Good stuff from Mark Weisbrot on media ownership and regulation in relation to what kind of civic society we are going to have. This is in reference to some of the goings ons taking place in South America these days, most of which are happening completely under the radar of public consciousness in North American society.

In Argentina, a new media law seeks to break up the media monopoly held by the Clarín Group, which according to press reports controls 60 percent of the media. The Brazilian government created, for the first time in 2007, a federally-launched public TV station. The Bolivian government, which faces perhaps the most hostile media in the hemisphere, has also expanded public media. What all of these governments are doing - although they would not put it that way - is trying to move their media more in the direction of what we have in the United States. That is, a media which is heavily biased toward the interests of the wealthy and the upper classes, but nonetheless adheres to certain journalistic norms that limit the degree to which the media is a direct, partisan, political actor.

———–

But international organizations or editorialists who take an absolutist or anarchist position with regard to countries such as Ecuador should apply the same standards to the United States and other rich countries.

For example, about two weeks before the 2004 U.S. Presidential election, the Sinclair Broadcast Group of Maryland, which owns the largest chain of TV stations in the U.S., decided to broadcast a film that was highly critical of candidate John Kerry. Nineteen Democratic senators sent a letter to the US Federal Communications Commission calling for an investigation, and some made public statements that Sinclair’s broadcast license could be in jeopardy. Sinclair backed down and did not broadcast the film.

The reason that such actions are rare in the United States is that the media rarely breaks certain rules or even comes close. This is true even of Fox News, which is considered to be the most partisan of major U.S. media outlets. And it is difficult to think of any cases of U.S. media doing what Teleamazonas did - broadcasting false reports that appear to be intended to destabilize the government. It simply would not be tolerated in the United States.

Of course the standards of the U.S. media are a low bar for comparison. After all, this is a country where the major media - by simply repeating official statements without challenge - helped lead us into the Iraq war by convincing a majority of Americans that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11. On the home front, our media has also convinced most Americans under 50 that they will never see their social security benefits - something that is about as likely as the end of all federal government authority in the United States. On the great issues of the day, the major U.S. media more often than not fail in their duty to inform the public.

———–

My own view is that the best solutions will be found in the area of introducing more competition in the media. The proposed media law in Argentina provides for the broadcast spectrum to be divided equally among private, public, and community media outlets. It is possible that Ecuador will move in a similar direction. These changes are especially important in a region where internet coverage reaches perhaps a third of the population, and the vast majority of citizens get their news from broadcast media. As Michael J. Copps, a commissioner on the U.S. Federal Communications Commission has emphasized, “Using the public airwaves is a privilege — a lucrative one — not a right.” He has argued, in the New York Times and elsewhere, that the U.S. government should use its legal authority to deny the renewal of broadcast licenses to media outlets that do not honor their pledge to serve the public interest.

Read the complete article Here (which also includes some insightful commentary from readers, as well).

Art Brodsky offers some good insights on the potentially larger and longer term ramifications of the FCC-Comcast court ruling.

By winning as big as it did, the result of Comcast’s case was that the FCC has, practically speaking, been stripped of its ability to regulate high-speed Internet access (broadband) services. That means if Comcast decided once again to throttle back the Internet traffic of its subscribers, consumers would have little to no recourse. There is no agency, no authority, which could look into a complaint and risk doing anything about it. Practically speaking (even if there is a very slim legal opening), broadband is free from regulation, a nirvana that the telecoms industry might once upon a time have gratefully accepted as its due, but now looks upon it with some trepidation because now the door has swung wide open to a full-scale discussion of bringing Internet broadband access services back under reasonable regulation.

Digital services offered by telephone companies were offered under regulations until 2005, continuing a line of consumer protections reaching back to 1934. Then it reclassified those digital services into the virtually deregulated bucket of “information services.” It was the FCC’s decision not to put the then-new cable modem service into that same regulatory bucket in 2002 that started the whole mess we find ourselves in today.

—————

The companies want to define their own obligations and then enforce them at their whim. Suppose someone wanted to add another principle to the ones that the FCC, thanks to the legal actions of Comcast, can’t enforce? Let’s say someone wanted to prohibit Internet access companies from discriminating against Web sites on the basis of financial relationships. Or let’s say telephone or cable companies moved all their popular services into a more expensive “managed” category, just like a cable network? What could consumers do under the KOS theory? Nothing. And if you have no choice of provider, you’re out of luck. But the free market has provided you at least with something, so be grateful, even if the companies with virtually no regulation have led the U.S. consistently downward in the Internet rankings since the deregulation of the past few years, with service more expensive and slower, with fewer choices for consumers than in comparable countries.

Don’t buy the argument that new regulation will screw up investment. Companies invest more or less depending on their business plans. With little to no regulation, Verizon will restrict its FIOS fiber service to about half of its customers. AT&T hasn’t deployed any fiber to the home.

—————

We need not have, as some commentators call it, the same rules that applied to the monopoly telephone network. On the other hand, some of the same principles, like non-discrimination, should exist regardless of the technology. The regulation of telephone companies existed as the technology evolved from the 1930s through the 2000s. It’s flexible and dynamic enough to protect Internet access. The regulatory system that could be put in place would be similar to that in place in the 1990s when, under the Clinton Administration, there were thousands of Internet Service Providers which leased access to telephone company lines and provided new services and choices to millions of consumers. Sadly, that competition was wiped out through the deregulation which followed.

Read The Complete Post

Some good insight by John Murrell from Good Morning Silicon Valley on the ramifications of the recent court ruling regarding Net Neutrality in the FCC-Comcast case…

So a federal appeals court has now ruled that the FCC does not have the authority to represent the public’s interests in the provision and management of Internet access. Comcast, the object of the FCC’s attempt at regulation (see “ FCC to Comcast: Go forth and sin no more “), and its fellow giant ISPs are toasting the decision, as are those who have an absolute faith in the ability of market forces, if left alone, to solve any problem. And that would be nice, if only there weren’t so many examples to the contrary.

The ultimate responsibility of a business is to follow the Prime Directive: maximize profit and shareholder value. A lot of times, that priority happily happens to coincide with our interests, when companies try to figure out what we need, compete to fill that need, and create jobs and wealth in the process. In theory, the Prime Directive keeps companies from acting against the public interest because it would cost them customers. In practice … well, that’s why we have regulatory agencies — because when push comes to shove, the Prime Directive trumps the broader public interest every time. And that’s why it’s untenable in the long run to have the nation’s communications regulators unable to have any say in the nation’s most dynamic and empowering communications medium.

When it comes to Internet access, the market’s system of checks and balances is out of whack. The industry is dominated by a few big companies, exempt from great masses of communications regulations, with their own financial interests in content as well as access, and sitting at the choke points of what is now an essential utility. Under the Prime Directive, if they can make more money by offering preferred treatment to their partners or by subverting the delivery of other traffic, who’s to stop them. Normally, the fear of losing customers would accomplish this, but in much of the country, there’s little choice when it comes to broadband providers and service is too important to do without. And while watchdog groups can expose bad behavior, they have no teeth. So if customers, competition and public scrutiny can’t keep the big ISPs honest, that leaves the responsibility with the government.

Read The Complete Post

For more on this very important issue, visit Savetheinternet.com

Quoting from the dust cover on this book by Lee Siegal…

“Lee Siegel argues that our ever-deepening immersion in life online doesn’t just reshape the ordinary rhythms of our days; it also reshapes our minds and culture in ways with which we haven’t yet reckoned. The Web and its cultural correlatives and by-products - such as the dominance of reality television and the rise of ‘bourgeois bohemian’ - have turned privacy in to performance, play in to commerce, and confused ’self-expression’ with art. And even as technology gurus ply their trade using the language of freedom and democracy, we cede more and more control of our freedom and individuality to the needs of the machine - that confluence of business and technology whose boundaries now stretch to encompass almost all human activity.

Siegel’s argument isn’t a Luddite intervention against the Internet itself but, rather, an appeal for us to contend with how it is transforming us all. Full of original insights, and bouyed by sharp wit, Against the Machine will force you to see our culture - for better or worse - in an entirely new way.”

Read more on this interesting book from reviews from The New York Times, Salon.com and Amazon.com

Though this year’s list of Academy Award-nominated documentaries is one of the strongest they’ve had in years, I’m hoping to see the award for feature-length documentary go to Burma VJ: Reporting From a Closed Country (along with the short doc category award going to my good friends Steve Bognar and Julia Reichert for their film The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant).

Burma VJ is a tremendously effective and important film about citizen media activists in Burma and the extraordinary risks they take to document government repression. The insights and lessons it provides for exposing not just the violent oppression of the military regime in Burma, but the influential power that grassroots, citizen-based media activism can have in confronting such oppression on the national and international political stage in the defense of human rights is transformative.

The video journalists and individual activists whose work is featured in this film took great personal risks to get this story out to the world. A number of them are currently incarcerated as a result of their roles in the Saffron Revolution. Some have been arrested and imprisoned by the government to lengthy sentences.

Please help the effort to free them by Signing The Petition To Free The Burma VJ Political Prisoners.

Watch a feature news story and interview with the film’s producers on Democracy Now!).

Watch an Interview with Burma VJ director Anders Østergaard and Khin Maung Win, Deputy Director of the Democratic Voice of Burma.

This is rich. Cablevision Corporation has asked to review the constitutionality of the so called “must-carry” regulations, that call for your local cable provider to carry the local channels on the system.

That’s one thing, but their rationale for why they shouldn’t be required to do this is because cable corporations aren’t actually monopolies or duopolies, but are a “wide-necked vase in which all flowers can bloom.” As a colleague of mine pointed out, I guess that’s true as long as they own all the flowers along with the vase!

To paraphrase from the founder of today’s Market-Leninist state of China, “Let a thousand channels bloom!”

Read the full article from Multichannel News

Tracy Rosenberg of Media Alliance delivers what is one of the best articles written on what public access is, what it represents, what it does, why it is important, and why it should be thoroughly protected. And the CAP ACT is current federal legislation which will do just that. Read more about the CAP ACT and how you can help support it here.

In May of 2009, I became a public access television producer. Couldn’t have picked a worse time.

Not because I don’t enjoy hosting and co-producing Media News. It’s a great joy to interview guests and try to shed a little light on the issues closest to my heart including: net neutrality and the digital divide, coverage of turmoil abroad and at home, the loss of local public affairs coverage and the rise in citizen journalism. I feel privileged to bring voices that need to be heard onto my local TV dial.

The reason it was bad timing is that the nation’s more than 3,000 public access centers are on the verge of extinction. Yours may go next week, next month or next year, but their days are numbered due to statewide cable franchising.

Statewide cable franchising is a term designed to put just about anybody to sleep, but here is what it really means. In the good old days, your local cable oligopoly, be it Comcast, AT&T or Time Warner, was required to go from county to county and negotiate for the right to be the cable provider of choice. In exchange for this mini-monopoly (whose value has been somewhat, but not entirely, degraded by the entrance of satellite providers like Dish and DirecTV), cities and counties could ask for things. Some were more or less asleep at the wheel, but many of them negotiated lots of great amenities: channels for governmental meetings to be aired, educational channels for the local schools and public channels for the citizens-at-large, sometimes including fully-staffed production studios that trained thousands of people in media making and citizen journalism.

Then AT&T decided this wouldn’t do, and launched their massive lobbying machine at the spunky and seriously undermanned PEGs (public, educational and governmental channels). They went state-by-state, legislature-by-legislature, and made their case that ever-rising cable rates could only be stemmed by more competition in the marketplace. The way to get more competition in the marketplace? End all this tiresome local negotiating and allow the giants to negotiate with one entity for all their franchises in the entire state. In my state, California, the law that became AB 2987 - The Digital Infrastructure and Video Competition Act, assigned the Public Utilities Commission to that task. In the end, similar laws passed in 28 of the 50 states between 2004 and 2009.

The results are predictable. The laws and the outcomes vary from state to state, but essentially operational funds were gutted and channel-slamming, the act of layering multiple local PEG channels behind one menu so nobody will ever find them, became the rule. The lowest common denominator won out.

You can see why this might matter to me. But you might be wondering why this matters to you. After all, many of us are pretty overwhelmed with the amount of information we’re already sorting through and we may have never watched a public access television program.

But lets not forget a few things. In my state, only 66% of households have high speed Internet access in their homes. The other 34% don’t. Polls consistently show that more than 51% of American adults still cite the television as their primary source for news and information. There are a lot of people sitting around flipping their remotes looking for stuff to watch. And there’s not always much out there.

Even for those of us busily carting our laptops about, the Internet is a land of affinities. Sites emerge from Google searches you initiate or as links from places you already frequent and people you know. In some ways, it’s a bit of a closed circle.

I was once channel surfing with a friend late one night. All of a sudden she yelled out “that’s my hairdresser”. Turned out her hairdresser was a pesticides activist in her spare time and hosted a once-a-month program on the dangers of common household products. We weren’t looking for information on toxins in cosmetics. We started watching because we knew this person. And we stayed watching because we learned something: both about the subject and about someone who lived in our neighborhood.

That’s the importance of community media: the proximity that brings issues and people together that might never ordinarily bump into each other though they live side by side.

It is only mass communications that provides the opportunity for someone to stumble upon something unique when they tire of watching Inside Edition. Every time it happens, it’s a little miracle.

These are not miracles we can afford to lose and its not looking too good right now. There is a bill, H.R 3745, the Community Access Preservation Act in the House of Representatives, which will go a long ways toward blunting the most damaging effects of the statewide franchising laws. But it needs support. It’s not a partisan thing. Call or write your representative today and tell them “Hey, I want to be able to watch my county board of supervisors duke it out till all hours of the night. I want that working mom to be able to take GED prep courses on the TV around here. And I want my hairdresser to make the world just a little safer for teenage girls buying their first makeup products”.

It doesn’t totally compensate for those ever-rising cable television bills, but it helps.

And if you still have one, check our your local public access television channel. You won’t be sorry you did.

Read The Original Article from The Huffington Post

UnCommon Sense TV - “Media Bill of Rights” An overview on the “Bill of Media Rights” as promoted and advanced by a large coalition of organizations and activists working towards a more democratic media system. The program includes a point-by-point description of the principles inherent in it and required for a media system that is truly reflective of and responsive to the needs and interests of the public. Amongst these discussed are the inherent rights to free expression, and for access to the platforms for being able to receive that expression, particularly those whose accessibility is provide through “net neutrality” and well-funded local public access. The program also features a brief history and overview as to the importance of media to the functioning of, if not the very existence of, a truly democratic society (including segments from the documentary film “Manufacturing Consent”).

Good question, and one posed in the Carolina Issues Forum by UNC grad students Katie Gay and Samantha McNeill, as they drive the point home about the inherent importance of public access to communication.

Monopoly is no longer just a board game; it is reality for cable subscribers in Wilmington, NC. Perhaps the Parker Brothers were trying to warn the public by designing a game in which the main goal is to bankrupt other players by accumulating the most money and property. The objectives are similar to those of Time Warner Cable (TWC). Although TWC has a non-exclusive franchise, meaning other cable companies could technically provide cable service within Wilmington if granted a franchise, they have dominated the cable market in Wilmington mainly because their infrastructure is already in place. In Monopoly terms, their houses, or cables, are on every block. Just like in the board game, competition requires an extended amount of time and money, which other cable companies are not willing to spend since TWC’s infrastructure is in place. This means we, the citizens of Wilmington, are stuck with TWC and their virtual monopoly.

And the story gets worse. As citizens of Wilmington we once had the right to give our input on which cable companies we wanted the city to grant franchise agreements. This right has been taken away. In 2007, a new North Carolina media law, “An Act to Promote Consumer Choice”, was enacted. According to the statute, the State instead of the City now issues franchise agreements with cable providers. This prohibits citizen input regarding what cable company serves our area. In a sense, TWC holds a “get out of jail free card” which allows them to maintain total access to our city. Thus, the “Act to Promote Consumer Choice” is in reality an Act to Deny Citizen Contribution. Beginning this year, 2008, when the City franchise expires, TWC may be free to jack up prices and provide substandard customer service throughout Wilmington.

We can relate to the monopoly analogy not only because we have all played a time or two, but more importantly, because the rules of the game are deeply ingrained within us. In a society dominated by corporations, we have learned to live as consumers. The rules, in
theory, are simple. The more competition we have in a market, the more likely we will receive higher quality goods for lower prices. Let’s assume that logic to be true and move on to the real issue, the question that never gets asked. Even if we did have competition, does consumer choice equal democracy? Democracy is supposed to be of the people, by the people and for the people. This means institutions such as our media system are supposed to serve us, not the other way around. But, what does it mean to have a media that serves the people, why does it matter, and how does this relate to Wilmington’s situation?

At its roots, the media has a democratic function ensured by the First Amendment. The framers of our Constitution knew that freedom of press‚ and freedom of speech‚ are vital to democracy. Our media is supposed to help us make informed decisions regarding political, economic and social issues. We rely on them. Therefore our media must be viable and independent. However, as our situation with TWC indicates, Wilmington is far from having such a democratic media.

Not only do we have a virtual cable monopoly, we’re not even being fed our small slice of the media pie, our right to independent, public access television. TWC by law must provide Wilmington space on its television cable for public access, education, and government (PEG) channels. However, the City of Wilmington is not taking full advantage of this opportunity. This is unfortunate because public access is our voice uncensored. Public access media is run by the people and for the people. It provides community members and local non-profit organizations the opportunity, knowledge and equipment to produce their own cable programming. Freedom of the press and freedom of speech unite so that we as citizens have the chance to share our opinions and interests.

We can have this valuable community resource right here in Wilmington if we demand it. It is time that we stand up for ourselves as citizens, not merely as consumers. It is time that we band together in recognition that Wilmington has allowed TWC to hijack our city’s media and demand an independent public access channel in return.

This kind of thing will keep happening as long as our rights are continued to be defined through the limitations as being those of expression rather than as ones of communication.

Contact Katie Gay and Samantha McNeill

This film is an excellent example what I am all about supporting and pursuing in regards to some of these issues of mediated communication as not only a primary tool in support of human rights work, but as human rights work. It is arguably the most important factor involved in it. The response to the Burma situation is only happening because of this kind of work. This film is a distillation of the very reason any human rights movement that does not encompass mediated communication within it’s core is incomplete. “Burma VJ” is in a nutshell a form of “Exhibit A” in making the case for such inclusion.

He lives in Thailand now, largely because he doesn‚t think he could hold up under torture. “I’m not sure how much I could keep secrets,” said the slight, shaggy-haired, 27-year-old Burmese video journalist, who is considered a public enemy by his country’s military junta.

Should his admission make him seem less than courageous, consider Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country. Directed by Anders Ostergaard of Denmark and opening on Wednesday at Film Forum in New York, the documentary chronicles the work of the Burmese journalist and his team of guerrilla cameramen during the “saffron revolution” of 2007, in which robed Buddhist monks joined street protests against Myanmar’s military dictatorship.

—————

Moviemaking philosophy aside, Burma VJ provides powerful evidence of the new ways in which oppression can be documented and world opinion swayed. “Technology is on our side,” said Micheline Lévesque, Asia specialist for Rights and Democracy. She said reports on human-rights violations, when done outside a country like Myanmar, are routinely ignored by countries that want to continue doing business with an oppressive regime. It’s harder to argue with a Burma VJ and the technology it champions, the eventual influence of which may be enormous. “Tibet is very interested,” Ms. Lévesque said, “and other movements in other countries are looking to what’s happening in Burma to use in their own movements.”

—————

But you go forward a hundred years, you have a situation in film where two cellphones talk to each other, and it’s impossible for a military dictatorship to keep secrets.

“Can you imagine,” Ms. Nevins added, “if someone had smuggled a camera into a concentration camp?”

Read more Here from The New York Times