After his introductory remarks, Blankley went into details about yesterday’s events with the White House Press Corps and the attempt to exclude Fox News from a pool interview. If he were a WH press person, he says he would be worried about the rest of the press refusing to go along with that.

Blankley has also been discussing the media fawning over Obama since the last election and points out that journalists used to hold an adversarial situation with elected officials as sacred.

Blankley also discusses how scrutiny of the government is proceeding via the development of various digital platforms. He discusses how the public not knowing what the government was doing back when he was Gingrich’s press guy made educating the public tougher. Blankley mentions how helpful the openness of the digital process is and how the government wants to regulate it.

However, he says it will be an interesting alliance between the Left and the Right in defending the free process and freedom on the Internet. (He prefaced that statement by saying the Left got an early start ahead of the Right in digital platforms.)

Blankley then recounted a history of the economy and cyclical levels of government intervention in the market since the Civil War and tied it into the recent economic situation including the deficit. He also mentioned how Perot (and later his old boss Gingrich) increased public awareness of the deficit. Blankley also mentioned that the deficit is an issue that cuts across partisan lines now for the first time in the history of polling – precisely at the moment that Obama is attempting to increase deficit spending with health care reform.

Blankley says there has been a lot of study recently of ethics in the corporate boardrooms. He says he has been calling for looking at the ethical restraints (not just laws or the Constitution) that need to be placed on the federal government when it starts trying to get involved in the free market. His first example is the firing of the CEO of GM by some guy at Treasury before the government had nationalized GM. Another example he puts forth from a banker is the pressure from regulators on the banks to do things the regulators don’t have control over or face consequences in the areas the regulators do have power over. Blankley thinks his ethics idea is a powerful way to push back at government involvement in the free market.

I was most interested in the remarks about how a synergy of both conservatives and liberals concerned about the freedom of the Internet will help cut down attempts on government regulation.

Related posts:

1. Jonah Goldberg on the evolution of media
2. New Media Panel
3. Trevor Loudon of New Zeal on Van Jones