About 70 - 100 people attended a protest against Champaign, IL Sinclair station WICD on Saturday, Oct. 23. Amongst the protestors' complaints were Sinclair's threat of running a one-sided anti-Kerry documentary in prime time and the company's "The Point" right-wing commentary that is appended to the local news without an opportunity for an opposing viewpoint. Paul and Drew bring a report on that protest.
We also talk to DIYmedia.net's John Anderson about his new project, Media Minutes, a 5-minute weekly audio newscast about media reform and policy issues.
On this edition we catch up on media news and try to get to the bottom of who seized Indymedia hard drives now that the UK gov't and the FBI deny involvement. We also review all of the myriad facets in the story of Sinclair's attempt to air the anti-Kerry documentary, "Stolen Honor."
We hear from Prof. Robert McChesney speaking to the Champaign-Urbana Joint Cable Commission on the importance of public access TV. And we discuss the mysterious return of Indymedia web server hard drives by the US government, and Sinclair's plans to air an anti-John Kerry program in prime time on all of its owne and operated stations.
In order to lighten the load on the server that hosts mediageek.org, I was using Archive.org's Freecache service to cache the 64 kbps mp3 and ogg archives of the radioshow. Unfortunately, Freecache died without any real notice, putting these archives off-line, and I didn't figure it out until today.
Luckily, it's an easy problem to solve, and all the affected archives are back on-line now.
We talk to the V-Man from Freak Radio Santa Cruz who tells us how the station is dealing with their recent FCC bust, and to Jacob, one of the organizers behind Media EmergenC, an independent media convergence happening in opposition to the National Association of Broadcasters Radio Show in San Diego, CA.