My column this week:
My mixed feelings come into play because Rosen, a longtime fixture on the LGBT scene, has come to represent the worst of that peculiar and annoying segment of the pundit-lobbyist class for whom you can’t really understand why they’ve attained the high position they have in that milieu.
Hilary Rosen
After all, Rosen was a catastrophe at the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the lobbying group for the nation’s largest record companies. As head of that group from 1987-2003, it was under her watch that the recording industry began its disastrous policy of taking file sharers to court—also known as suing the pants off your future customers.
She and the rest of the RIAA stubbornly held to their outdated model whereby record companies screwed new artists, and made tons of money by forcing everyone to purchase overpriced CDs when all of us really just wanted one or two songs off each album. The RIAA under her watch also refused to embrace alternative technologies for distributing music, a void that Apple and Amazon stepped in to fill while the RIAA was concentrating on making criminals of their potential customer base.
From there Rosen went on to such illustrious jobs as representing British Petroleum after the Gulf oil spill. In other words, if you’re looking for someone who understands the plight of America’s everywoman, Rosen is a terrible choice because her perspective appears to be a lot closer to the Romneys than she would likely admit. Yet she still manages time-after-time to get gigs as an allegedly progressive pundit, a job she still can’t manage to get right despite its ridiculously low bar for being considered a success.
You can read the rest of it here.
