Lots of folks are writing these days about Rupert Murdoch's recent statement that News Corp. plans to stop its newspaper stories from being indexed by Google when it throws up a more comprehensive pay wall next year. His comments came days after the American Press Institute released an intriguing report on digital business models that exposed a gap between the industry's sense of its content's value and the public's perception. Hmm, "gap" isn't exactly the right word. Make that "yawning chasm."

API and ITZBelden surveyed daily-newspaper executives in North America in August and September, reaching a total of about 7% of the publications in the U.S. and Canada. Their responses were compared with results from consumer surveys aggregated by Belden earlier this year. The comparison revealed that news execs believed their stories were more valuable and harder to replace than readers did. For example, 52% of the readers surveyed said it would be somewhat easy or very easy to find a substitute for the online content that news industry websites were providing; 68% of the executives said the opposite.

Here's the most telling table, in my opinion -- it shows just how slim the chances are that readers who can no longer find the content they want on a newspaper's website will migrate to the paper's print edition:

Granted, the API study didn't seem to address the central issue posed by pay walls: how much, if anything, would people be willing to pay to read a story? But it did say this about the fees that newspapers charge for subscriptions to their websites:

"Respondents report a wide range of online subscription charges (from $1 to $27.50 a month), yet they report surprisingly uniform levels of uptake on subscriptions, typically 1 percent to 3 percent of print circulation -- regardless of price."

In other words, the vast majority of readers don't like the subscription model, regardless of how cheap it might be. Micropayments, anyone?

(Thanks to the Center for Media Research for putting the API report on my radar screen.)

-- Jon Healey

New FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, fresh off his speech to a wireless industry conference in San Diego, stopped by the Times this afternoon to talk to the editorial board and several members of the news staff about broadband policy, Net neutrality, media ownership and other items on the commission's plate. He was, shall we say, circumspect. At this point, almost every issue seems to boil down to a process question for Genachowski, who was far less willing than the two previous chairmen (interim and otherwise) to suggest what policies he'd like the commission to adopt. But hey, it's early yet -- he's been on the job for barely three months.

Here's the entire conversation, which lasted about 55 minutes. Many of the questions were asked by me, with Joe Flint chiming in on media consolidation and decency regulation, Jim Granelli on wireless Net neutrality, John Corrigan on the new chairman's view of his predecessors, David Sarno on wireless billing issues and Mark Milian on Google Voice:

The full session

And here are links to segments devoted to specific topics:

The DTV transition

Media ownership and consolidation

His predecessors at the FCC

Net neutrality

Wireless Net neutrality

Wireless broadband

Decency rules beyond broadcast TV

Wireless billing outrages

The Google Voice inquiry

Promoting broadband access, investment and adoption

-- Jon Healey

Matthew Continetti, associate editor of the Weekly Standard, gets the Op-Ed page rolling this morning by accusing President Obama of being organized labor's Santa Claus. The First Community Organizer may believe that unionization helps lift workers into the middle class, Continetti writes, but the numbers don't support that argument:

Speaking of a unionized workforce, columnist Tim Rutten urges the state Senate to waive some California environmental rules to let developer Ed Roski Jr. build a football stadium in the City of Industry. Why?

Alllll-righty then. Closing out the page, Anna Husarska, senior policy advisor at the International Rescue Committee, laments the "huge human cost" of the Taliban's operations in Pakistan's Swat Valley and the government's counteroffensive. The image above is an illustration of the psychic toll; it's a drawing by a schoolgirl in the Swat Valley named Sheema.

On the other half of the opinion pages, the Times editorial board blasts the L.A. Department of Water and Power for the fabulous parting gifts it's planning to shower on departing chief H. David Nahai. We like how Nahai defied union leaders (the Opinion page's méchants du jour) to bring in more renewable power from outside the district, but we still don't see the need to pay him his salary for the rest of the year:

The board also says the Federal Trade Commission's new guidelines for online advertisers could put too much scrutiny on bloggers and amateur product reviewers. And it warns that the Supreme Court's review of a case involving the giant cross in California's Mojave National Preserve threatens to "blow a gaping hole" in the 1st Amendment's wall between church and state.

-- Jon Healey

Small-government conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg makes a startling argument on today's Op-Ed page: We should make the House of Representatives bigger. A lot bigger, in fact; Goldberg says a Congress with 5,000 members would shake up our nation's calcified two-party system and more closely approximate the kind of democracy the founding fathers intended.

UC Irvine School of Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, meanwhile, debunks arguments that the healthcare bills pending in the House and Senate would be unconstitutional. And obesity experts Kelly D. Brownell and David S. Ludwig argue in favor of a tax on sugar-sweetened sodas, which would help fund healthcare reform programs and lower healthcare costs by decreasing obesity and related ailments such as diabetes.

On the editorial page, the board urges the Obama administration to consider backing new elections in Afghanistan or a transitional government, unless monitors can determine that the country's Aug. 20 election was legitimate.

The editorial board also takes up a gun-rights case and argues, surprisingly enough, in favor of stronger protections for gun owners. Though the board favors measures to reduce gun violence, it thinks the Supreme Court should rule that the 2nd Amendment applies to states as well as the federal government. That's because allowing states to ignore this part of the Bill of Rights could undermine the requirement that they abide by others.

Finally, the board notes that Comcast Corp.'s proposal to buy NBC Universal cuts against the grain of recent media deals, and its effect on the marketplace may be limited. But it will be interesting to watch how the combined company's approach to the Internet might change.

* Cartoon by Rob Rogers / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Former Times staff writer Johanna Neuman polled Washington insiders for the cause of today's hyper-partisanship in the Capitol, and names the most-cited culprit: Newt Gingrich. The architect of the Republican takeover of Congress in the mid-1990s also changed the congressional calendar and urged Republican lawmakers to spend their weekends at home, not mingling with colleagues of both parties in D.C. as they'd done before.

Updated at 1:05 p.m.: Neuman will discuss her Op-Ed on the "Michael Smerconish Show" at 7 a.m. EDT Wednesday, in case you're up that early and want to listen online. Or if you're in Philadelphia.

Columnist Jonah Goldberg eulogizes the "godfather of neoconservatism" Irving Kristol, who died last week at 89 -- and who had a major impact on Goldberg's political thinking.

On the Editorial Page, The Times examines the much-delayed work of the blue-ribbon panel trying to reimagine California's tax structure, and wonders if it might be a little too innovative. Its business receipt tax might not stand up to legal scrutiny, and its attempts to decrease revenue volatility appear to come at the expense of the poor and middle class.

We also address the backfiring strategy of seven former CIA directors who sent a letter to President Obama urging him to abort a Justice Department inquiry into torture... er, enhanced interrogation techniques... by the CIA under the Bush administration. The directors seem not to have realized that they were asking the president to abandon his assurances that Atty. Gen. Eric Holder would put the law above loyalty to the White House. The unintended result: Obama was forced to renew his promise, the opposite of the outcome they wanted.

And on the tangled question of Net neutrality, we weigh in on the side of new FCC chief Julius Genachowski, who wants to develop new rules governing what Internet service providers can do with the data that travels through their networks. Without such rules, the major phone and Internet companies have too much power to quash innovation in the name of "managing congestion."

Cartoon by Tom Toles / Washington Post

-- Dan Turner

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced a new forum this week for Californians to pitch their ideas for how to fix the state's problems. But at MyIdea4CA.com, there's not much room for explaining how to implement an idea, what the benefits might be or how much it might cost. In fact, there's not much room, period. That's because the site publishes the ideas that people submit via Twitter, which has a 140-character limit on its messages.

That doesn't strike me as the greatest way to tap the public's imagination and resourcefulness, particularly not when dealing with issues as complex as the state's budget mess. Then again, I write long. Even my emoticons run longer than 140 characters. Besides, people can always include links in their tweets to lengthy blog posts or white papers about their ideas, as Paul Benedict (aka paulbenedict7) did in the following tweet on the state budget: "Reduce costs by fewer gov rules that must be enforced: http://www.nolanchart.com/article6524.html." Most of the others weighing in on the budget problems, though, went with simple one- or two-sentence prescriptions, such as "automate unemployment biweekly claims. Permit online filing and direct deposit like tax returns" and "Add variable gas taxes, when it's low in way to obtain money for debts." Then there's this from Francisco MelliHuber (aka fmelli): "get a new governor who's not insane."

Got a proposal for the Gubernator? Send out a Tweet with the hashtag "#myidea4ca." But remember, keep it short. He's running out of time.

Photo: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger chats (briefly) with Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams. Credit: Justin Short, Office of the Governor.

-- Jon Healey

Spare the "Heils" -- he's dead. (Associated Press)

She’s the Nevada woman who yelled “Heil Hitler” at an Israeli Jew last week, apparently infuriated by his praise for that country’s national health care program and gold-plated care for its soldiers. (The Israeli seems to have been concerned about how the U.S. treats its veterans, not the relative merits of nationalized health care.) Pilger, wearing an Israeli defense forces shirt, blasted the speaker (and by extension all those other Nazi-sympathizing Jews in Israel) for failing to realize that universal health care is the first step to a socialist master plan.

Seriously, shouldn't you have to pick one camp and stick with it? Either you get to wear pro-Israel gear or you shout hateful, racist words to Jews. Not both. Anyway, the appropriate reaction to the Pilger video would have been this: recoil, shake head, pass to sane friends, renew commitment to improve nation’s education system. Period.

This is such a bad move. Not only is it counterproductive – it won't further the cause of healthcare reform legislation -- but it is also a terrible misapplication of the power of Internet.

It's using a bomb to attack an ant.

Semi-literate right-wingers have been behaving badly for weeks, hurling all kinds of invective around to see where it sticks. And lefties have been longing to retaliate. Now Pilger, with her confused cruelty, wanders into the crosshairs. Does that make her fair game? An angry mob is still a mob, even in cyberspace.

Did the horrifying murder last month of Los Feliz teen Lily Burk get so much media attention because the 17-year-old victim was Jewish? At least one reader thinks so. A more puzzling question for us at the Opinion Manufacturing Division, though, is whether we should provide a forum for such ugly allegations.

If you've ever wondered why your comments take so long to appear, both on this blog and on the graffiti boards on latimes.com's editorials and Op-Eds, it's because each comment has to be screened by somebody here at the OMD. If a comment doesn't meet The Times' standards -- if it contains profanity, or is blatantly offensive or inflammatory -- it doesn't get posted. Most of the time, deciding whether or not to post something is a snap, and the vast majority of reader responses make their way onto the site -- latimes.com readers are a pretty well-educated, civil bunch. But sometimes, making a call on a reader comment is harder than, say, making a call on President Obama's health care plans. A comment in response to one of today's editorials is a case in point.

The editorial concerned Burk's murder, and the effect it might have on California prison policy. One reader submitted the following:

On the day Lily Burke was killed a man killed his daughter and then himself and several others were shot and killed in the LA area. Lily Burke was a jew so her death is still in the media. It is an insult that the media considerers a jewish girls death so much more important than anyone else's. I had a friend murdered. She was a Mexican American around Lily Burke's age and also killed by a stranger with a criminal record. Her death was not on TV. She got a little spot in a local newspaper. Is a jewish girls death really that much more important than anyone else's?

Should The Times post this comment, or others like it? This one posed so many problems that I ran that question past my fellow editorial writers. It is, on its face, anti-Semitic, playing into a vicious stereotype that Jews control the American media. On the other hand, it raises an important point that should be of great concern to journalists and readers: Do newspapers and other media value the lives of some kinds of crime victims more than others? If this reader had criticized the media for playing up the Burk story because she was white, we would have posted it without hesitation. So why would we be reluctant to post it because the criticism is based on her Jewishness?

The response from my colleagues was mixed. Some thought the comment was clearly anti-Semitic and should be junked; Jews have been victimized for centuries based on imaginary conspiracy theories, so such statements must be treated differently than comments about a non-threatened majority such as whites. Others noted that questionable comments like this one are extremely common on non-newspaper blogs and they provide fodder for the kind of reader interaction and dialogue that is the entire purpose of our forum.

In the end, we decided not to post it, but to blog about it instead. In part, that's because we haven't been able to determine whether or not Burk was Jewish -- her parents are of mixed religious heritage. Does the reader who posted this comment about her know something we don't?

Photo: Lily Burk, in a photo taken by a classmate. Credit: Sarah Faulk

Short answer: Amend the Constitution.

I say this because some of the commentary in reaction to the suddenly resurfacing movement to prove that President Obama isn't a natural-board citizen -- fueled in part by filthy-rich average guy Lou Dobbs -- has blamed the Internet for providing the outlet that hateful, xenophobic conspiracy theorists don't deserve. In his otherwise funny and effective column today on Dobbs, The Times' own James Rainey makes this rote statement: "I often hear from disgruntled readers that they don't pay attention to the dread 'Mainstream Media' because they can find 'the truth' on the Internet. Translation: Some blogger will please them by propping up just about any cockeyed theory that they hold."

Unacknowledged in the wake of the Dobbsian nuttiness is the real villain of the Obama birther movement: The Constitution. It's precisely this sacred document that seeds the conspiracy theories over where President Obama was really born. Sure, the Internet does indeed facilitate such craziness (just as it facilitates smart observations that don't have an outlet in newspapers), but none of this would be possible without the following part of Article II, Section 1 in the Constitution: "No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President."

So what should be completely irrelevant -- where Obama's parents were on a single day in 1961, an accident of history over which the president had no control but that could have disqualified him from office -- becomes legal cover for those who just want to "enforce the law." Witness Rep. John Campbell (R-California) using this defense to support a bill he sponsored to require presidential candidates to supply a birth certificate as proof of citizenship.

It's the Constitution that seeds this lunacy, and yes, the Internet allows it to grow. But amending the natural-born clause out of the Constitution (which The Times' editorial board supports) would remove that seed (plus be more fair to millions of naturalized U.S. citizens, and leave our country better off).

And no, I don't think Obama was born in Kenya.

Photo: Lou Dobbs in 2007 at the National Press Club in Washington. (Karen Bleier / AFP/Getty Images)

Companies that offer downloadable movies and music online without licenses from the copyright holders typically wind up answering lawsuits from the Hollywood studios and the major labels. So it was odd to see a news release announcing the impending launch of Zookz, a site that offers unlimited music or movie downloads for about $10 a month (or both for $18). That's a bit like waving a red cape in front of a couple of bulls, isn't it? But Zookz believes it's in the clear, legally, thanks to the World Trade Organization. It's a far-fetched argument, but you've got to give Zookz credit for nerve.

The main differences between Zookz and most online outlets for bootlegged goods are that it's not a file-sharing network and that the content isn't free. Instead, it's just insanely cheap. The company's impossibly low prices reflect the fact that it doesn't pay for most of its inventory or share revenues with  copyright holders. All the proceeds go to Zookz, its 10-person staff in St. Johns, Antigua, and (through taxes) the Antiguan government.

How can it get away with this, you ask? I'm not sure it can, but here's its argument....