Do as the governor says online; but not as he does

Gov. Brown has been pushing online education as the key to closing the gap between what he proposes to give UC in his budget and what UC requests.  Various prior posts on this blog have dealt with that issue.  He also wants to foreclose tuition increases as a way to close the gap.  So let’s take a look at the governor’s use of online communications:

Above is a screenshot of the governor’s multimedia element of his website: http://gov.ca.gov/home.php [click on multimedia].  It was taken at around 6 AM this morning. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]  If you are looking for a video of his State of the State address last week, you won’t find it there.  You won’t find an audio of it.  You won’t even find a link to calchannel.com from which you can download a cumbersome video version of the address (something like 780 megs – unlikely to download all that fast – and with no live-stream option).  You will find a text of the speech on the main page (as of today). As we will note below, however, it does not contain precisely what the governor actually said.

In fact, the latest video on the governor’s multimedia page is almost a year old.  That video is a “webinar” of the Dept. of Finance dated Jan. 31, 2012.  There are some more recent audios including one of his budget press conference of January 10.  But there is no link to the (also cumbersome) calchannel video of that event.  Calchannel does have a video on YouTube of that event but there is no link or embedding of that on the governor’s website.  Gov. Schwarzenegger had a more up-to-date multimedia website.

Now Gov. Brown’s limited option website may be an attempt at frugality, perhaps in contrast with his predecessor.  But it would have cost nothing – that is zero, zilch, nada – at least to provide a link to calchannel.  And in fact it would have cost next to nothing to put a video of the State of the State right on the governor’s website.

In the official print version of the State of the State (which is on the governor’s website as noted above), you won’t find something he injected into the actual delivery in discussing his high-speed rail plan.  If you go on the cumbersome calchannel video, however, you will find that around minute 44, the governor told the story of the Little Engine That Could. That story, if you have forgotten, involved old engines that on various grounds declined to do a simple job that needed doing.  It was left to someone else – the Little Engine – to do what was needed.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7uPKDEY4ME?feature=player_detailpage]
The governor may feel that UC is the old engine that won’t take on the needed task. But compared to what is on the governor’s website, UC is more like the Little Engine. We’ll leave it to blog readers to decide who is more like the old engine.