Archive | January, 2001

The January issue of Toward Freedom magazine features highlights and excerpts from the Building Independent Media conference, apparently held last year in Burlington, VT. Unfortunately, somehow I never even heard about this conference or knew it existed. It’s too bad, ’cause it’s exactly the sort of thing I’d like to go to.

I didn’t want this mention to get lost in the mini-essay below — The Media Alliance’s Media-File that features Andrea Buffa’s article also features a special section that asks the question: “What does media democracy look like?” This is a critical question for our time, both because of the problems in national civic democracy, but […]

Contemplating the Progressive and Alternative Media: Andrea Buffa, of the Media Alliance, has written a nice article attempting to formulate a way to assess the progressive media, entitled “National Progressive Media: Who’s Left?” She explores the important point that the traditional media assessment tool of audience size is not necessarily useful or consistent for evaluating […]

Yet more on new FCC head Michael Powell: Wired News has an article examining Powell’s desire to limit the FCC’s power. The article quotes Andrew Schwartzman, president of Media Access Project, who raises concerns with Powell’s approach to mergers, in addition to his opposition to low-power FM. Schwartzman says that Powell “has a very crimped […]

It’s official, Michael Powell, son of Gen. Colin, is the new head of the FCC. (Click here for News.com article, Click here for NY Times article.) Powell is very much a free marketeer, and has generally opposed low-power FM. Yet, I’m hard pressed to see how opposing having more radio stations and creating more opportunity […]