Obama: Government should be transparent

Um, isn't this post about transparency in government, not partisan politics?

Andy, as to being a legitimate news source, the only thing I need to point to is the First Amendment. But it's worth noting, we've also been recognized officially as a legitimate news source by the New York Newspaper Publishers' Association. To whatever opinion you, or any member of the city government, has to the tone or nature of any of the content, whether produced by paid staff or comments from users, is 100 percent irrelevant under the law and in principle. The other fallacy of that objection is the Daily's own comments. If comments here delegitimize The Batavian, they also delegitimize the Daily. Also, currently, Andy, we have four local businesses advertising on the site, with more coming. You obviously haven't looked very hard. Yes, that's about half as many as the Daily online, and the Daily as a business in this community had about a 100 year head start on us, so we're doing fine in that regard so far. The idea that local businesses wouldn't want to advertise here is ludicrous. The questions they ask are, will my ad be effective for the money? Am I reaching the local audience I want to reach? And on The Batavian, the answer is clearly yes. Advertisers want results, and we can deliver results at a price they can afford. You don't think we don't have an engaged, valuable audience? Just look at how many votes our polls get in one day compared to the Daily's polls, which are generally up more than a week; or, how many more comments we get -- often we get more comments on a single post than the Daily gets in a week. Finally, as to traffic, Russ -- our traffic right now is about double what the Daily's traffic. They can't offer advertisers nearly the local online exposure we can, and aren't even trying to make those promises. WBTA is much closer to us in traffic, but for online news in Genesee County, we're the market leader right now. The Daily has significant marketing power through its print circulation, so the Daily online could still overtake us, but on the other hand, the more they market their site, the more it helps The Batavian because it helps generate interest in online news. I'm pretty darn optimistic about our future. And within the next week, maybe even today, we're going to launch something new that local businesses are going to love and it takes what we can deliver to businesses to a whole new level -- the Daily won't even be able to come close to matching its value, at least not any time soon. And we have other enhancements coming to the site aimed at creating even more value for advertisers. We've got a lot of good ideas coming, so keep an eye out for changes.

BTW: On the First Amendment issue, consider the type of press the Founders intended to protect. It had no relation to today's so-called professional media. The idea of objective reporting, of factual reporting was completely unknown at the time. The New Yorker recently published an interesting piece on the 19th Century press.

“The Business of Printing has chiefly to do with Men’s Opinions,” Benjamin Franklin wrote, in his “Apology for Printers,” in 1731, after he started printing the Pennsylvania Gazette, in Philadelphia. (Franklin proposed printing a one-size-fits-all “Apology” annually, to save himself the labor of apologizing every time he offended someone.) Franklin’s job, as he saw it, wasn’t to find out facts. It was to publish a sufficient range of opinion: “Printers are educated in the Belief, that when Men differ in Opinion, both Sides ought equally to have the Advantage of being heard by the Publick; and that when Truth and Error have fair Play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter.”

....

This charge wasn’t entirely without foundation. Early American newspapers tend to look like one long and uninterrupted invective, a ragged fleet of dung barges. In a way, they were. Plenty of that nose thumbing was mere gimmickry and gambolling. Some of it was capricious, and much of it was just plain malicious. But much of it was more. All that invective, taken together, really does add up to a long and revolutionary argument against tyranny, against arbitrary authority—against, that is, the rule of men above law.

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Thomas Jefferson was inaugurated on March 4, 1801, the day after the Sedition Act expired. In his Inaugural Address, Jefferson talked about “the contest of opinion,” a contest waged, in his lifetime, in the pages of the newspaper. Without partisan and even scurrilous printers pushing the limits of a free press in the seventeen-nineties, Marcus Daniel argues, the legitimacy of a loyal opposition never would have been established and the new nation, with its vigorous and democratizing political culture, might never have found its feet. Soon after Jefferson came to power, he, like Adams, developed doubts about the unbounded liberty of the press. Printers, Jefferson complained, just days after his election, “live by the zeal they can kindle, and the schisms they can create.” In his second Inaugural Address, Jefferson ranted against printers who had assaulted him with “the artillery of the press,” warning that he had given some thought to prosecuting them. During his beleaguered second term, Jefferson suggested that newspapers ought to be divided into four sections: Truths, Probabilities, Possibilities, and Lies.

So, to whatever degree The Batavian might be out of step with most of the 20th Century version of journalism, it clearly fits the definition of Press as understood by the Founders -- a free forum of opinion, improved upon by staff reporting and community contributions. But the other point that needs to be made -- the need for open government isn't just about The Batavian. It's about WBTA and the Daily News as well.