The Dish

For a small monthly fee, Aereo makes broadcast TV available online (previous Dish coverage here). The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the appeal of major broadcast networks that object to Aereo’s services.  Michael Phillips explains why the case “may determine the future of television”:

To carry network programming, cable and satellite companies normally pay what are known as “retransmission consent fees,” which have come to make up an ever-greater portion of the networks’ revenue. CBS, for instance, pulled its channels from Time Warner Cable last fall while negotiating higher fees. However, Aereo, using a novel interpretation of copyright law, argues that the complex mechanics of its service mean that it doesn’t have to pay.

Under the Copyright Act, you need permission—typically an expensive license—from a copyright holder to show, say, a television program to a large number of people. But the act doesn‘t prohibit showing it “privately” to “a normal circle of family” or “social acquaintances.” This is why you can host a Super Bowl party in your living room without paying an additional fee to whichever network is broadcasting it, or worrying that a lawyer in a power suit will bust down your front door. Because each antenna is assigned to a single subscriber, Aereo claims that it is merely facilitating the sort of individual, private viewership that is allowed by the Copyright Act. …

The putative question before the Supreme Court is whether Aereo is violating the Copyright Act by putting on “public performances” without appropriate licensing. But the Court’s decision to hear the case may signal some sympathy for the networks’ argument that Aereo poses an existential threat to their industry. Out of some ten thousand petitions that the Court receives each year, it chooses seventy-five or so cases to review. Many of these cases earn the Court’s attention because of contradictory rulings between lower courts. As Aereo’s lawyers have emphasized, however, the broadcast industry has pursued its claims against the company in five cases and in three states, and every court that has reached a decision so far has sided with Aereo. This suggests that the Supreme Court has some other rationale for taking the Aereo case. It seems possible that the Court is willing to consider the networks’ argument that Aereo is so dangerous to the broadcasting industry that a review of the matter is of “national importance.”

Peter Hessler reflects on last week’s constitutional referendum:

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the 97.7-per-cent approval rate is that there is no overt evidence of widespread fraud. But this is why voting is only a small part of what constitutes a democracy; since the revolution, Egypt has held seven fraud-free national votes, and yet the country still doesn’t have a single government official who was elected to his position democratically. (Everybody voted into national office has been subsequently removed by coup or court decision, and local governments have yet to hold elections.) …

The most heartening thing about the referendum, though, was the relative lack of violence. Egypt won’t go the way of Syria—there’s too much power in the Army and the police, and too little support for the Brotherhood. And Egyptians have a social cohesiveness that allows them to survive despite a deeply dysfunctional government. Throughout the chaos of the past three years, even a big city like Cairo has remained remarkably safe and functional. There are signs that terrorist activity is expanding, but, thus far, the attacks have been focussed on the police, the Army, and other government institutions, rather than on the public. At five o’clock in the morning of the first day of the referendum, a bomb exploded in front of a Cairo court; the façade was damaged, but there were no injuries. The attack was clearly a statement—but a very different statement than would have been made by a midday bomb at a crowded polling station.

Marc Lynch considers what a constitution means for a country in Egypt’s situation:

The primary value of a constitution in an unsettled political arena like that of Egypt is to provide predictability through stable, legitimate rules. Democratic politics rest upon the guarantee that all sides understand and agree upon these rules of the game: Without such predictability, politics is no more than an endless game of Calvinball, with powerful players changing the rules at a moment’s notice to suit their interests. Nobody knows from one day to the next whether their political activity, journalistic investigations, protest against injustice, or organizational membership will be a demonstration of democratic commitment or evidence of terrorism. This debilitating uncertainty helps to fuel polarization and dangerously raises the stakes of political conflict. …

The July military coup magnifies the intensity of this problem, however, and may have made it almost impossible to overcome. The precedent has now been firmly established that the military will step in if it does not approve of the direction in which politics is heading. No promises to avoid future such interventions can possibly be made credible, regardless of what the constitution says. This effect will take decades to wear off, which means that the pathologies of uncertainty, unaccountability and unpredictability will continue to afflict Egyptian politics. Political actors will constantly have to be looking over their shoulders in fear of a military overthrow, which will be a defining context of their strategies and actions.

Michael Albertus and Victor Menaldo imagine the glass half full:

A new democracy can … jettison or overhaul a constitution inherited from the military or outgoing autocratic elites. Since 1950, 31 percent (a total of 19) of the countries that democratized with autocratic constitutions went on to shed their inherited constitutions and replace them with new social contracts. … This means that if the Egyptian government is to represent all of its people, there must be another future phase of reform. To become a more perfect democracy, Egypt’s next political vanguard will have to wage a different type of revolution, one dedicated to institutional reform. While some of these battles may still be waged in Tahrir Square, many of them will take place behind the scenes and involve lawyers, academics, and other members of civil society – including Islamic clerics – persuading Egypt’s politicians to themselves become the advocates of a fuller version of democracy.

Recent Dish on Egypt’s constitution here.

Caleb Hannan’s Grantland profile of inventor Essay Anne Vanderbilt took an ugly turn when Vanderbilit committed suicide, causing many to blame the suicide on Hannan, who disclosed that Dr. V was transgender. My take on editor-in-chief Bill Simmons’ apology here. Christina Kahrl addresses the cavalier way in which Hannan dealt with the outing:

We’re here because Essay Anne Vanderbilt is dead. And she’s dead because — however loath she was to admit it — she was a member of a community for whom tragedy and loss are as regular as the sunrise, a minority for whom suicide attempts outpace the national average almost 26 times over, perhaps as high as 41 percent of all trans people. And because one of her responses to the fear of being outed as a transsexual woman to some of the people in her life — when it wasn’t even clear the story was ever going to run — was to immediately start talking and thinking about attempting suicide. Again.

It was not Grantland’s job to out Essay Anne Vanderbilt, but it was done, carelessly.

Not simply with the story’s posthumous publication; that kind of casual cruelty is weekly fare visited upon transgender murder victims in newspapers across the country. No, what Hannan apparently did was worse: Upon making the unavoidable discovery that Vanderbilt’s background didn’t stand up to scrutiny, he didn’t reassure her that her gender identity wasn’t germane to the broader problems he’d uncovered with her story. Rather, he provided this tidbit to one of the investors in her company in a gratuitous “gotcha” moment that reflects how little thought he’d given the matter. Maybe it was relevant for him to inform the investor that she wasn’t a physicist and probably didn’t work on the stealth bomber and probably also wasn’t a Vanderbilt cut from the same cloth as the original Commodore. But revealing her gender identity was ultimately as dangerous as it was thoughtless.

Dreher pushes back on the rush to blame Hannan:

Is Caleb Hannan morally responsible for Dr. V’s suicide? There’s no doubt that she would be alive today if he hadn’t begun writing the piece about her. But there’s also no doubt that Dr. V was happy to cooperate with the piece as long as she could control what was going to be written. She knew that the author was a golf nut and a fanboy of her invention. She also loved passing herself off as a mysterious genius. Trouble was, she couldn’t control the story, and once the reporter started digging, he found that the mysterious Dr. V was not at all who she said she was — and that her deceptions had victims. I think Hannan can’t be blamed for this mentally ill person’s suicide. He didn’t set out to take her down. He set out to write an admiring story about a reclusive genius who invented a new golf tool that stood to greatly improve the game. He had no idea, could not possibly have had any idea, where this story was going. When he found out her ultimate secret, how could he have kept it? She was happy to lie constantly when it suited her, and to steal, and to threaten, but when the journalist unraveled all her lies, she killed herself. And this is the journalist’s fault?

Josh Levin thinks the tragedy illustrates “the dangers of privileging fact-finding and the quest for a great story over compassion and humanity”:

I believe that “Dr. V’s Magical Putter” was a story worth telling, but this was not the right way to tell it. “What began as a story about a brilliant woman with a new invention had turned into the tale of a troubled man who had invented a new life for himself,” Hannan writes after describing Dr. V’s 2008 suicide attempt, at once revealing his ignorance about trans issues and his protagonist’s utility as a fascinating narrative arc. When you reread the story knowing that Essay Anne Vanderbilt is dead, the whole thing feels cold-hearted. … I don’t believe that Caleb Hannan and his editors were willfully callous. This is the kind of story, though, that breeds cynicism about journalists. It is a piece of writing that treats its subject as a series of plot points rather than a person, and that seems concerned with little else aside from propelling itself toward a dramatic conclusion.

A reader sounds off:

I found this tragic story and the coverage it has received compelling from day one. I have read all three articles on Grantland and other takes on the article and have been waiting for The Dish to weigh in. As someone who has an undergrad degree in journalism – I am actually a corporate writer now – and is almost half-way to a Master’s Degree in Marriage and Family Therapy, suicide is something I have reflected upon a lot as are journalistic ethics.

First, I find it extremely unfair to try and blame Hannan for Dr. V’s suicide. This was not her first attempt at suicide and more than likely would not have been her last if she never spoke to Hannan. It’s very likely that it was only a matter of time before she was approached by someone else. She told many lies for financial gain. She was deceiving her investors. She accepted the interview because – and I am assuming here – it would further promote her product and that would make her more money. Lies have a way of being discovered, especially lies told to many people.

Was the story insensitive to Dr. V? Absolutely. The story came off as more salacious than it needed to be and her gender changing should have never been included because it is irrelevant. That being said, suicide is a personal decision that an individual makes for his or herself. One person cannot compel another person to commit suicide. Hannan is no more responsible for her suicide than is her partner who is probably kicking herself for missing the warning signs. The only person responsible for Dr. V’s suicide is Dr. V.