Broadcast

Authors: Kristian Davis Bailey and Jason Smith

On Tuesday, July 17 we attended the Federal Communication Commission’s (FCC) demonstration of their new online interface for the uploading of television broadcasters’ “public inspection files” (PIFs).  [A video of the demonstration has been archived on the FCC’s website and is available here.]

Remember how the Internet community stopped SOPA?

Come on out to Irish Whiskey this Thursday at 8pm for the official launch of the Internet Defense League (IDL), a network of people and organizations committed to defending the open Internet. The goal of IDL is to sound the alarm quickly to millions of users whenever the Internet is in peril.

At first glance, the new rule approved last month by the Federal Communications Commission requiring local television broadcasters to make public their records on political ad spending might seem revelatory. But in reality, it represents a very modest change to longstanding policy.

Freedom of Expression: Penalties for Controversial Content

In an effort to curb anti-government speech, China’s top microblogging site, Sina Weibo, implemented a points-based system that penalizes users for posting certain types of content. The site, which boasts over 300 million users, was in the news last month for censoring content on human rights activist Chen Guangcheng and has a record of complying with the Chinese government’s censorship demands.

It’s the end of an era in modern medicine. House is no more.

The Fox show House ended last week. It was entertaining, but as far as health policy is concerned, we’re not sorry to see it go. The main character (Dr. Gregory House, played by Hugh Laurie) exemplifies the kind of “cowboy doctor” too many patients have come to expect. The cowboy doctor rides in on a lab result and offers a brilliant diagnosis, saves the patient’s life, and rides off into the sunset, never to be heard from again. It’s the dominant image of heroic doctors in television. Even Hawkeye Pierce, the caring Army surgeon in M*A*S*H whose demeanor is the polar opposite of House, saw his patients in one-off interactions before sending them home or back to the front.

For most of us, though, that’s an entirely unrealistic portrait of medicine. Our interaction with doctors is usually about trying to stay healthy and avoid problems, or managing long-term, chronic diseases like diabetes, heart disease, obesity, cancer. We need doctors who will listen to us, who can explain things clearly, and who we’re comfortable telling our concerns. Chronic disease management makes for lousy TV, but in recent years it has become the dominant kind of problem doctors and patients face day to day.

That's not our only quibble with Dr. House. In addition to being a cowboy, he's not much of a diagnostician. Through the magic of scripted TV he somehow manages to stumble on the treatment that saves the patient, almost by accident. He practices what I call “spaghetti on the wall”  medicine—as in, “throw the spaghetti on the wall and see if it sticks.”  He diagnoses his patients' rare illnesses by throwing treatments at patients and seeing what happens—often causing significant harm in the process. That's just bad medicine, and it isn’t something that doctors should do lightly. To us, House isn't a hero, he's a hazard, a catastrophe waiting to happen. Blinded by his own pain, he's indifferent to the suffering he causes through his reckless, unscientific, non-evidence based treatment decisions.

But there’s one point in House’s favor: he works with a team—and that team actually talks to each other. Unfortunately, that’s as unrealistic as the rest of the show. There are only a few hospitals and medical practices (Virginia Mason, in Seattle, comes to mind, and the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota) where communication among providers is very good. In most places, the ball gets dropped between the hospital and primary care doctor and home, or even between different specialists in the same hospital.

Maybe one day TV will produce a more realistic version of medicine, but beware: it won't be the clean-cut single interactions we saw in House, or any of the other medical dramas out there. It'll be messy, and it'll be ambiguous: something a lot more like The Wire than Marcus Welby, M.D.

Our work at the Media Policy Initiative has been in support of both broadcaster transparency and advancing the idea that journalism schools can be news producers, so we couldn’t have been happier when the two ideas intersected in a piece produced by Kent State University undergraduate and

Contrary to the claims of some broadcasters, adoption of the standardized reporting form proposed by PIPAC would not raise any First Amendment concerns. Broadcasters’ concerns are based on a false belief that the mere fact of reporting requires stations to air certain types of programming. The Commission has made clear that the proposed reporting requirement is not intended to require any particular programming and would not alter broadcasters’ existing public interest requirements.

The increasing lack of racial diversity in the U.S. media landscape is becoming a hot topic and putting pressure on policy makers to (finally) pay attention.