The Southeastern Conference (you know, the home of those really good teams that win all the national championships?) has decided to ban social media from college stadiums. No iPhone photos, no cell phone videos, no Twitter, Facebook or YouTube.

According to the revised policy on new media released Monday, ticketed fans are not allowed to "produce or disseminate (or aid in producing or disseminating) any material or information about the Event, including, but not limited to, any account, description, picture, video, audio, reproduction or other information concerning the Event."

The SEC believes that the dissemination of videos, pictures, tweets and other newfangled technologies will reduce the number of viewers who watch live broadcasts of the game on TV -- and they want to protect their contract with CBS and other television networks.

Meanwhile, the Big Ten Conference has taken the opposite approach, encouraging the use of social media sites and the proliferation of status updates and tweets. Coaches like Northwestern's Pat Fitzgerald see Facebook as a way to communicate with fans, not a tool that could jeopardize mainstream media. 

So which approach do you think is best? Is there some merit in the SEC's approach to let broadcast handle the viewers' demands? Or is the Big Ten right to embrace new technology?

Updated August 20 4:15 p.m.: The SEC reversed its policy after this blog post was written. The SEC's revised policy now reads:

-- Catherine Lyons

Credit: Sun Sentinel Staff Photo / Robert Duyos

In Wednesday's Los Angeles Times opinion pages, California finally has a balanced budget! Sort of. OK, not really. Fine. Not at all.

That sort of delayed reckoning and outsourced accountability should not be portrayed as forward momentum. The state should not try to take credit for solving the budget problems when in fact it has merely foisted its problems onto local governments. There is no separation, in the minds of voters or in the pangs of those most in need, between state and local government. We'd prefer a little more honesty from both the Capitol and the many city and county halls, all of which should acknowledge that their budget woes are but two sides of the same worn coin.

Editorial writers also take note of the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr., a black man who was trying to break into the home of a famous Harvard scholar, best-selling author and professor. Good thing they caught him. The professor's name was ...let's see, it's here somewhere... Oh. Oops. It's Henry Louis Gates Jr. The editorial board writes:

The police say Gates asked if the officer knew "who he was." That may sound arrogant, but many a black man in the same position has asked a similar question. It means: "Can you see who I am, not just what I am?" Because regardless of their achievements, wealth or status, they are vulnerable to the universal black male experience -- finding themselves in handcuffs first and charges dropped later.

Times columnist Tim Rutten has a preview of Thursday's MTA board vote on whether to contract out Metro car construction to Italian firm AnsaldoBreda. David Wise catalogs the CIA's attempts to assassinate foreign leaders and perceived nuisances, and discovers that our spooks aren't very good at bumping people off. Finally, author Christopher Lane walks us through the changes in direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising, which have given us, among other things, Brooke Shields shilling for a liquid to combat the horrors of eyelash hypotrichosis.

But that's just our Opinion.

Photo: Rich Pedroncelli / AP

The Rehabilitating Healthcare series continues on the editorial page; this week's installment focuses on rationing. The current system rations care based on income, which leaves the poorer folks out to dry while properly insured Americans fare well. The Times' editorial notes that most people have no qualms with the system, though, because it prevents the government from determining what care you get. Critics of Obama's healthcare proposal are hostile to such government rationing. Here is the board's response:

On the Op-Ed page, ccontributing editor Sara Catania offers an up close and personal look at home foreclosures in Los Angeles. Catania talks to five people who have sought legal help after hitting rock bottom in recent days.

Also in Op-Ed land, NPR senior news analyst Daniel Schorr reflects on legendary news anchor Walter Cronkite and what made him as successful as he was in turning any story into national news. His conclusion? Everyone trusted Uncle Walter:

The simple answer, but maybe too simple, is that Cronkite inspired trust. In a couple of polls he was designated the most trusted man in America. His baritone voice with its Midwest cadence, the impression he gave of being unawed by all the big shots he had to deal with, his never losing touch with his audience -- all these factors placed him in a unique role. And he felt its weight. Asked to run for public office, Cronkite reportedly said he could not step down from his anchor post.

Photo: For-sale signs line a residential street in Adelanto, Calif., in the Mojave Desert (Robyn Beck / AFP/Getty Images).

It's silly, as well as trite, to call the death of Walter Cronkite the end on era. The demise of the omniscient, ultra-influential anchorman came years ago. As I wrote when Tom Brokaw retired:

The common ground for [media] critics of the left and right was the centrality of the network news anchorman. At least since the mid-1960s, anchormen have enjoyed cult status. They weren't merely "newsreaders" like their counterparts in Britain; they were also globe-trotting reporters and the 'managing editors' of their broadcasts. And, of course, they were TV stars, as marketable in their way as the stars of sitcoms and shoot-'em-ups.

They were also spokesmen -- however self-appointed -- for the American people. It seemed appropriate for Walter Cronkite, the "most trusted man in America," to give voice to his viewers' enthusiasm for the space program or their horror at the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

As in "Murder on the Orient Express," there are many culprits in this killing: the advent of the Internet, the defensive response to it of Cronkite's successors (I'm sick of CNN anchors cutting to the comments of viewers), the eclipse of supposedly objective TV reporting by the rants of cable commentators. The Cronkite legacy was also trashed by his self-important CBS successor, "Gunga Dan" Rather, whose parting line wasn't "That's the way it is," but the enigmatic "Courage!" Rather might have been speaking to viewers forced to adjust to the post-Cronkite age.

Photo: Dan Rather, right, with Walter Cronkite in 1980 (AP photo).

Today we honored the 40th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11 that brought astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong to the moon's surface. But we also discovered that NASA indeed taped over the footage of that first landing.

NASA TV specialist Dick Nafzger, who headed the search for the tapes, spoke to KPCC this morning:

"I don't think anyone in the NASA organization did anything wrong," Nafzger says. "I think it slipped through the cracks, and nobody's happy about it."

After a three-year search for the tapes, NASA concluded that the original footage was deleted when the program started erasing old magnetic tape so it could record satellite data. Search team members say that as they discovered that tens of thousands of magnetic tape boxes had disappeared from the enormous government records center, their hope waned for ever finding the original moon landing footage recorded on the lunar camera operated by the astronauts. NASA says the picture was much clearer than the TV broadcast of the historic moment. How sad...

But wait! There's hope.

After piecing together a complete version of the moonwalk from a variety of broadcast television sources from around the world, NASA has contracted with Lowry Digital in Burbank, the digital restoration firm responsible for restoring movies from "Bambi" to "Star Wars," to make the "original" better. They're touching it up, making it less fuzzy and brighter so you can actually make out Neil Armstrong descending from the "Eagle" instead of the dark blob viewers saw in 1969.

So while technology makes it so that our generation and future generations will see the moonwalk with more clarity than ever before, the fact remains that it's not the original. Are we tampering with history, or preserving a moment?

--Catherine Lyons

Credit: Mark Wilson / Getty Images

My television pretty much stays dark during the week, so it took until the weekend for me to twig to it.

The Sci Fi channel has vanished.

The same shows were there, but the name wasn't.

In its place is something called the Syfy channel.

Whose dopey, dumbed-down idea was this, anyway? 

Do the network honchos think this is the next, hip iteration of the texting-literate generation? Or that we R 2 dum 2 no betr?

Sci fi. the venerable shorthand for science fiction -- a noble genre of literature and art and entertainment in its own right, with giants like Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. Le Guin -- has been reduced by this phonetic and simple-minded un-word to something that looks like it's traded on the stock market.

I read that the execs who thought of this say it will allow them a ''broader range of content'' in programming. Terrifying words, those. Don't think for a minute that they mean more original programming, or more film classics like ''2001: A Space Odyssey'' and ``Blade Runner'' and even ''Barbarella.'' More likely infomercials. The slick thinking must go that spelling it  ''Syfy'' absolves them of any responsibility to the spirit of ''sci fi.''

The Syfy channel exhorts me to ''imagine greater.''

All right, I will:

I am imagining Rod Serling siccing the Kanamits on whoever thought this was a great idea. ``Let's do lunch,''  they'll say. ``You be lunch.''

Obviously, some California public services will have to be cut, the editorial board observes, but what sense does it make to eliminate CalWorks, a program funded mostly by the federal dollars that enables people to get jobs and pay the rent? The board also notes that this is the big day for switching to digital TV, and it calls on the Federal Communications Commission to define the broadcasters' public-service obligations for digital channels.

CIA Director Leon E. Panetta might be right in saying that he can't possibly make public a single paragraph within 65 documents describing his agency's interrogation techniques, the board says, but that doesn't mean the federal judge in the case should take his word for it. The judge should review the documents personally before making a decision, the board advises.

 On the other side of the fold. a teacher of history and education says the use of the term "Hispanic" to denote an ethnic group is a relatively recent phenomenon in the nation's history, and one that has served to make those of Latin American descent feel more "other" than they used to. Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor should be seen as the first person of Puerto Rican descent who might be appointed to the high court, Jonathan Zimmerman argues, rather than as Hispanic. And Bill Maher has had enough with the puppies and the hamburgers; he wishes President Obama were less visible and barking more orders over the phone. The man is in serious danger of cute media overexposure, Maher huffs:

We like you, we really like you! You're skinny and in a hurry and in love with a nice lady. But so's Lindsay Lohan. And like Lohan, we see your name in the paper a lot, but we're kind of wondering when you're actually going to do something.

Illustration: Pedro X. Molina

Like a lot of journalists (I suspect), I spent Friday evening in a movie theater watching "W," the President Bush biopic. Like Times reviewer Kenneth Turan, I found the Oliver Stone take on Bush suprisingly complex, not the unsubtle screed I had expected. My one disagreement with Turan is with this portion of his review: "It also helps that 'W' is exceptionally well cast with actors who are not only gifted but who also actually look like the people they portray. Richard Dreyfuss makes a fine scheming Dick Cheney, Scott Glenn is a confident Donald  'I don't do nuance' Rumsfeld. And Ellen Burstyn as Barbara Bush and Thandie Newton as Condoleezza Rice are also on target. First among acting equals is the always involving Jeffrey Wright as Gen. Colin L. Powell, a man torn between an instinct for loyalty and what he sees happening around him."

As the friends who accompanied me to "W" can attest, I found jarring the fact that some of the characters -- particularly Wright as Colin Powell and Glenn as Donald Rumsfeld -- looked not at all like the people they were portraying. The problem was aggravated by the fact that other actors in the film -- especially Brolin as W, Dreyfuss as  Cheney and Bruce McGill as CIA Director George Tenet -- were  the spittin' image of the real people. The inconsistent casting made it difficult for me to suspend disbelief across the board, which wouldn't have been the case with a film that wasn't as intent on verismilitude. For example, "RFK,"  a 2002 cable move starred  British actor Linus Roache (the  prosecutor on "Law & Order") as Bobby Kennedy, even though Roache didn't look the part. (The actor playing Lyndon Johnson in "RFK," by the way, was James Cromwell, who unconvincingly plays George H.W. Bush in "W.")

The casting of Wright is especially annoying, because it seems to reflect the Hollywood belief that one black actor is as good as another. Wright doesn't  resemble Powell, any more than Sidney Poitier looks like Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall -- yet Poitier played Marshall in a 1991 television film. Though not a clone of George W. Bush, Brolin's resemblance to Bush is close enough to complement the character's mannerisms. The film wouldn't have worked as well if Stone has cast another white actor -- Paul Giamatti, say -- in the role. But it isn't only whites who take a simplistic attitude toward racial casting: There were murmurs of disapproval when "Saturday Night Live" first cast Fred Armisen, who is of  South American and Asian ancestry, to play Barack Obama. Yet Armisen, with the aid of makeup, looks at least as much like Obama as Brolin does George W. Bush.

Obviously there's more to capturing the personality of a real-life figure than physical resemblance. But in a film that strives to replicate the face as well as the name, everyone should look like the original -- or no one should.

John McCain: "And of course, I've been talking about the economy. Of course, I've talked to people like Joe the assistant professor of cultural studies to tell him that I'm not going to spread his wealth around. I'm going to let him keep his wealth. And of course, we're talking about positive plan of action to restore this economy and restore jobs in America." No, that is not a fully accurate quote from Wednesday's debate, in which McCain endlessly invoked not Joe the Professor but Joe the Plumber. It was another example of the homage politicians pay to blue-collar workers, even those who aspire to ownership of a business (a dream off-limits to low-paid academics). It doesn't matter that Joe the Plumber was swiftly demythologized with a little fact-checking. Politicians will still exalt cite blue-collar workers, real and imagined, in their stump speeches. McCain is a Republican, but Democrats, if anything, are more enamored of Joe Six-Pack. He is the unspoken subject of appeals for programs that benefit "working people," a term that is not meant to conjure up images ofadjunct faculty, computer troubleshooters or journalists ("I met a laid-off editorial writer at one of my campaign stops...) Speaking of journalists, we also worship at the altar -- or barstool -- of the working man. If I had a dollar for every story in which political reporters take the pulse of the people in a beer garden, I'd be ineligible for Barack Obama's tax cuts. This story is the hoariest of journalistic cliches, yet it appears election after election -- and in non-election journalism as well.

Years ago, the Harvard Lampoon published a parody of The Wall Street Journal that included a hilarious  takeoff of the man-in-the-bar story. Under the headline "When Talking Finance, Joe Six-Pack Sounds Like a Professor or Something," the story pulled a switcheroo in which blue-collar barflies commented about the economy with erudite references to obscure financial instruments.

There was a time when it made statistical sense for politicians and journalists to fixate on blue-collar workers. But the economy has changed. In my native city of Pittsburgh, where the economic center of gravity has shifted from manufacturing to health care and high technology, it would make more sense for visiting reporters to canvass voters in a Starbucks than a workingman's bar. But old archetypes die hard. Pittsburgh's NFL team is still the Steelers (or Stillers, as it's pronounced there), not the Geeks or Transplanters.

I have a theory about the continued canonziation of blue-collar workers: People who push paper -- or buttons on a keyboard -- are secretly a bit guilty about the non-physical nature of their labor. Never mind that plumbers often make more than assistant professors -- teaching isn't really "hard work." Of course, neither is being a U.S. senator.

Photo: AP Photo/Madalyn Ruggiero

TV networks give plenty of free airtime to presidential candidates (at least the ones from the two major parties). They televise their debates. Their news programs frequently cover stump speeches and campaign ads, while soliciting the candidates' views on big stories. Some networks go even further, offering (short) segments to the major parties' nominees in the run-up to Election Day. But Barack Obama's campaign has raised so much money, it can afford to buy more prime-time TV face time. It's spending an estimated $3 million to secure a half an hour slot -- 8 to 8:30 p.m. Oct. 29 -- on CBS, NBC and Fox. Expect it to drop another million or so to get the same treatment from ABC. (I mean really -- can ABC afford to say no to the guy who may soon choose the next chairman of the Federal Communications Commission?)

John McCain's campaign, meanwhile, is federally funded (by McCain's choice), so it probably doesn't have enough cash to do its own TV "roadblock" in the waning days before the election. (In case you're wondering, the so-called "equal time" provision of federal law requires stations only to make time available to all candidates on equal terms, not to give McCain the same amount of time that Obama bought.) McCain can certainly run as much video as he likes online, where the cost is far lower -- but the audience is much smaller, too.

Which brings us to the point of this windy post: Is Obama's TV purchase a symptom of a flawed campaign-finance system? I'm discomfited by the idea of one candidate harnessing -- alone -- the country's most powerful communications medium in the last days of the campaign. Yet it's happened several times before in the TV era. I'm also uneasy about the idea of using public funds to close the fundraising gap between candidates. Nor do I much care for the idea of forcing broadcasters to give candidates more free airtime to address the public. What do you think?

Photo: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images