NO MORE CLEAR CHANNELS! STOP THE FCC MEDIA GIVEAWAY!
The FCC is poised to approve the most dramatic changes to media ownership regulations in decades. Leading the charge is FCC Chairman Michael Powell, Colin Powell's son, who essentially declared war on diversity in media at the same time that his father was spearheading the war against Iraq.
Thursday, media activists and concerned citizens protested at Clear Channel radio stations throughout the United States with the message: No More Clear Channels! Stop the FCC Media Giveaway!
Clear Channel Communications is the poster child of everything that's wrong with media deregulation. After the media deregulation of 1996, Clear Channel gobbled up hundreds of radio stations throughout the country and now owns more than 1200 stations nationwide, dominating the audience share in 100 of 112 major markets. Not only is the company the world's largest radio broadcaster, it's also the world largest concert promoter and billboard advertising firm. Clear Channel promotes a cookie-cutter style radio that has urban stations throughout the country seemingly playing the same seven songs. It shuts out independent artists and eliminates local programming. The company also uses its stations to promote its right-wing political agenda, such as the pro-war rallies that Clear Channel has sponsored in numerous cities since the start of the war against Iraq. In San Francisco, Clear Channel station KMEL fired popular public affairs director Davey D after he invited anti-war Congresswoman Barbara Lee to speak on a KMEL public affairs show.
There's still time, campers, to email the FCC and Congress. Let's send them a message before the June 2 FCC vote on media deregulation: Protest Clear Channel radio and the media monopoly! We demand truth over profit, diversity over monopoly!
Sponsored in part by The Prometheus Radio Project
Thursday, May 29, 2003
(Gosh, do you sense an ongoing theme here in the Duck Pond lately? Maybe I should change it to the Dove Pond? Hey, works for me. Any of you got a prob with that? Why not leave a comment? Oh, that's right, you can't anymore. Why? Because I gave yas ample opportunity to do so and only one of you seized it, and only wrote 2 lame-ass words at that. So the comment sections are toast. Gone. Toodle-oo. Plus the voting on Best Post: Year 1 has been cancelled. Same reason. Congrats. You have cast your vote by your silence. I'm driving. Get in the back seat where you belong. Wanna make your voice heard? Get your own damn blog. Meanwhile, since you're here, sit back and relax and ride the waves of my mind...)
MORE EXCERPTS FROM THE NWOPC NEWSLETTER
***
Earth (the dot in the middle) as seen from 3.7 billion miles away by the Voyager 1 spacecraft, on 6/6/1990.
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.
--Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
***
I see the corporate media and the government as a covert oppressor, like Iago, who comes in the guise of a friend, but secretly covets what you have. The government pretends to be our friend and protector when they are really our oppressor. Clear Channel is Iago, playing anthems and providing chants and posters on the one hand, then perpetuating the ignorance of the masses on the other by controlling the (right agenda) message, not providing any answers or solutions and playing on people's fears and hopelessness.--Mitch Balonek
***
Alaska Says No to Patriot Act
Alaska has joined a growing national rebellion against the USA Patriot Act, voting to oppose the massive federal anti-terrorism law passed by Congress soon after Sept. 11, 2001. Alaska's measure goes further than most, advising police and other state agencies not to "initiate, participate in, or assist or cooperate with an inquiry, investigation, surveillance or detention" if there is not "reasonable suspicion of criminal activity under Alaska State law."
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/alaska_patriot030523.html
***
AT LAST, WMD'S FOUND... ER, IN MARYLAND
- musta been destroyed before the War started, eh?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,965319,00.html
'US finds evidence of WMD at last - buried in a field near Maryland'
Julian Borger in Washington, Wednesday May 28, 2003, The Guardian
The good news for the Pentagon yesterday was that its investigators had finally unearthed evidence of weapons of mass destruction, including 100 vials of anthrax and other dangerous bacteria. The bad news was that the stash was found, not in Iraq, but fewer than 50 miles from Washington, near Fort Detrick in the Maryland countryside.
The anthrax was a non-virulent strain, and the discoveries are apparently remnants of an abandoned germ warfare programme. They merited only a local news item in the Washington Post.
But suspicious finds in Iraq have made front-page news (before later being cleared), given the failure of US military inspection teams to find evidence of the weapons that were the justification for the March invasion.
Even more embarrassing for the Pentagon, there was no documentation about the various biological agents disposed of at the US bio-defence centre at Fort Detrick. Iraq's failure to come up with paperwork proving the destruction of its biological arsenal was portrayed by the US as evidence of deception in the run-up to the war.
***
LAST BUT NOT LEAST, JUST IN CASE YOU'RE TOO LAZY TO CLICK THE PICK TO CLICK, HERE'S THE LATEST FROM MARK MORFORD...
The Great Teen Sex Conundrum: Should American teens actually be encouraged to have really good, healthy sex?
By Mark Morford
Don't look now because oh my goodness it's about sex, and teens, and it turns out that more teens are having sex at younger and younger ages and until now no one really knew just how dire and/or fascinating and/or calamitous it all was and who pray who will save the children?
Turns out, this new Kaiser Family Foundation survey says, that boys in particular are feeling the peer pressure to have sex even more than girls, and sometimes gasp horror alcohol and even oh my God say it isn't so drugs are lubricating factors in the divine clumsy groping interactions, can you believe it and isn't that shocking.
Also: Four in 10 sexually active teens have found it necessary to use pregnancy tests, and more than half (!) of 15- to 17-year-olds say they've been with someone sexually, and two in three have gone the full sexual distance by high school graduation. Oh dear.
These are the latest findings. This is the latest study, more comprehensive than most regarding the sexual behavior of the young, because it's apparently some sort of social barometer, like gas prices or economic forecasts or bikini styles, something very telling and something about which we should all be very concerned as we guzzle our cocktails and smoke our pot and have our sex even when we don't really want to.
Always fascinating and strange and weirdly uninformative, these teen-sex surveys are, as frowning family-planning/Bible/gov't groups across the board take it all to mean either the apocalypse is nigh or juvenile debauchery is rampant and those extraterrestrial teens are outta control and dangerous and sometimes drunk and condomless and Something Must Be Done, though no one has any idea exactly what.
Teen sex is that often unstable, panicky, unapproachable cultural subject most lawmakers -- and many parents -- seem loathe to really want to acknowledge in any real way, no one really wanting to think of the young as the new and explosively sexual creatures they so obviously are, what with all those taints of abuse and groping priests and screeching pedophilia headlines swirling in the cultural miasma.
So, tentative laws get passed. Hugely ineffectual scare-tactic programs with names like "Get Real About AIDS" and "Reducing the Risk" get launched, utterly limp multimillion-dollar GOP-funded anti-sex campaigns like "Sex Can Wait" splash all over schools promoting the joys of abstinence or the joys of waiting until marriage or the joys of praying to Jesus to stop those vile delicious pictures in your dad's Hustler or your mom's erotica collection from slipping like hot silk into your every thought, when not a single one of those things contains a single iota of anything resembling joy.
Meanwhile, the hormonally fire-breathing teens get utterly pummeled. Media is insanely saturated with sexed-up images, TV shows and magazines and videos and movies and whatshername from that odious little Lizzie McGuire movie stuck on billboards across America in a skintight tank top and a Spandex butt-hugging miniskirt looking all flirty and nubile and coyly edible. God, but we are invidious hypocrites.
This is the vicious double standard. This is the insane mixed message, worse than it ever was, hammering into these sexually mal-educated kids the idea that sex is, of course, the greatest goddamn thing in the entire history of the known universe ever and is the only thing really worth living for, and is concomitantly also the ickiest most disease-riddled guilt-packed disgustingly wrong and blasphemous and abusive and victimizing act you can ever do with another person with the notable exception of convincing them to turn Republican.
Want to know what's really to blame for the vast majority of sad teen pregnancies and drunken backseat gropings and really unpleasant de-virginizing experiences in this country?
Want to know the root cause of nearly every crude high school lug thinking sex means pumping like a jackhammer for two grunting minutes and every beautiful girl thinking sexual pleasure means lying there frozen and pretending to moan for those two same minutes? You got it -- it's that very same mixed message.
This is the problem. There is no survey that addresses true teen sex. There is no data, no stats, no one really celebrating the idea that, because teens are, have always been and will continue to be, absolutely and insanely sexually demonically possessed, that maybe, just maybe they should be, gasp oh my God don't say it, encouraged to enjoy sex as the raw and real and consensual and mutually beneficial and sticky and wonderful and tricky and deeply mindful but ultimately glorious act it so bafflingly is. Wow what a radical notion.
Here is what will never happen in your lifetime but really, really should: Raw and wide-open and casually explicit and non-insultingly dumbed-down sex ed for every teen, beginning in junior high and continuing every year until graduation, in every school in every town and every city and every teen.
Not just indifferent medical diagrams and color charts and awful educational films about reproduction and hormones and the horrors of STDs, but actual raw and real and human and humorous and dirty discussion, full of swear words and slang and laughter and notions of love and respect and orgasm and true information.
I advocate, in a nutshell, nothing short of a revolution in sex ed in this nation. Possible? Absolutely. Probable? No way.
And it's tragic, really. Because perhaps more than anything else, what we need right now in this country (and, yes, on this planet), is a fresh population of deeply sexually attuned and comfortable and nonabusive citizens. Oh what a difference that would make.
We need more orgasms and less whining. More lubrication, less ignorance. More sensual body awareness, less stiff flabby awkward pain. More deep sticky joy, less cold bitter fear. Go ahead, try and refute.
There exists this very correct theory: Nearly every war and every despot and every uptight sneering power-mad leader and every warmongering culture is a direct result of that culture's or that leader's deep-seated sexual frustration and sexual unfulfillment and sexual angst.
Let's put it another way: A sexually aware planet is a soothed planet. An informed and open-minded and ecstatically satisfied nation is a peaceful nation. A sexually open and healthy and sticky and respectful citizen is a happy and productive citizen. Clear enough?
And it starts, of course, with teenagers. Don't we want to help our children? Give them a better life, more happiness, leave them a more openly and divinely orgasmic world? Of course we do. After all, what could be more patriotic than that?
MORE EXCERPTS FROM THE NWOPC NEWSLETTER
***
Earth (the dot in the middle) as seen from 3.7 billion miles away by the Voyager 1 spacecraft, on 6/6/1990.
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.
--Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
***
I see the corporate media and the government as a covert oppressor, like Iago, who comes in the guise of a friend, but secretly covets what you have. The government pretends to be our friend and protector when they are really our oppressor. Clear Channel is Iago, playing anthems and providing chants and posters on the one hand, then perpetuating the ignorance of the masses on the other by controlling the (right agenda) message, not providing any answers or solutions and playing on people's fears and hopelessness.--Mitch Balonek
***
Alaska Says No to Patriot Act
Alaska has joined a growing national rebellion against the USA Patriot Act, voting to oppose the massive federal anti-terrorism law passed by Congress soon after Sept. 11, 2001. Alaska's measure goes further than most, advising police and other state agencies not to "initiate, participate in, or assist or cooperate with an inquiry, investigation, surveillance or detention" if there is not "reasonable suspicion of criminal activity under Alaska State law."
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/alaska_patriot030523.html
***
AT LAST, WMD'S FOUND... ER, IN MARYLAND
- musta been destroyed before the War started, eh?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,965319,00.html
'US finds evidence of WMD at last - buried in a field near Maryland'
Julian Borger in Washington, Wednesday May 28, 2003, The Guardian
The good news for the Pentagon yesterday was that its investigators had finally unearthed evidence of weapons of mass destruction, including 100 vials of anthrax and other dangerous bacteria. The bad news was that the stash was found, not in Iraq, but fewer than 50 miles from Washington, near Fort Detrick in the Maryland countryside.
The anthrax was a non-virulent strain, and the discoveries are apparently remnants of an abandoned germ warfare programme. They merited only a local news item in the Washington Post.
But suspicious finds in Iraq have made front-page news (before later being cleared), given the failure of US military inspection teams to find evidence of the weapons that were the justification for the March invasion.
Even more embarrassing for the Pentagon, there was no documentation about the various biological agents disposed of at the US bio-defence centre at Fort Detrick. Iraq's failure to come up with paperwork proving the destruction of its biological arsenal was portrayed by the US as evidence of deception in the run-up to the war.
***
LAST BUT NOT LEAST, JUST IN CASE YOU'RE TOO LAZY TO CLICK THE PICK TO CLICK, HERE'S THE LATEST FROM MARK MORFORD...
The Great Teen Sex Conundrum: Should American teens actually be encouraged to have really good, healthy sex?
By Mark Morford
Don't look now because oh my goodness it's about sex, and teens, and it turns out that more teens are having sex at younger and younger ages and until now no one really knew just how dire and/or fascinating and/or calamitous it all was and who pray who will save the children?
Turns out, this new Kaiser Family Foundation survey says, that boys in particular are feeling the peer pressure to have sex even more than girls, and sometimes gasp horror alcohol and even oh my God say it isn't so drugs are lubricating factors in the divine clumsy groping interactions, can you believe it and isn't that shocking.
Also: Four in 10 sexually active teens have found it necessary to use pregnancy tests, and more than half (!) of 15- to 17-year-olds say they've been with someone sexually, and two in three have gone the full sexual distance by high school graduation. Oh dear.
These are the latest findings. This is the latest study, more comprehensive than most regarding the sexual behavior of the young, because it's apparently some sort of social barometer, like gas prices or economic forecasts or bikini styles, something very telling and something about which we should all be very concerned as we guzzle our cocktails and smoke our pot and have our sex even when we don't really want to.
Always fascinating and strange and weirdly uninformative, these teen-sex surveys are, as frowning family-planning/Bible/gov't groups across the board take it all to mean either the apocalypse is nigh or juvenile debauchery is rampant and those extraterrestrial teens are outta control and dangerous and sometimes drunk and condomless and Something Must Be Done, though no one has any idea exactly what.
Teen sex is that often unstable, panicky, unapproachable cultural subject most lawmakers -- and many parents -- seem loathe to really want to acknowledge in any real way, no one really wanting to think of the young as the new and explosively sexual creatures they so obviously are, what with all those taints of abuse and groping priests and screeching pedophilia headlines swirling in the cultural miasma.
So, tentative laws get passed. Hugely ineffectual scare-tactic programs with names like "Get Real About AIDS" and "Reducing the Risk" get launched, utterly limp multimillion-dollar GOP-funded anti-sex campaigns like "Sex Can Wait" splash all over schools promoting the joys of abstinence or the joys of waiting until marriage or the joys of praying to Jesus to stop those vile delicious pictures in your dad's Hustler or your mom's erotica collection from slipping like hot silk into your every thought, when not a single one of those things contains a single iota of anything resembling joy.
Meanwhile, the hormonally fire-breathing teens get utterly pummeled. Media is insanely saturated with sexed-up images, TV shows and magazines and videos and movies and whatshername from that odious little Lizzie McGuire movie stuck on billboards across America in a skintight tank top and a Spandex butt-hugging miniskirt looking all flirty and nubile and coyly edible. God, but we are invidious hypocrites.
This is the vicious double standard. This is the insane mixed message, worse than it ever was, hammering into these sexually mal-educated kids the idea that sex is, of course, the greatest goddamn thing in the entire history of the known universe ever and is the only thing really worth living for, and is concomitantly also the ickiest most disease-riddled guilt-packed disgustingly wrong and blasphemous and abusive and victimizing act you can ever do with another person with the notable exception of convincing them to turn Republican.
Want to know what's really to blame for the vast majority of sad teen pregnancies and drunken backseat gropings and really unpleasant de-virginizing experiences in this country?
Want to know the root cause of nearly every crude high school lug thinking sex means pumping like a jackhammer for two grunting minutes and every beautiful girl thinking sexual pleasure means lying there frozen and pretending to moan for those two same minutes? You got it -- it's that very same mixed message.
This is the problem. There is no survey that addresses true teen sex. There is no data, no stats, no one really celebrating the idea that, because teens are, have always been and will continue to be, absolutely and insanely sexually demonically possessed, that maybe, just maybe they should be, gasp oh my God don't say it, encouraged to enjoy sex as the raw and real and consensual and mutually beneficial and sticky and wonderful and tricky and deeply mindful but ultimately glorious act it so bafflingly is. Wow what a radical notion.
Here is what will never happen in your lifetime but really, really should: Raw and wide-open and casually explicit and non-insultingly dumbed-down sex ed for every teen, beginning in junior high and continuing every year until graduation, in every school in every town and every city and every teen.
Not just indifferent medical diagrams and color charts and awful educational films about reproduction and hormones and the horrors of STDs, but actual raw and real and human and humorous and dirty discussion, full of swear words and slang and laughter and notions of love and respect and orgasm and true information.
I advocate, in a nutshell, nothing short of a revolution in sex ed in this nation. Possible? Absolutely. Probable? No way.
And it's tragic, really. Because perhaps more than anything else, what we need right now in this country (and, yes, on this planet), is a fresh population of deeply sexually attuned and comfortable and nonabusive citizens. Oh what a difference that would make.
We need more orgasms and less whining. More lubrication, less ignorance. More sensual body awareness, less stiff flabby awkward pain. More deep sticky joy, less cold bitter fear. Go ahead, try and refute.
There exists this very correct theory: Nearly every war and every despot and every uptight sneering power-mad leader and every warmongering culture is a direct result of that culture's or that leader's deep-seated sexual frustration and sexual unfulfillment and sexual angst.
Let's put it another way: A sexually aware planet is a soothed planet. An informed and open-minded and ecstatically satisfied nation is a peaceful nation. A sexually open and healthy and sticky and respectful citizen is a happy and productive citizen. Clear enough?
And it starts, of course, with teenagers. Don't we want to help our children? Give them a better life, more happiness, leave them a more openly and divinely orgasmic world? Of course we do. After all, what could be more patriotic than that?
Sunday, May 25, 2003
MY APOLOGIES FOR THIS RATHER LONG POST, BUT IT'S A VERY IMPORTANT READ. SO DON'T BE SO FUCKING LAZY, CAMPERS, YOU'RE NOT DYSLEXIC. READ, DAMMIT! AN UNINFORMED PUBLIC IS AN EASILY MANIPULATED PUBLIC!
[copy/pasted from the latest NWOPC email digest]
MAKING MEDIA MONOPOLY PART OF THE CONSTITUTION
by Robert W. McChesney, ZNet InterActive May 15, 2003
*Robert W. McChesney is the co-author, with John Nichols, of OurMedia, Not Theirs: The Democratic Struggle Against Corporate Media (Seven Stories).
As I write this, the Federal Communications Commission is poised to vote on June 2 to relax several longstanding media ownership rules. By nearly all accounts it will lead to a wave of media mergers and market consolidation that is unprecedented in U.S. history. In my view, such moves would be a disaster for our society. If you know about this and want to register your opposition, go to www.mediareform.net, where there are links to all the major campaigns to stop the FCC, along with links to news articles and considerable background information on the topic. Public pressure can stop the FCC. The www.mediareform.net site also has a comprehensive index to all of the groups working on media reform issues in the United States, as well as a complete list of the issues these groups are working on.
If you want an overview of the current situation, stay here and read on.
In 1996, Congress passed the Telecommunications Reform Act, which amended the Communications Act of 1934. The 1996 Telecom Act was a corrupt piece of work, being the product of the largest corporate lobbies all salivating at the prospect of rewriting the law to provide them a larger slice of the action. The best way to grasp how the communications law was passed is to imagine the classic scene from The Godfather II, when Hyman Roth, Michael Corleone and several other American gangsters meet on a rooftop in Havana to divide up the island between them in pre-Castro Cuba. They do so by ceremoniously each taking a slice of a cake with the outline of Cuba on it, and while they are doing this, Hyman Roth intones, "Isn't it great to be in a country with a government that believes in a partnership with private enterprise." The 1996 Telecom Act was drafted on that proverbial rooftop, only instead of mob families there were trade associations like the National Association of Broadcasters and corporations like News Corporation and Viacom. The public played no role in the Telecom Act, and it received virtually no news media coverage, except in the business and trade press where it was covered as an issue of importance to owners and investors, not citizens in a democracy. The powerful lobbies - much like Roth and Corleone - were duking it out with each other for the largest slice of the cake, but they all agreed that the public had no right to participate in the process. It was their cake.
One of the major aims of the corporate communication lobbies in the 1996 law was to scrap longstanding ownership laws that prevented them from getting larger. These ownership restrictions had been historically about the only meaningful regulations on large media firms. They prevented, among other things, firms from owning multiple TV stations in the same community, TV stations in every community in the nation, or TV stations and radio stations and newspapers and cable TV systems in the same community. The theory behind these ownership restrictions was that when the government granted firms monopoly rights to scarce TV or radio channels, it needed to place restrictions on what media the firms could own, so that the firms would not use their monopoly profits (owning a TV or radio station has historically been the closest thing to having the right to print money in our economy, except, perhaps, for the right to own a monopoly newspaper) to corner the market on all media. That would be a very bad thing for democracy.
One might logically ask how these media ownership restrictions could have ever come into existence, if the system was so corrupt that the Havana rooftop analogy captures the policy making process. To some extent it was because there was (and is) such a deep seated hostility to concentrated media ownership in the American population. It simply violates every core tenet of a free society to have a small number of powerful media owners. To the extent there has been popular involvement in media policy making, it has been to push for more competitive media markets. Even more important, there were powerful commercial interests that wanted restrictions on media ownership. Companies that owned a small number of radio or TV stations, for example, understood that if ownership limits were lifted, huge firms would be able to muscle them out of the market. And while firms wanted to see ownership limits removed in some markets, they were very happy to have them in other markets, where, for example, they were selling their products.
By 1996, however, the largest media firms had grown so large they thought their power could tip the balance and remove the ownership limits. They miscalculated. The powerful lobbies could not reach a consensus on which ownership laws to scrap and which ones to relax. Accordingly, the 1996 law called for the five-member FCC to merely review the ownership rules every two years with an eye to eliminate them when conditions permitted. The theory was that eventually, when the Internet and digital TV worked their multi-channel magic, the media system would be so awash in media voices that there would be no reason to be concerned about media monopoly. So at that time it would be absurd, not to mention unfair, so saddle some media firms, those that worked in radio, TV and cable, with ownership limits, while other media firms were not so encumbered. The FCC's job was to determine when the time of technological plenty had arrived and then dump the media ownership rules.
This process is often referred to as "deregulation," but it is nothing of the kind. The framing of the issue as one of "regulation" versus "deregulation" or "free markets" is ideologically loaded propaganda that obscures what is happening in total. When media ownership rules are eliminated, there is still plenty of regulation. If you or I persist in trying to broadcast on a frequency licensed to Clear Channel, we will be arrested and sent to prison. That is serious regulation. Regulation is going to exist no matter what. Even a so-called free market media system requires massive regulation. The real framing is whether there will be regulation that makes some effort to serve the public interest or broad publicly determined values, or whether regulation will be done exclusively to the benefit of corporate interests without any public involvement. It is the latter that has been misnamed "deregulation."
There was only one media industry in 1996 where a consensus could be reached to relax media ownership rules, and that was radio. In radio broadcasting the small station owning firms lost their resolve or their ability to fight the big station owning groups and the 1996 act lifted the national limit on the number of stations a single company could own. It also let a single company own up to eight stations in a single market. The results have been catastrophic for everyone except the owners of the handful of massive companies like Clear Channel (which now owns over 1,200 stations) and Viacom that have come to rule the roost in radio. In the past seven years, U.S. radio has become vastly more commercial and has lost much of its localism and any commitment to covering the news. Ironically, what by all rights should be our most decentralized and democratic medium -- because it is so inexpensive to produce a good signal -- has become our most regimented and standardized. You could be airdropped into any city in the United States and hear the same oldies song or the same right wing blather. And this has nothing to do with the natural workings of any "free market;" it is the direct result of corrupt policy making.
What has happened in radio is about to be visited on the balance of the media system. We know what many of you are thinking -- "hey, the media system sucks, it can't get any worse." But one look at radio should tell you otherwise. It can get worse, much worse. And it will, unless we stop the FCC. Moreover, the political power these ever larger media firms will accrue, will make any prospective media reform down the road that much more difficult.
The FCC conducted biennial reviews of the ownership rules in 1998 and 2000, and determined the rules should remain in place. At this point the biennial review was regarded as a benign and unreviewable process. The industry lobby went through the court system to get the rules thrown out. In 2002 a right wing federal appeals court demanded that the FCC provide a justification for keeping the ownership rules, or else they would have to be thrown out. Be clear that it was the appeals court, acting as the advocate of corporations that put the new aggressive pro-industry spin on the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The appeals court interpreted the law to mean that unless the FCC could provide compelling, even overwhelming, evidence to justify keeping media ownership rules, they should be scrapped. The Court construed the statute as a one-way street, with a strong presumption in favor of deregulation. This put Michael Powell, the Chair of the FCC in an unusual position. He was supposed to go before the courts and make the case on behalf of keeping media ownership rules in the public interest. Powell was famous for his pro-industry rah-rah sentiments, and his hostility to regulation in the public interest. Having him be responsible for defending media ownership rules was along the lines of putting Katherine Harris in charge of Al Gore's Florida recount team in 2000. Powell responded by authorizing a formal FCC review of the six main media ownership rules.
At this point, the spring and summer of 2002, the odds that the FCC would dump the rules without much of a fight were very high. Traditionally the FCC has been a corrupt body, not in the sense that its members are explicitly bribed to make specific decisions, but in the broader ethical sense of the term. The five FCC members are unknown to the general public and have virtually no contact with them. They are surrounded instead by corporate CEOs, lawyers and lobbyists. As one FCC Chairman put it, "the job of the FCC is to regulate fights between the super wealthy and the super super wealthy. The public has nothing to do with it." Over time, logically, the FCC has come to see its mission as being an advocate for the very firms it is regulating; the more profitable they are, the better the job the FCC is doing. This worldview has been encouraged by the tradition that members of the FCC tend to move on to extremely lucrative careers working for the very firms they once regulated. As it is often put, when a firm comes before the FCC, FCC members do not know whether to regard it as an entity to be regulated or as a prospective future employer. This applies across the board, to Republicans and Democrats alike. The FCC Chair who preceded Michael Powell, Democrat William Kennard, has gone on to making big bucks working on telecommunication deals for the Carlyle Group.
In theory, and in law, the FCC merely implements the will of Congress. It should be the job of Congress to force the FCC to act in the public interest, and prevent cronyism and corruption. In practice, Congress has done almost the opposite. The powerful communication corporations traditionally have the relevant committee chairs in the House and Senate wrapped around their fingers, thanks, in part, to massive campaign contributions. Media firms also have a very powerful weapon at their disposal: control over the news media. This means that debates over media policy rarely get covered in a manner that might question the legitimacy of the corporate system, and that politicians are especially sensitive to staying on good terms with the corporate media lobby.
In this context, it certainly looked like the fix was in when FCC Chair Michael Powell announced the formal review of the media ownership rules in 2002. But history has taken an unpredicted turn. Two of the five members of the FCC have shown themselves to be remarkable public servants, of a caliber found on the FCC perhaps only three or four other times in its 69 year history. This was a fluke. The two members, Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein, were patronage appointments to fill the two Democratic slots on the five member FCC. It just so happened that they had a degree of backbone rarely found in that far from august body. Copps, especially, insisted that it would be inappropriate for there to be any change in the media ownership rules without extensive public input. He pressed Powell to hold public hearings around the nation on the matter. Powell attended a portion of the first unofficial hearing in New York in January and convened one official public hearing in Richmond in February. But otherwise he has refused to attend any of the ten public hearings on the media ownership rules that have been held subsequently all across the nation. None of the three Republicans has attended any of these ten hearings. Copps, on the other hand, has attended all of them, and Adelstein some of them. These hearings are historically unprecedented and mark a turning point in media activism in the United States. Many of them have been jam packed with people. After seeing hundreds of people hanging from the rafters in Vermont for an April hearing, one congressional aide remarked that there is more interest concerning media policy than on almost any other issue.
There is a very good reason why Powell and the Republicans on the FCC have boycotted the public hearings: the sentiment there, from thousands and thousands of citizens from all walks of life, has been almost unanimously opposed to relaxing or eliminating the ownership rules. Indeed, much of the sentiment has been in favor of strengthening the ownership rules, especially in radio. Likewise, as of May 8, 2003, a comprehensive analysis of the 9,065 statements on media ownership submitted to the FCC by citizens unaffiliated with a self-interested corporation or trade organization found that only 11 of these submissions supported changing the rules. Eleven! That means something like 99.8 percent of the statements opposed what Powell and the Republicans on the FCC are proposing to do! One could argue that there is as much support for putting Osama bin Laden's bust on Mount Rushmore as there is for letting fewer and fewer massive corporations own more and more media. Even conservative groups, like the National Rifle Association and Brent Bozell's Media Research Center, oppose gutting the media ownership rules.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this has nothing to do with free markets or a free press, but that it is all about cronyism and corruption. The massive media firms that have bankrolled and supported the Bush administration want their payback and the administration is determined to give it to them, the public be damned. Commerce Secretary Donald Evans wrote to Powell telling him to move full speed ahead with the rules changes regardless of Congressional or public opposition.
Powell has explained his absence from the ten media ownership hearings on the grounds that he is too busy too attend them and that he knows enough about what the public thinks. At the same time, Powell finds time to address the corporate media trade association meetings and he has an open door policy for corporate media CEOs like Rupert Murdoch. The research that the FCC has developed to justify relaxing the media rules has been kept top secret; members of Congress and leading media scholars have asked to see it and been turned down. Copps and Adelstein have raised their concerns about the lack of research and debate over the proposed changes to Powell but they have been ignored and marginalized.
Powell and the Republican members of the FCC repeatedly make one claim, and only one claim, to justify relaxing the media ownership rules: That the massive increase in media channels through multi-channel television and the Internet has eliminated the need for ownership regulation of broadcast media, because the scarcity of the airwaves is no longer a relevant issue. The reality of media today, the argument goes, is that the media system is no longer oligopolistic, but, instead, it is hyper-competitive. The granting of monopoly rights to broadcast channels no longer confers monopolistic market power in the marketplace. Media ownership regulation is justified on the grounds that spectrum scarcity meant the government had a duty to regulate the amount of ownership to protect the public interest. In this era of abundance, owning multitudes of broadcast stations is no longer monopolistic or a threat to diversity and should not be prohibited. The market will be a better regulator than the government. Or, to put it another way, Powell and his colleagues argue that corporations are no longer getting scarce and valuable beachfront property when they receive a monopoly license form the FCC; rather, they are merely getting one grain of sand on the media beach. If the claim is wrong, however, then the movement to eliminate these rules can be seen as little more than an opportunistic effort by powerful special interests to alter regulations to suit their naked self-interest. The problem with this claim is that it is not true. The Internet has changed much about our world, but it has not undermined the tremendous market power granted by federal license to use scarce broadcast spectrum. In ten years of the commercialized Internet, despite hundreds of millions of dollars in investment, arguably not a single original commercially viable media content site has been launched. Not one. More important, the value of radio and TV stations continues to grow at a much faster rate than the rate of inflation. If the Internet and digital technologies were indeed undermining the value of scarce radio and TV channels, we would expect TV channels to be approaching the point where they would have much less value in the market because of all the new competition. It would be irrational to spend, say, $100 million for a mere TV station when the same money could create scores of incredible websites. But this mythological era of media abundance does not exist in any meaningful sense. These licenses to TV and radio channels still confer considerable, even extraordinary, market power. That is why their value continues to shoot up. Hence the legal justification for the media ownership rules is fully intact. Congress understood that it was only when the new communication technologies generated an increase in bona fide commercial competition that the FCC should eliminate or relax the ownership rules. That is why the 1996 Telecommunications Act did not eliminate those rules and Congress advised the FCC to do so down the road when the market conditions had changed. It is clear, as of now, they have not changed in such a way to justify the elimination of media ownership rules. That day remains off in the future, as far as anyone can tell. And if the FCC lets the giant firms get even larger, it will go a very long way toward letting these firms have the market power to ward off any threat of new competition.
Powell has called for a June 2 vote on his proposed media ownership rules changes. Until then all attention is focused on getting Congress to force the FCC to desist from this plan. Here, too, we are beginning to see considerable movement to oppose the FCC, though we have a very long way to go. A large coalition of journalists, labor, musicians, civic organizations, peace groups, consumer groups, and organizations representing women and minority groups has begun organizing in earnest around this issue. The crucial ingredient now is to generate as much popular comment as possible. Emails, letters and phone calls need to be sent to members of Congress and the FCC. As I note at the top of this piece, the website www.mediareform.net provides an easy-to-use index of all the leading campaigns, including those of MoveOn, Common Cause and Consumers Union. It is imperative that everyone who reads this piece circulate it, or at least the website, to everyone that they know. Even if we lose on June 2, this is not the final battle in the war. Instead, it is the first battle in what is emerging as a broad democratic movement to popularize media policy-making with the aim of generating a more diverse and competitive media system with a strong and independent nonprofit and noncommercial sector.
[copy/pasted from the latest NWOPC email digest]
MAKING MEDIA MONOPOLY PART OF THE CONSTITUTION
by Robert W. McChesney, ZNet InterActive May 15, 2003
*Robert W. McChesney is the co-author, with John Nichols, of OurMedia, Not Theirs: The Democratic Struggle Against Corporate Media (Seven Stories).
As I write this, the Federal Communications Commission is poised to vote on June 2 to relax several longstanding media ownership rules. By nearly all accounts it will lead to a wave of media mergers and market consolidation that is unprecedented in U.S. history. In my view, such moves would be a disaster for our society. If you know about this and want to register your opposition, go to www.mediareform.net, where there are links to all the major campaigns to stop the FCC, along with links to news articles and considerable background information on the topic. Public pressure can stop the FCC. The www.mediareform.net site also has a comprehensive index to all of the groups working on media reform issues in the United States, as well as a complete list of the issues these groups are working on.
If you want an overview of the current situation, stay here and read on.
In 1996, Congress passed the Telecommunications Reform Act, which amended the Communications Act of 1934. The 1996 Telecom Act was a corrupt piece of work, being the product of the largest corporate lobbies all salivating at the prospect of rewriting the law to provide them a larger slice of the action. The best way to grasp how the communications law was passed is to imagine the classic scene from The Godfather II, when Hyman Roth, Michael Corleone and several other American gangsters meet on a rooftop in Havana to divide up the island between them in pre-Castro Cuba. They do so by ceremoniously each taking a slice of a cake with the outline of Cuba on it, and while they are doing this, Hyman Roth intones, "Isn't it great to be in a country with a government that believes in a partnership with private enterprise." The 1996 Telecom Act was drafted on that proverbial rooftop, only instead of mob families there were trade associations like the National Association of Broadcasters and corporations like News Corporation and Viacom. The public played no role in the Telecom Act, and it received virtually no news media coverage, except in the business and trade press where it was covered as an issue of importance to owners and investors, not citizens in a democracy. The powerful lobbies - much like Roth and Corleone - were duking it out with each other for the largest slice of the cake, but they all agreed that the public had no right to participate in the process. It was their cake.
One of the major aims of the corporate communication lobbies in the 1996 law was to scrap longstanding ownership laws that prevented them from getting larger. These ownership restrictions had been historically about the only meaningful regulations on large media firms. They prevented, among other things, firms from owning multiple TV stations in the same community, TV stations in every community in the nation, or TV stations and radio stations and newspapers and cable TV systems in the same community. The theory behind these ownership restrictions was that when the government granted firms monopoly rights to scarce TV or radio channels, it needed to place restrictions on what media the firms could own, so that the firms would not use their monopoly profits (owning a TV or radio station has historically been the closest thing to having the right to print money in our economy, except, perhaps, for the right to own a monopoly newspaper) to corner the market on all media. That would be a very bad thing for democracy.
One might logically ask how these media ownership restrictions could have ever come into existence, if the system was so corrupt that the Havana rooftop analogy captures the policy making process. To some extent it was because there was (and is) such a deep seated hostility to concentrated media ownership in the American population. It simply violates every core tenet of a free society to have a small number of powerful media owners. To the extent there has been popular involvement in media policy making, it has been to push for more competitive media markets. Even more important, there were powerful commercial interests that wanted restrictions on media ownership. Companies that owned a small number of radio or TV stations, for example, understood that if ownership limits were lifted, huge firms would be able to muscle them out of the market. And while firms wanted to see ownership limits removed in some markets, they were very happy to have them in other markets, where, for example, they were selling their products.
By 1996, however, the largest media firms had grown so large they thought their power could tip the balance and remove the ownership limits. They miscalculated. The powerful lobbies could not reach a consensus on which ownership laws to scrap and which ones to relax. Accordingly, the 1996 law called for the five-member FCC to merely review the ownership rules every two years with an eye to eliminate them when conditions permitted. The theory was that eventually, when the Internet and digital TV worked their multi-channel magic, the media system would be so awash in media voices that there would be no reason to be concerned about media monopoly. So at that time it would be absurd, not to mention unfair, so saddle some media firms, those that worked in radio, TV and cable, with ownership limits, while other media firms were not so encumbered. The FCC's job was to determine when the time of technological plenty had arrived and then dump the media ownership rules.
This process is often referred to as "deregulation," but it is nothing of the kind. The framing of the issue as one of "regulation" versus "deregulation" or "free markets" is ideologically loaded propaganda that obscures what is happening in total. When media ownership rules are eliminated, there is still plenty of regulation. If you or I persist in trying to broadcast on a frequency licensed to Clear Channel, we will be arrested and sent to prison. That is serious regulation. Regulation is going to exist no matter what. Even a so-called free market media system requires massive regulation. The real framing is whether there will be regulation that makes some effort to serve the public interest or broad publicly determined values, or whether regulation will be done exclusively to the benefit of corporate interests without any public involvement. It is the latter that has been misnamed "deregulation."
There was only one media industry in 1996 where a consensus could be reached to relax media ownership rules, and that was radio. In radio broadcasting the small station owning firms lost their resolve or their ability to fight the big station owning groups and the 1996 act lifted the national limit on the number of stations a single company could own. It also let a single company own up to eight stations in a single market. The results have been catastrophic for everyone except the owners of the handful of massive companies like Clear Channel (which now owns over 1,200 stations) and Viacom that have come to rule the roost in radio. In the past seven years, U.S. radio has become vastly more commercial and has lost much of its localism and any commitment to covering the news. Ironically, what by all rights should be our most decentralized and democratic medium -- because it is so inexpensive to produce a good signal -- has become our most regimented and standardized. You could be airdropped into any city in the United States and hear the same oldies song or the same right wing blather. And this has nothing to do with the natural workings of any "free market;" it is the direct result of corrupt policy making.
What has happened in radio is about to be visited on the balance of the media system. We know what many of you are thinking -- "hey, the media system sucks, it can't get any worse." But one look at radio should tell you otherwise. It can get worse, much worse. And it will, unless we stop the FCC. Moreover, the political power these ever larger media firms will accrue, will make any prospective media reform down the road that much more difficult.
The FCC conducted biennial reviews of the ownership rules in 1998 and 2000, and determined the rules should remain in place. At this point the biennial review was regarded as a benign and unreviewable process. The industry lobby went through the court system to get the rules thrown out. In 2002 a right wing federal appeals court demanded that the FCC provide a justification for keeping the ownership rules, or else they would have to be thrown out. Be clear that it was the appeals court, acting as the advocate of corporations that put the new aggressive pro-industry spin on the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The appeals court interpreted the law to mean that unless the FCC could provide compelling, even overwhelming, evidence to justify keeping media ownership rules, they should be scrapped. The Court construed the statute as a one-way street, with a strong presumption in favor of deregulation. This put Michael Powell, the Chair of the FCC in an unusual position. He was supposed to go before the courts and make the case on behalf of keeping media ownership rules in the public interest. Powell was famous for his pro-industry rah-rah sentiments, and his hostility to regulation in the public interest. Having him be responsible for defending media ownership rules was along the lines of putting Katherine Harris in charge of Al Gore's Florida recount team in 2000. Powell responded by authorizing a formal FCC review of the six main media ownership rules.
At this point, the spring and summer of 2002, the odds that the FCC would dump the rules without much of a fight were very high. Traditionally the FCC has been a corrupt body, not in the sense that its members are explicitly bribed to make specific decisions, but in the broader ethical sense of the term. The five FCC members are unknown to the general public and have virtually no contact with them. They are surrounded instead by corporate CEOs, lawyers and lobbyists. As one FCC Chairman put it, "the job of the FCC is to regulate fights between the super wealthy and the super super wealthy. The public has nothing to do with it." Over time, logically, the FCC has come to see its mission as being an advocate for the very firms it is regulating; the more profitable they are, the better the job the FCC is doing. This worldview has been encouraged by the tradition that members of the FCC tend to move on to extremely lucrative careers working for the very firms they once regulated. As it is often put, when a firm comes before the FCC, FCC members do not know whether to regard it as an entity to be regulated or as a prospective future employer. This applies across the board, to Republicans and Democrats alike. The FCC Chair who preceded Michael Powell, Democrat William Kennard, has gone on to making big bucks working on telecommunication deals for the Carlyle Group.
In theory, and in law, the FCC merely implements the will of Congress. It should be the job of Congress to force the FCC to act in the public interest, and prevent cronyism and corruption. In practice, Congress has done almost the opposite. The powerful communication corporations traditionally have the relevant committee chairs in the House and Senate wrapped around their fingers, thanks, in part, to massive campaign contributions. Media firms also have a very powerful weapon at their disposal: control over the news media. This means that debates over media policy rarely get covered in a manner that might question the legitimacy of the corporate system, and that politicians are especially sensitive to staying on good terms with the corporate media lobby.
In this context, it certainly looked like the fix was in when FCC Chair Michael Powell announced the formal review of the media ownership rules in 2002. But history has taken an unpredicted turn. Two of the five members of the FCC have shown themselves to be remarkable public servants, of a caliber found on the FCC perhaps only three or four other times in its 69 year history. This was a fluke. The two members, Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein, were patronage appointments to fill the two Democratic slots on the five member FCC. It just so happened that they had a degree of backbone rarely found in that far from august body. Copps, especially, insisted that it would be inappropriate for there to be any change in the media ownership rules without extensive public input. He pressed Powell to hold public hearings around the nation on the matter. Powell attended a portion of the first unofficial hearing in New York in January and convened one official public hearing in Richmond in February. But otherwise he has refused to attend any of the ten public hearings on the media ownership rules that have been held subsequently all across the nation. None of the three Republicans has attended any of these ten hearings. Copps, on the other hand, has attended all of them, and Adelstein some of them. These hearings are historically unprecedented and mark a turning point in media activism in the United States. Many of them have been jam packed with people. After seeing hundreds of people hanging from the rafters in Vermont for an April hearing, one congressional aide remarked that there is more interest concerning media policy than on almost any other issue.
There is a very good reason why Powell and the Republicans on the FCC have boycotted the public hearings: the sentiment there, from thousands and thousands of citizens from all walks of life, has been almost unanimously opposed to relaxing or eliminating the ownership rules. Indeed, much of the sentiment has been in favor of strengthening the ownership rules, especially in radio. Likewise, as of May 8, 2003, a comprehensive analysis of the 9,065 statements on media ownership submitted to the FCC by citizens unaffiliated with a self-interested corporation or trade organization found that only 11 of these submissions supported changing the rules. Eleven! That means something like 99.8 percent of the statements opposed what Powell and the Republicans on the FCC are proposing to do! One could argue that there is as much support for putting Osama bin Laden's bust on Mount Rushmore as there is for letting fewer and fewer massive corporations own more and more media. Even conservative groups, like the National Rifle Association and Brent Bozell's Media Research Center, oppose gutting the media ownership rules.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this has nothing to do with free markets or a free press, but that it is all about cronyism and corruption. The massive media firms that have bankrolled and supported the Bush administration want their payback and the administration is determined to give it to them, the public be damned. Commerce Secretary Donald Evans wrote to Powell telling him to move full speed ahead with the rules changes regardless of Congressional or public opposition.
Powell has explained his absence from the ten media ownership hearings on the grounds that he is too busy too attend them and that he knows enough about what the public thinks. At the same time, Powell finds time to address the corporate media trade association meetings and he has an open door policy for corporate media CEOs like Rupert Murdoch. The research that the FCC has developed to justify relaxing the media rules has been kept top secret; members of Congress and leading media scholars have asked to see it and been turned down. Copps and Adelstein have raised their concerns about the lack of research and debate over the proposed changes to Powell but they have been ignored and marginalized.
Powell and the Republican members of the FCC repeatedly make one claim, and only one claim, to justify relaxing the media ownership rules: That the massive increase in media channels through multi-channel television and the Internet has eliminated the need for ownership regulation of broadcast media, because the scarcity of the airwaves is no longer a relevant issue. The reality of media today, the argument goes, is that the media system is no longer oligopolistic, but, instead, it is hyper-competitive. The granting of monopoly rights to broadcast channels no longer confers monopolistic market power in the marketplace. Media ownership regulation is justified on the grounds that spectrum scarcity meant the government had a duty to regulate the amount of ownership to protect the public interest. In this era of abundance, owning multitudes of broadcast stations is no longer monopolistic or a threat to diversity and should not be prohibited. The market will be a better regulator than the government. Or, to put it another way, Powell and his colleagues argue that corporations are no longer getting scarce and valuable beachfront property when they receive a monopoly license form the FCC; rather, they are merely getting one grain of sand on the media beach. If the claim is wrong, however, then the movement to eliminate these rules can be seen as little more than an opportunistic effort by powerful special interests to alter regulations to suit their naked self-interest. The problem with this claim is that it is not true. The Internet has changed much about our world, but it has not undermined the tremendous market power granted by federal license to use scarce broadcast spectrum. In ten years of the commercialized Internet, despite hundreds of millions of dollars in investment, arguably not a single original commercially viable media content site has been launched. Not one. More important, the value of radio and TV stations continues to grow at a much faster rate than the rate of inflation. If the Internet and digital technologies were indeed undermining the value of scarce radio and TV channels, we would expect TV channels to be approaching the point where they would have much less value in the market because of all the new competition. It would be irrational to spend, say, $100 million for a mere TV station when the same money could create scores of incredible websites. But this mythological era of media abundance does not exist in any meaningful sense. These licenses to TV and radio channels still confer considerable, even extraordinary, market power. That is why their value continues to shoot up. Hence the legal justification for the media ownership rules is fully intact. Congress understood that it was only when the new communication technologies generated an increase in bona fide commercial competition that the FCC should eliminate or relax the ownership rules. That is why the 1996 Telecommunications Act did not eliminate those rules and Congress advised the FCC to do so down the road when the market conditions had changed. It is clear, as of now, they have not changed in such a way to justify the elimination of media ownership rules. That day remains off in the future, as far as anyone can tell. And if the FCC lets the giant firms get even larger, it will go a very long way toward letting these firms have the market power to ward off any threat of new competition.
Powell has called for a June 2 vote on his proposed media ownership rules changes. Until then all attention is focused on getting Congress to force the FCC to desist from this plan. Here, too, we are beginning to see considerable movement to oppose the FCC, though we have a very long way to go. A large coalition of journalists, labor, musicians, civic organizations, peace groups, consumer groups, and organizations representing women and minority groups has begun organizing in earnest around this issue. The crucial ingredient now is to generate as much popular comment as possible. Emails, letters and phone calls need to be sent to members of Congress and the FCC. As I note at the top of this piece, the website www.mediareform.net provides an easy-to-use index of all the leading campaigns, including those of MoveOn, Common Cause and Consumers Union. It is imperative that everyone who reads this piece circulate it, or at least the website, to everyone that they know. Even if we lose on June 2, this is not the final battle in the war. Instead, it is the first battle in what is emerging as a broad democratic movement to popularize media policy-making with the aim of generating a more diverse and competitive media system with a strong and independent nonprofit and noncommercial sector.
Saturday, May 17, 2003
UM, WHERE'S THE COMMENTS? THE VOTES? ANYONE? ANYONE? BUELLER?
Don't forget to scroll down and peruse the nominees for Best Post from Year 1 of The Pond. Meanwhile, got a new Pick To Click: My fellow peacenik and war tax resister (and almost-mayor of Toledo) Mike Ferner tipped me off to a guy named Mark Morford who writes for SFGate.com. Below is just a sample of his work. For more, the link's over by there.--->
***
President John F. Kennedy had an affair with a 19-year-old intern who traveled with him on official trips, according to a new biography. "She had no skills. She could answer the phone," Robert Dallek, author of "An Unfinished Life," told "Dateline NBC". "Apparently, her only skill was to provide sexual release for JFK on those trips and maybe in the White House." Dallek learned of the affair from a White House aide, Barbara Gamarekian, whose oral history was recently unsealed. President Bush, who obtains sexual release from dry humping a mangy taxidermied colt named Binkers while snorting premium Peruvian blow through the hollow case of an ExxonMobile ballpoint pen, was visibly appalled and shaken at the news, unless that was just the lithium and Demerol, as was Dick Cheney, whose idea of sexual release is, of course, a dozen gin/Viagra Martinis and cranking the defibrillator on 10 and having Lynney stuff used nylons into every orifice and then coating his body with liver-flavored kibble and letting a swarm of rabid Chihuahuas in heat run all over his mounds of milky white cottage cheese while Lynney jumps on a trampoline and does a sloppy heavily Paxiled strip-tease and belts out 'Hit Me Baby One More Time' through a megaphone.
***
Don't forget to scroll down and peruse the nominees for Best Post from Year 1 of The Pond. Meanwhile, got a new Pick To Click: My fellow peacenik and war tax resister (and almost-mayor of Toledo) Mike Ferner tipped me off to a guy named Mark Morford who writes for SFGate.com. Below is just a sample of his work. For more, the link's over by there.--->
***
President John F. Kennedy had an affair with a 19-year-old intern who traveled with him on official trips, according to a new biography. "She had no skills. She could answer the phone," Robert Dallek, author of "An Unfinished Life," told "Dateline NBC". "Apparently, her only skill was to provide sexual release for JFK on those trips and maybe in the White House." Dallek learned of the affair from a White House aide, Barbara Gamarekian, whose oral history was recently unsealed. President Bush, who obtains sexual release from dry humping a mangy taxidermied colt named Binkers while snorting premium Peruvian blow through the hollow case of an ExxonMobile ballpoint pen, was visibly appalled and shaken at the news, unless that was just the lithium and Demerol, as was Dick Cheney, whose idea of sexual release is, of course, a dozen gin/Viagra Martinis and cranking the defibrillator on 10 and having Lynney stuff used nylons into every orifice and then coating his body with liver-flavored kibble and letting a swarm of rabid Chihuahuas in heat run all over his mounds of milky white cottage cheese while Lynney jumps on a trampoline and does a sloppy heavily Paxiled strip-tease and belts out 'Hit Me Baby One More Time' through a megaphone.
***
Tuesday, May 13, 2003
A FEW EXCERPTS FROM THIS WEEK'S NWOPC E-MAIL NEWSLETTER:
***
If the U.S. chooses to occupy other lands and set up puppet governments then the U.S. will encounter resistance. This is creating an ongoing world war that will last decades. Other countries in the area and around the world will seek to act to stop empire building. If you are going to build and maintain a world empire then it is reasonable that there will be opposition, that the U.S. military will be in constant battles around the world to maintain the empire, and that there will be attacks on U.S. soil. Certain actions will bring about certain reactions. This isn't that hard to understand.
***
According to the Canadian Web site Straightgoods.ca, the Bush administration (a) failed to protest when the Republican-controlled House Budget Committee voted to cut $25 billion in veterans benefits over the next 10 years; (b) proposed cutting $172 million from impact aid programs that provide school funding for children of military personnel; and (c) ordered the Department of Veterans Affairs to stop publicizing health benefits available to veterans.
But the guy looks great in a flight suit, doesn't he?
***
THE CHINA SYNDROME
By Paul Krugman
From NY Times Op-Ed, May 13, 2003
(MY OWN COMMENTS ARE INSERTED THUSLY.--DJP)
A funny thing happened during the Iraq war: many Americans turned to the BBC for their TV news. They were looking for an alternative point of view — something they couldn't find on domestic networks, which, in the words of the BBC's director general, "wrapped themselves in the American flag and substituted patriotism for impartiality." (HEY, SOUNDS LIKE CLEAR CHANNEL!--DJP)
Leave aside the rights and wrongs of the war itself, and consider the paradox. The BBC is owned by the British government, and one might have expected it to support that government's policies. In fact, however, it tried hard — too hard, its critics say — to stay impartial. America's TV (AND RADIO--DJP) networks are privately owned, yet they behaved like state-run media (I.E. CLEAR CHANNEL--DJP).
What explains this paradox? It may have something to do with the China syndrome. No, not the one involving nuclear reactors — the one exhibited by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation when dealing with the government of the People's Republic.
In the United States, Mr. Murdoch's media empire — which includes Fox News and The New York Post — is known for its flag-waving patriotism. But all that patriotism didn't stop him from, as a Fortune article put it, "pandering to China's repressive regime to get his programming into that vast market." The pandering included dropping the BBC's World Service — which reports news China's government doesn't want disseminated — from his satellite programming, and having his publishing company cancel the publication of a book critical of the Chinese regime.
Can something like that happen in this country? Of course it can. Through its policy decisions — especially, though not only, decisions involving media regulation — the U.S. government can reward media companies that please it (I.E. CLEAR CHANNEL--DJP), punish those that don't. This gives private networks an incentive to curry favor with those in power. Yet because the networks aren't government-owned, they aren't subject to the kind of scrutiny faced by the BBC, which must take care not to seem like a tool of the ruling party. So we shouldn't be surprised if America's "independent" television (AND RADIO--DJP) is far more deferential to those in power than the state-run systems in Britain or — for another example — Israel.
A recent report by Stephen Labaton of The Times contained a nice illustration of the U.S. government's ability to reward media companies that do what it wants (I.E. CLEAR CHANNEL--DJP). The issue was a proposal by Michael Powell, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, to relax regulations on media ownership. The proposal, formally presented yesterday, may be summarized as a plan to let the bigger fish (I.E. CLEAR CHANNEL--DJP) eat more of the smaller fish. Big media companies will be allowed to have a larger share of the national market and own more TV stations in any given local market, and many restrictions on "cross-ownership" — owning radio stations, TV stations and newspapers in the same local market — will be lifted.
The plan's defects aside — it will further reduce the diversity of news available to most people — what struck me was the horse-trading involved. One media group wrote to Mr. Powell, dropping its opposition to part of his plan "in return for favorable commission action" on another matter. That was indiscreet, but you'd have to be very naive not to imagine that there are a lot of implicit quid pro quos out there.
And the implicit trading surely extends to news content. Imagine a TV news executive considering whether to run a major story that might damage the Bush administration — say, a follow-up on Senator Bob Graham's charge that a Congressional report on Sept. 11 has been kept classified because it would raise embarrassing questions about the administration's performance. Surely it would occur to that executive that the administration could punish any network running that story.
Meanwhile, both the formal rules and the codes of ethics that formerly prevented blatant partisanship are gone or ignored. Neil Cavuto of Fox News is an anchor, not a commentator. Yet after Baghdad's fall he told "those who opposed the liberation of Iraq" — a large minority — that "you were sickening then; you are sickening now." Fair and balanced.
We don't have censorship in this country; it's still possible to find different points of view. But we do have a system in which the major media companies (I.E. CLEAR CHANNEL--DJP) have strong incentives to present the news in a way that pleases the party in power, and no incentive not to.
***
If the U.S. chooses to occupy other lands and set up puppet governments then the U.S. will encounter resistance. This is creating an ongoing world war that will last decades. Other countries in the area and around the world will seek to act to stop empire building. If you are going to build and maintain a world empire then it is reasonable that there will be opposition, that the U.S. military will be in constant battles around the world to maintain the empire, and that there will be attacks on U.S. soil. Certain actions will bring about certain reactions. This isn't that hard to understand.
***
According to the Canadian Web site Straightgoods.ca, the Bush administration (a) failed to protest when the Republican-controlled House Budget Committee voted to cut $25 billion in veterans benefits over the next 10 years; (b) proposed cutting $172 million from impact aid programs that provide school funding for children of military personnel; and (c) ordered the Department of Veterans Affairs to stop publicizing health benefits available to veterans.
But the guy looks great in a flight suit, doesn't he?
***
THE CHINA SYNDROME
By Paul Krugman
From NY Times Op-Ed, May 13, 2003
(MY OWN COMMENTS ARE INSERTED THUSLY.--DJP)
A funny thing happened during the Iraq war: many Americans turned to the BBC for their TV news. They were looking for an alternative point of view — something they couldn't find on domestic networks, which, in the words of the BBC's director general, "wrapped themselves in the American flag and substituted patriotism for impartiality." (HEY, SOUNDS LIKE CLEAR CHANNEL!--DJP)
Leave aside the rights and wrongs of the war itself, and consider the paradox. The BBC is owned by the British government, and one might have expected it to support that government's policies. In fact, however, it tried hard — too hard, its critics say — to stay impartial. America's TV (AND RADIO--DJP) networks are privately owned, yet they behaved like state-run media (I.E. CLEAR CHANNEL--DJP).
What explains this paradox? It may have something to do with the China syndrome. No, not the one involving nuclear reactors — the one exhibited by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation when dealing with the government of the People's Republic.
In the United States, Mr. Murdoch's media empire — which includes Fox News and The New York Post — is known for its flag-waving patriotism. But all that patriotism didn't stop him from, as a Fortune article put it, "pandering to China's repressive regime to get his programming into that vast market." The pandering included dropping the BBC's World Service — which reports news China's government doesn't want disseminated — from his satellite programming, and having his publishing company cancel the publication of a book critical of the Chinese regime.
Can something like that happen in this country? Of course it can. Through its policy decisions — especially, though not only, decisions involving media regulation — the U.S. government can reward media companies that please it (I.E. CLEAR CHANNEL--DJP), punish those that don't. This gives private networks an incentive to curry favor with those in power. Yet because the networks aren't government-owned, they aren't subject to the kind of scrutiny faced by the BBC, which must take care not to seem like a tool of the ruling party. So we shouldn't be surprised if America's "independent" television (AND RADIO--DJP) is far more deferential to those in power than the state-run systems in Britain or — for another example — Israel.
A recent report by Stephen Labaton of The Times contained a nice illustration of the U.S. government's ability to reward media companies that do what it wants (I.E. CLEAR CHANNEL--DJP). The issue was a proposal by Michael Powell, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, to relax regulations on media ownership. The proposal, formally presented yesterday, may be summarized as a plan to let the bigger fish (I.E. CLEAR CHANNEL--DJP) eat more of the smaller fish. Big media companies will be allowed to have a larger share of the national market and own more TV stations in any given local market, and many restrictions on "cross-ownership" — owning radio stations, TV stations and newspapers in the same local market — will be lifted.
The plan's defects aside — it will further reduce the diversity of news available to most people — what struck me was the horse-trading involved. One media group wrote to Mr. Powell, dropping its opposition to part of his plan "in return for favorable commission action" on another matter. That was indiscreet, but you'd have to be very naive not to imagine that there are a lot of implicit quid pro quos out there.
And the implicit trading surely extends to news content. Imagine a TV news executive considering whether to run a major story that might damage the Bush administration — say, a follow-up on Senator Bob Graham's charge that a Congressional report on Sept. 11 has been kept classified because it would raise embarrassing questions about the administration's performance. Surely it would occur to that executive that the administration could punish any network running that story.
Meanwhile, both the formal rules and the codes of ethics that formerly prevented blatant partisanship are gone or ignored. Neil Cavuto of Fox News is an anchor, not a commentator. Yet after Baghdad's fall he told "those who opposed the liberation of Iraq" — a large minority — that "you were sickening then; you are sickening now." Fair and balanced.
We don't have censorship in this country; it's still possible to find different points of view. But we do have a system in which the major media companies (I.E. CLEAR CHANNEL--DJP) have strong incentives to present the news in a way that pleases the party in power, and no incentive not to.
Monday, May 12, 2003
OOPS. WE MISSED THE PARTY. OH WELL, THERE WAS NO CAKE ANYWAY.
Um, yeah. Silly me, I thought today was the one-year anniversary of The Duck Pond. But I checked the archives to make sure and, heh heh, turns out it was Saturday. My bad. (Hey, at least I knew it was May, the date started with a 1, and it was an even number. So give me SOME credit.)
So, to save face, let's just label this Duck Pond Anniversary Week! Wait, shit, can't do that. That would have been last week. Aw, fuck it, the week started Saturday, dammit. So there. Anyone got a problem with that? Blow me.
Anyhoo, stay tuned, sometime this week I'll give yas a chance to vote for the best post from the Pond's first year of operation.
Um, yeah. Silly me, I thought today was the one-year anniversary of The Duck Pond. But I checked the archives to make sure and, heh heh, turns out it was Saturday. My bad. (Hey, at least I knew it was May, the date started with a 1, and it was an even number. So give me SOME credit.)
So, to save face, let's just label this Duck Pond Anniversary Week! Wait, shit, can't do that. That would have been last week. Aw, fuck it, the week started Saturday, dammit. So there. Anyone got a problem with that? Blow me.
Anyhoo, stay tuned, sometime this week I'll give yas a chance to vote for the best post from the Pond's first year of operation.
I'LL SEE YOU ON THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON
Hey campers, just wanted to post a reminder about the upcoming lunar eclipse this Thursday night. CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFO
Hey campers, just wanted to post a reminder about the upcoming lunar eclipse this Thursday night. CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFO
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