UnCommon Sense TV - “Media & Democracy/Media Carta” Emphasizing the importance of media and its role in the functioning of a democracy, USTV looks at just what is the media, who owns it, who controls it, who has access to it, and what can be done to reform it to make it more directly responsive and accountable to the needs of a functioning democratic society on a whole, and not just to a small number of business sponsors. Analysis of how local control and accoutability of the media has real world implications for the political and cultural health of our society, as well as what every citizen can do to be aware and involved in making the media more responsive to their nation and community.

Good post by David Reed regarding the ongoing attempts by the corporate few and their PR shills to wrest control over our communication systems.

The Internet is a simple network, a stupid network, that just connects your computer to another computer with no interference. That’s opposed to old smarty-pants networks that tried limit users to those things that maximized the operators‚ monopoly profits, by taxing the content providers and preventing innovators from attaching new devices, inventing new services at the edges, etc. The Internet won, for a good reason: it enabled innovation, and it kept busybody operators from having to tinker with or spy on their users‚ traffic. It delighted users, rather than holding them hostage.

The Arts+Labs site looks cool, very Web 2.0-ish. But hidden in that beautiful design, behind the slick and seductive words, is a dangerous idea, one that the founders of the United States rejected in the First Amendment. The Arts+Labs site tries to convince you (and Congress) of the idea that it’s a “good thing” to allow your ISP to decide what you can see or hear or use. That’s the same ISP that is given by Fed, State, or local regulators a monopoly or oligopoly over your ability to connect at high speed to the Internet. For that monopoly to examine your traffic, make guesses as to what it means, and to decide for you which services you should connect to, using what protocols.

Don’t believe Mike McCurry [former Clinton press secretary], AT&T and Cisco’s new shill. He may be connected, but it’s pretty clear that he wants to disconnect us.

Read The Full Post

Here is a story from ABC’s Nightline on what Reverend Billy terms ‘the holy business of saving public access’. It’s good to see the threats to access getting national attention and making an effort to detail some of the underlying causes of those threats. However, this story is also notable in that it is an example of how, once again, corporate media likes to trivialize and marginalize the full breadth and scope of community access and the wide variety of constituencies it serves, and those who create through it.

It is also notable in that it misses it’s own point in seeing the relevance and effective civic uses of access in that it features a clip of then-State Senator Barack Obama on local access, a medium of communication he obviously understood the value of. He’s not the only one. Ohio House Speaker Jon Husted used to have his own regular political talk show (which I was a guest on at one time) entitled “Political Perspectives”, which ran for a couple of years on MVCC, via a medium that Mr. Husted later voted to undercut with his support of Ohio video franchise legislation SB 117. This legislation has proven (and was predicted to be) to be highly destructive to the survival of local community access media throughout the state. What is sadly ironic is a show like his would hardly have been able to exist if such legislation had been in effect while he was taking advantage of the medium himself.

Here’s Ed Asner with some different and more supportive perspective of the importance of the role of public access.

From President Barack Obama’s new White House website comes this comment from the “Technology” page, as posted in the section titled “Ensure the Full and Free Exchange of Ideas through an Open Internet and Diverse Media Outlets”

Encourage Diversity in Media Ownership: Encourage diversity in the ownership of broadcast media, promote the development of new media outlets for expression of diverse viewpoints, and clarify the public interest obligations of broadcasters who occupy the nation’s spectrum.

Now this is the kind of change I can believe in.

Read much more on this at Brad Friedman’s site The Brad Blog

Obama also appointed Michael Copps as acting chair of the FCC, which is good news for PEG access (public, educational and government television) and all advocates of a truly democratically accountable and accessible media system. Too bad he didn’t just go ahead and name him permanent chair.

A really good posting on the state of community access television, celebrating some of the grand and glorious uniqueness that it encapsulates. I can’t say I care much for the headline The Huffington Post used for this piece, but the essay itself is good and the writer is making direct references to the state of access television in Los Angeles, which has more than its share of the offbeat and unusual, thus the emphasis on those qualities of the programs.

As someone who has worked and participated in access as long as I have, I find this to be a rather poignant if not unfortunately bittersweet homage to the cultural and civic value of access and the sadness at seeing it assualted the way it is these days.

Here in Los Angeles, the city rang in the New Year by closing down all of its public access TV studios, signaling an end to homegrown, grass roots production of eclectic and often monumentally weird alternative programming. Cities in Michigan, Illinois and Indiana are also shutting down facilities, and if the amount of locally-based “save public access” postings on the Internet are any indication, the trend is continuing. Of course, there was never any money in it, and now that the economy is in the crapper something that costs and has no return is just begging for the chopping block. Not to mention, some argue, the notion of the individual cranking out outsider material has long since been co-opted by YouTube. But YouTube is largely the outlet for quick hits, easily digestible visual jokes, rants or parakeets dancing to the Village People. And while many out there may wonder why it is worth mourning a TV channel that usually features seventy-three different talk shows each featuring the same potted plant, I think one would be remiss, especially in a career-based column, if one did not compose a short eulogy for a format that contained a heaping helping of what it takes to get ahead in this world: passion.

People who create public access programming do it because they must. They are overtaken by a muse that will not permit them to do otherwise. How many of us can claim that on a good day?

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The entire idea of getting out there and doing it is intrinsic to our cultural landscape. So who are we to govern what might constitute the getting out there, or the doing it for that matter? There are (sorry, were) several cable access programs in the Los Angeles area that have been running on a nearly weekly basis for over twenty years. Compare that with the amount of turnover in the private sector, and you get some idea of the dedication inherent in these resolutely individualistic souls.

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And before we get on our high horse about how fringe or self-indulgent some of these programs may be, it should be noted that several other, more serious informational shows produced in local markets around the country were often part of a syndication network, allowing them to be broadcast in a number of other cities in the U.S. And the alternative news outlet The Full Disclosure Network is the only public access program to have won an Emmy, It has been up and running since 1992. That, by any estimation, is a career.

So, let us hard-working Americans raise a toast to another set of hard-working Americans: the originators of unique (and, yes, often freakishly disturbing, but so what?) television at the recently-departed and still-remaining community access television stations across the country. Just because these people never got paid for it doesn’t mean they didn’t have jobs to do.

Amen.

Read The Complete Article

For more on the politics behind what is going on in regards to this issue, check out the Multichannel News report PEG Access Has Blurry Future In Golden State

Learn more about community access television at the Alliance For Community Media and SaveAccess.org

From Art Brodsky at PublicKnowledge…

Over the past couple of years, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin got a lot of mileage out of making jokes about his “KGB-style management” at the Commission. Nobody’s laughing today. The House Commerce Committee report sets out in excruciating detail, supported in some cases by email from FCC staff, how Martin withheld information or ignored information that could have changed the outcome of some proceedings, how he intervened in proceedings and how he created a culture of paranoia around the Commission so that staffers weren’t willing to risk disagreeing with the Chairman’s conclusions on issues for fear of being demoted. At the Commission, this is called being “Martinized,” the report said. As damaging as are the accounts of the individual cases, however, are the reports of staff intimidation and of the creation of the “climate of fear” in the agency. FCC staff were directed not to talk to other staff, or to workers at other government agencies. Staff were told to stop work on anything but not officially approved projects that have been assigned. “Projects that were authorized in the past are not necessarily considered to be authorized at this time,” one email read. Everything has to be decided by the chairman’s office, from important regulatory issues to the hiring of student interns, the report found. The result was a demoralized, ineffective agency.

The Original Post from The Benton Foundation

An editorial in the Illinois Times in regards to some of the issues raised in the report on The Fading Promise of Public Access.

Access programming is the last locally produced and viewed programming in a world where deregulation and consolidations have removed local voices and local community identity from the air nationwide. Commercial stations only want to sell you something; Access wants to tell you something. And that’s the key difference and value. PBS is great, but it can only do so much locally as well, with only a handful of locally produced shows like Prairie Fire and Illinois Stories.

Here’s something the government and FCC knew far back in the ’20s and ’30s, and we’ve forgotten: If only commercial interests are ever allowed to reach your TV, it is commercial interests that will control all the choices made for you, about what you see and know, and commercial interests will censor or ignore anything that is counter to their bottom line, even if that information is vital to you. You won’t even know what you don’t know, if this trend continues.

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Access is host to a variety of voices that could never be heard on commercial stations. You won’t like all of them, but they deserve their space and serve a vital civic function. Free speech isn’t free if you’re charging a premium to be allowed to make it, or withholding it because it doesn’t let somebody move a few more units of sham-wow towels. The city and state should be outraged and indignant that these providers are trying to weasel out of a deal made in good faith. Demand more from your TV providers and government. Demand what was promised. Three channels out of 300 is no great sacrifice to them, but it is their civic duty and a public trust.

Read The Complete Letter

Good article in the Illinois Times on some of the serious challenges public access is being confronted with these days. There are those who say access has had its day, is an outdated model of communication, YouTube is replacing it, etc..etc… (points raised in this PBS report on Public Access TV Fights for Relevance in the YouTube Age). Never mind the crux of the issue is replacing non-commercial, public spheres of communication with privately owned and controlled ones (which is what sites like Google Video and YouTube are). Access to communication is never outdated, and the right to do it should include via what is currently the predominate means of media in our society and that is, like it or not, television.

But anecdotal evidence — and in the non-Nielsen-ized world of cable access, that’s the only kind available — suggests that Just Two Guys is one of Access 4’s “hit” shows. Anderson and Roderick’s blog (just-two-guys.blogspot.com) gets up to 100 hits per day, and the hosts find themselves getting recognized by everyone from the stocker at Lowe’s hardware to the cashier at the thrift store where they buy the coolly retro jackets they wear on their show. They’ve even been profiled by the State Journal-Register.

As their show has grown, though, Anderson has noticed that the resources available to do Just Two Guys seem to have declined. The full-time director who helped them fulfill their artistic visions, whether it meant filming outside the studio or adding a laugh-track, has been transferred away. Another director got laid off; neither position has been replaced. With only part-time staff working at the studio, shooting times have become harder to schedule, and editing help has dwindled. “I think the model they’re moving toward is just a space to do the show and the cameras and nothing else,” Anderson says.

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Nationwide, public access television is becoming ever less publicly accessible. In parts of Indiana and Michigan, cable providers like Comcast are closing studios and permanently pulling the plug; in Chicago, behemoth provider AT&T is introducing the spiffy new service U-verse, offering a tantalizing array of bells and whistles while exiling all public access programming to broadcast Siberia.

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To understand why PEGs are disappearing, you must first get a grasp on why they exist. Contrary to popular belief, such channels weren’t invented just to give fringe voices like The Shooting Sport host Tom Shafer a home.

The concept of PEG programming dates back decades to the birth of broadcasting, when Congress recognized that the airwaves are public property. Just as the far left end of the radio dial is reserved for non-commercial and community radio (like our WQNA 88.3 FM), so too is a certain segment of the television band dedicated to publicly-accessible free use. In Springfield, for example, the municipal channel has long been used to provide training courses for the fire department. Even now, a training course required for firefighters is shown on channel 18 every Monday at 9 a.m. and 1 and 7 p.m., so that each shift can watch. Channel 18 also broadcasts city council committee meetings, programs promoting tourism and historical information, and special events like the mayor’s inauguration.

With cable television, the public property is even more “real” or concrete than with radio: the wires that bring commercial channels like ESPN and QVC into our homes are laid in the public right-of-way along our city streets. In exchange for providing this privilege to cable companies, municipalities typically demand certain perks, such as free cable service for schools, libraries and fire stations (there are about 80 such “drops” in Springfield), along with a few spots on the dial for PEG programming. Because municipalities have such different needs, franchise agreements specifying exactly what a cable company should provide have traditionally been negotiated on a city-by-city basis.

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Does anybody care? It’s impossible to tell, since PEG channels, by definition, don’t sell advertising and aren’t included in Nielsen surveys. But Erik Mollberg, chair of the Alliance for Community Media in Indiana, has a survey by the local Comcast franchise to prove the appeal of the PEG channel he helps manage, Access Fort Wayne. The survey asked subscribers which channel they would be willing to delete, and only 1 percent of respondents were willing to lose a PEG channel.

“They’re not going to watch it all the time,” he admits, “but by God, they want to watch the city council meeting and our international hockey team.”

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“To me, it’s almost a higher purpose,” Crowdson says. “Maybe not with every show, but with a lot of them, you really get the sense you’re helping the community out. It’s not just business; it’s a community.”

Read The Complete Article

Good questions and salient points from Bruce Kushnick of the New Network Institute…

What now for broadband and the telecoms?

Will Obama and Congress be satisfied to leave the U.S. as 15th among developed nations in broadband use? Will the FCC under Democratic control be less of a tool for large corporations?

Questions for Obama and Congress:

Q. Will you set the goal of broadband access at 1 gigabit in every American home?

Q. Why aren’t telecom subsidies being directed to cover much-needed infrastructure improvements?

Q. What steps should be taken to democratize the FCC’s decision-making process?

Q. Will you re-introduce and implement the parts of the 1996 Telecommunications Act that promote competition?

Is it time to break up AT&T again? And Verizon, as well?

Telecommunications reform needs to be on President-elect Obama’s agenda and that of the 111th Congress. It is a key aspect of overall infrastructure renewal and will impact the future of the nation’s economic prosperity, educational system and its role in an increasingly globalized world.

January 1, 2008, marks the 25th anniversary of the breakup of the old AT&T after a successful Department of Justice antitrust suit during the Reagan administration. AT&T was broken up because a then-upstart, MCI, wanted to compete to offer long distance service and AT&T did everything in its power to block competition. The case, initiated by the Ford Administration and pursued under Jimmy Carter, showed how the government could help foster fair competition in the telecommunications industry. But thanks to deregulation in the 1990s, we now live in an age of mega-telecoms, including a reconstituted AT&T.

The results have been damaging to Americans’ and widely ignored by the traditional news media. The U.S. share of worldwide Internet traffic has shrunk over the last decade from 70 percent to 25 percent. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) ranks the U.S. 15th out of 30 leading industrial nations in per capita broadband use. And Americans are getting poorer broadband telecommunications services-lower bandwidth-and paying more than citizens in most other advanced industrial countries.

Go Here to read the rest of this article

Wow. Another revelatory insight from John McCain.

“There is [sic] too many ways…that people are able to communicate with one another.”

Sascha Meinrath sums up the ramifications of this mindset pretty well.

Some will certainly say that McCain’s statements are just about our enemies having too many ways to communicate. Ponder that spin for a moment — how do you limit the abilities of your enemies to communicate without detrimentally impacting your non-enemies? Put into a different context, McCain’s quote is exactly what repressive regimes around the globe have stated throughout history. It’s a statement with woeful historical and contemporary precedent.

Read Meinrath’s full blog posting on this Here

While we’re on the subject of John McCain, this is an interesting expose’ on his history with a much more revealing portrait of his true character. You sure you think this guy should be President? Read this article about our ‘make-believe maverick’ and let us know what you think.