This is good to see…

Public Citizen, the consumer group founded by Ralph Nader , gave its first-ever Lifetime Achievement Award to Phil Donahue on Thursday night at the National Press Club. There were plenty of tributes for the talk show host, but it was impossible for the room full of pumped-up progressives to get through the evening without finding plenty of people to criticize — including Barack Obama.

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Donahue, now 74 and still brimming with energy, stepped up to accept his award and went on for 40 minutes, without notes and barely taking a breath. “I can’t think of any other single development in my own personal life . . . that is more consequential for me than to have met the people through Ralph who have introduced me to so many people of conscience — to the people I admired and wanted to be,” he said.

Do we smell comeback? Stay tuned.

Hope so. Congrats Phil, and thanks.

Read the complete article in The Washington Post

Democracy Now’s comprehensive interview with Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, talking about the biggest leak in US history: the release of more than 91,000 classified military records on the war in Afghanistan. As the Pentagon announces it is launching a criminal probe into who leaked the documents, Assange asks what about investigating the “war crimes” revealed in the leaked military records? He also talks about the media, why he isn’t coming to the US anytime soon, and what gives him hope. “What keeps us going is our sources. These are the people, presumably, who are inside these organizations, who want change,” Assange says. “They are both heroic figures taking much greater risks than I ever do, and they are pushing and showing that they want change in, in fact, an extremely effective way.”

Watch The Video/Read The Transcript from Democracy Now!

This is great stuff here from Julian Assange, co-founder of the increasingly well-known organization WikiLeaks.

Paraphrasing Orwell, Assange explains that he who controls today’s internet servers controls the intellectual record of mankind. In this speech to the Oslo Freedom Forum, he warns about Western governments, large corporations, and certain wealthy individuals who are increasingly able to wield power and influence to remove material permanently from the historical record using sophisticated methods. “If the West doesn’t reverse its course of increased censorship and rights abuses, Assange warns, it will lose all of the ideals that it once stood for.”

Or should one add that it will continue to lose all those ideals it once stood for, considering the rate the US is going today in replicating the model of the USSR when it comes to matters of empire and surveillance state tactics and techniques.

WikiLeaks - “The method is transparency; The goal is justice.”

This is an interesting development from the Finns, who clearly understand the importance of making sure their citizens have universal access to this indispensable communication and information system.

While U.S. telecom regulators and service providers argue over how to manage networks or what is the best broadband speed, Finland’s government is already one upping our country with a mandate that says that broadband should be a legal right.

Finland’s telecom regulator FICORA said that all of its 5.3 million residents will be able to get a 1 Mbps connection by July 1, 2 Mbps by 2012 and 100 Mbps service by 2015 as part of its updated Universal Services Obligations (USO). By adding broadband to its USO, Finland will be the only country in the world that legally requires Internet access as a basic right.

For more on this, go Here

Good report on how public access channels offer an alternative to corporate and other so-called “public” media, and why they should be supported and legally protected.

For most Americans, “public broadcasting” means the local PBS affiliate. But there’s another kind of non-commercial media that’s established by the government: public access channels.

PEG (Public, Educational and Governmental) channels, as they’re officially known, are created by agreements between municipalities and cable companies: In exchange for getting access to lay their cable through public rights of way, the cable company pays in the form of setting aside channels for the community to run themselves, plus a small fee of up to 5 percent of the cable company’s gross revenue (New York Times, 11/8/2005).

In many communities, that money helps to fund community production centers where the public can learn to use video equipment and produce their own programming for those public channels.

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This system, created by a patchwork of local government agreements that are loosely regulated at the federal level, does a remarkable job of safeguarding programming from outside influence and encouraging cable programming to meet local needs. The FCC‚s 1984 Cable Franchise Policy prohibited cable companies from exercising editorial control over public access programming, and advertising is typically prohibited.

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Public access programming sometimes gets a bad rap as “Wayne’s World” style vanity projects with low production quality. But public access truly offers a voice to everyone in a community, and some notable news programming has thrived on the PEG system, such as Free Speech TV and Paper Tiger Television. And most access channels regularly feature a variety of shows covering local news, particularly news produced by an concerning underserved communities something that’s increasingly difficult to get from other media.

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Some centers, such as those in Sacramento, Calif., and Grand Rapids, Mich., have recently launched programs to train citizen journalists and provide outlets for their local news production. Money makes a difference here; cities with better-funded community access can provide better equipment and training to local producers, who in turn can create higher-quality shows.

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In 2006, the industry lobbied for legislation that would have let them negotiate franchise agreements on the state
level, eliminating local accountability. The bill failed, but the companies then went directly to the states themselves and managed to rewrite the laws in 19 states, arguing that such changes were needed to reduce high cable rates.

Since then, many communities in those states, from Los Angeles (L.A. Times, 1/5/09) to northern Indiana (OurChannels Indiana.org, 11/18/07), have already lost their access centers due to lax state negotiating, exactly the telcos‚ goal. Others have suffered funding decreases, lost signal quality and function, or been hit with new monthly carriage fees, all while cable rates have largely increased (Alliance for Community Media survey, 5/08).

At the same time, there are success stories. Persistent Philadelphia activists finally got PEG channels after some 25 years of struggle (Philadelphia Inquirer, 9/19/07). And Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.), supported by access advocacy group the Alliance for Community Media, has introduced legislation to rectify many of the recent backwards steps in PEG policy. Among other things, the Community Access Preservation Act would secure less-restricted funding for access centers and ensure that new state laws don‚t gut the franchise agreements established by municipalities (AllianceCM.org, 10/9/09).

Read the complete report Here.

And help keep these community media centers and the channels they operate alive and well! Support the “CAP Act” now pending in Congress. For more information on this legislation and how to support its passage, visit the Alliance For Community Media.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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