[mechanical_fish]

Angling for the perfect five-second sound bite makes all debate more inane, but the debate about copyright is a particularly awful case: most of those TV cameras are owned by major media companies that have an axe to grind.

It's not a coincidence that the media industries have a degree of political influence that's out of proportion to their size. If you're a politician, it's good to avoid irritating major media corporations, and it's even better to have them on your side.

This is why Larry Lessig eventually gave up on trying to make his arguments more eloquent and went into the corruption-fighting business. Eloquence is great, but it doesn't do much good when the fix is in.