Category: media ownership & consolidation
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Same News, New Channels — A Different Sort of NewsCentral
Those Google News alerts are occasionally worth something…. Today my alert set for “Sinclair Broadcast Group” brought me this little gem from the PR Newswire, announcing that my local Central Illinois Sinclair-owned stations will now be producing the 9:00 PM nightly news broadcast for the local FOX affiliates, too, which are not owned by Sinclair.…
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FCC Opens The Ownership Floodgates — We’ve Got 120 Days To Learn to Swim
On Tuesday the FCC finally released the official Notice of Proposed Rulemaking for its Media Ownership Proceeding [PDF], more than a month after first announcing that it would happen. This proceeding marks the Commission’s attempt to deal with the 2004 appeals court ruling against the 2003 media ownership rules rewrite which attempted to greatly loosen…
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From Today’s Radioshow: Net Neutrality Debate and Daily Show Segments
On today’s radioshow we listened to excerpts from a debate on Net Neutrality between two founders of the internet, Vint Cerf, in defense of net neutrality, and Dave Farber, speaking against it. The debate was sponsored by the Center for American Progress, and you can find an mp3 of the whole debate at the Public…
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Tubes, not Trucks — Sen. Stevens Explains the Internets
One of the most wonderful things about the Senate Commerce Committee is that it is chaired by a doddering old man from Alaska who rarely demonstrates a clear understanding of the technologies his committee oversees. Not that we should be surprised about relative tech ignorance on Capitol Hill, where enough Congresscritters were willingly bamboozled by…
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One Step Closer to the Demise of the Record Button?
In addition to the votes for LPFM and against net neutrality, the Senate Commerce Committee voted in favor of an amendment creating the broadcast flag for both radio/audio and TV/video. If you haven’t heard already, the broadcast flag would allow all content producers to effectively disable the record button on any digital device you own.…
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Progressives’ Paradox — Senate Commerce Committee Votes Up on LPFM, Down on Net Neutrality
Oh, those party lines. Senate Commerce Committee Republicans showed themselves to be 92% against ensuring internet freedom, with 11 out of 12 voting against a net neutrality amendment to the big telecom bill (S.2686) today. That was a much narrower loss than a similar amendment suffered in the House, due to the fact that all…
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FCC Pulls the Scab off the Media Ownership Sore
With a full Republican-majority commission, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin finally took the wraps off his proceeding to revisit media ownership rules [link to press release PDF]. Not unexpectedly, this new proceeding threatens to be just as bad as the last one in 2003. I’ll let Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein explain why [PDF]: First, the process does…
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Path for LPFM through the Telecom Bill Forest?
Thursday at 2 PM EDT the Senate Commerce Comittee will begin marking up and possibly voting on the ironically titled Communications, Consumer’s Choice, and Broadband Deployment Act of 2006. It’s the Senate version of the COPE Act, whose primary purpose is to speed the entry of the big telcos, like AT&T and Verizon, into the…
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Self-Aggrandizement and the Axis of Justice
I will indulge, momentarily: Jake Sexton is the webmaster for Axis of Justice, the social justice organization formed by Tom Morello of Audioslave and Serj Tankian of System of a Down. Jake did an interview with me on net neutrality which is now featured at the AoJ site. Jake also is the sole proprietor of…