than 25 years.