That’s our debate
I just got an email pitch from Congressional Quarterly trying to sell a service called reClip, which will repackage the floor debate in Congress. The pitch:
Dear Friend,When you need to communicate a congressional member’s position on a particular issue or bill in your stories, nothing is as effective as showing them in action during floor debate.
With reClip, you can access gavel-to-gavel video coverage of congressional floor debate, pinpoint video clips of members and post those clips directly to news stories on your Web site.
Plus, with customized e-mail alerts, you’ll be notified when a member has spoken on the floor about a specific subject area.
Designed specifically for the needs of media clients, reClip enables you to:
* Post floor debate video featuring Members of Congress directly to your story.
* Monitor members’ floor debate with custom e-mail alerts.
* Manage your selected clips with simple video editing tools.
* Maintain an archive of your selected video clips.
That really pissed me off — not at CQ (hey, if they go to the effort and can sell it, good on them) but at Congress, which should be doing this anyway. Just as with the presidential debates, that democratic discussion should belong to the people and to truly give it to us, Congress should be doing everything CQ is doing — for free.
Tags: sunshine
May 22nd, 2007 at 11:23 am
Well, give them TIME, Jeff…after all, the Dems have only had the wheel for a few months now…and they’re not exactly picking up a good head of steam, what with the republican remnant trying to maintain their current highwire act.
Maybe we should all email Nancy Pelosi about this. She’s been pitching questions on ‘what do we want to see?’ to Yahoo for a few days now… This’d be a pretty good example.
May 22nd, 2007 at 12:29 pm
Jeff, I don’t see it the way you do.
The government should make all information free. Equal access for all.
But the government should not be in the business of providing services that compete with private enterprise.
In other words, the government should not be creating a clipping service. They just make the information easily available to any company that wants to create a service around the available information, documents, video, what not.
The government has no business setting up services that compete with private enterprise.
May 22nd, 2007 at 1:09 pm
I agree with Howard. I don’t my tax dollars spent making a clipping service for bloggers. How about more money on rebuilding dying cities or helping create jobs? Less money for the intellectual elite who make a living being snarky.
May 22nd, 2007 at 2:34 pm
Howard and Cooler are right. If Congress does this for us “for free” it will cost us ten times as much as just buying the clips we want from a private service like CQ. In fact, most of the services that our government provides to us “for free” can be divided into one of two categories: those that people want, which should be provided by the private sector, and those that no one wants, which should not be provided at all.
May 22nd, 2007 at 5:17 pm
I 5th that… Gov’t would screw it up and make me download some spyware video player… What you’re describing is a media company and the gov’t is not a media company.
May 22nd, 2007 at 6:10 pm
What I’d like to see, just for starters, is an immediate repeal to the ban on recording devices and cameras in the Senate chamber. I was run out of there yesterday for breaking a half-dozen rules … no cell-phone (even turned off), no recording device (ditto), no laptop (even in bag), no water … no nothing except a pen and paper. No wonder there were no journalists sitting in the Press Gallery, while Jeff Sessions rambled on to an audience of Jim Bunning, some tourists in the rafters, and 75 empty wooden chairs (at least from my vantage point).
C-Span was a great breakthrough 25 years ago, but it’s utterly inadequate now. There should be cameras all over those rooms, and the viewing chambers should be filled with people actually enthusiastic about quietly watching (and recording) the facade of democratic debate, while the reporters continue chasing down stories in the corridors and keeping their eye on the same TV monitors we can watch in Los Angeles.
May 23rd, 2007 at 11:22 am
[...] Jeff Jarvis, speaking about CQ’s reClip’s thinks it’s government dropping the ball. Public debate is their responsibility. [...]
May 23rd, 2007 at 2:23 pm
This is complete bullshit. That “coverage” belongs to us. They (politicians) already jsut sit there in Washington on their fat asses waiting for the PAC checks to arrive so they can continue to NEVER respond to their constituents for another billion years, smirking behind their ludicrous firewalls of unaccountability and those armies of lobbyista.
The tiniest of crumbs they can throw our way are some g-damn frames of floor video.
Now I’m just plain hoppin’ mad….
May 23rd, 2007 at 2:59 pm
[...] post in full is here. Times like this, we need to remind ourselves that we are now The Media. Sphere [...]
May 23rd, 2007 at 8:50 pm
Jeff,
Its actaully worse than you think. My company Voxant just spent 8 months getting our accreditation to cover the House and Senate TV galleries. We are thinking of doing the much the same as CQ. Not only is Congress not doing this, the process makes it exceedingly painful for anyone else to. First, accredited members are prohibited from allowing these clips to be used by lobbyists, PACs, campaigns, or in any way that shows member in anything other than a positive light. You have to be a “news organization” and make most of your money that way, and you have to be approved by the gallery “accreditation committee”, which may or may not eventually get around to it…
Then… you need to put in a lot of expensive equipment or join one of the two media pools. The system is designed to protect incumbents from having any of their sometimes inane remarks used against them. Why every committee hearing and debate isn’t webcast by shrouded by the tradition and politics of hidebound institutions.
If its any consolation, Speaker Pelosi seems to be taking a more active and open approach to all of this… so its not inconceivable that this may all change with the new control.
jeff
May 23rd, 2007 at 11:14 pm
Thank you Jeff Crigler for the update.