3/1/11

Media Reform Daily
News of the movement
Public Broadcasting, a 'Luxury' We Can't Do Without Like millions of my countrymen, I am profoundly concerned that the debate over government spending, while necessary, has come to threaten the cultural, educational, informational and civilizing influences that help equip us for enlightened citizenship. Suddenly, these are dismissed as "unaffordable luxuries" when in fact we have never needed them more. Difficult decisions will have to be made -- but not on the back of an infinitesimally small fraction of the deficit that the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and public broadcasting represent.
Ken Burns, Washington Post
PBS Faces New Threat in Federal Budget With the new Congress, Republicans again have made public broadcasting a target for cuts, and the petitions and on-air appeals are back. This time, however, even a recent Capitol appearance by Arthur, the booking-loving aardvark, may not be enough to fully stave off a reduction in financing.
Elizabeth Jensen, New York Times
Rep. McCollum: Republicans Wrong to Go After Public Broadcasting Despite the unanimous opposition of Democrats, the U.S. House passed an appropriations bill that eliminates all funding for CPB and ends federal support for public media. If allowed to stand, this attack on unbiased reporting and quality cultural and educational programming on television and radio and online will have dire consequences here at home for Minnesota Public Radio and Twin Cities Public Television, not to mention the Minnesotans who rely on public broadcasting every day.
Betty McCollum, Minneapolis Star Tribune
Public Broadcasters in Northeast Ohio Say Loss of Federal Funding Would Be Devastating These are nervous times at the area's public broadcasting stations. The budget bill passed this month by the House would cut $61 billion in federal spending, including the $430 million allocated to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. About 70 percent of that CPB money is channeled to the nation's public radio and television stations. And Northeast Ohio's public broadcasters say the loss of that funding would have a devastating effect.
Mark Dawidziak, Plain Dealer
Don't Cut Funding for Public Broadcasting In a budget proposal, House Republicans announced plans to zero out all funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the nonprofit responsible for funding public media including PBS and NPR. Public media is one of the last bulwarks against the corporate media, where the combination of consolidation and profit motive has long since shifted the focus to infotainment rather than substantive news.
John Pryor, Bloomington Pantagraph
Community Media Outlets Under Attack More than 3,000 Public, Educational and Government access channels across the nation provide a vital platform for community-produced video from full coverage of local town halls, to student-produced shows about topics that matter to their campus, to city council meetings and debates. The programming on these stations is critical in creating an engaged, informed and active community. Unfortunately, PEG stations are under attack in states across the nation.
Beth McConnell, Progressive States Network
Boehner's Attack on Net Neutrality Not Based in Reality In a speech to religious broadcasters, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) warned that "the FCC is creeping further into the free market by trying to regulate the Internet." But there is no government takeover, there's no censorship, and there's no gatekeeper when there's Net Neutrality -- that's the whole point. The government doesn't decide what's available, and neither does your Internet service provider.
Free Press
FCC Announces New Broadcast Ownership Database Revealing Ownership Neglect The FCC has announced its new broadcast ownership database in a format that can be searched and manipulated for media and public policy research. However, for broadcast stations, the new database reveals that many broadcasters have never filed timely reports about their ownership.
Michael Grotticelli, BroadcastEngineering
Lobbying Intensifies As Cable Firms Aim to End Retransmission Battles Lobbying has picked up in recent weeks as the FCC prepares to launch a proposed rulemaking on possible changes to the current rules governing the process by which cable operators and other video content distributors negotiate to retransmit broadcasters' programming.
Juliana Gruenwald, National Journal
Did Google Pre-Emptively Block a 4G iPhone on Verizon? In 2008, after much protest, Verizon accepted openness conditions attached to valuable spectrum being auctioned off by the FCC, and spent $4.7 billion to buy nationwide capacity that would ensure it could build a robust 4G network for the next generation of mobile devices. But in doing so, Verizon may have screwed itself out of ever being able to offer a 4G-capable iPhone.
Ryan Singel, Wired
No Support for U.S. Proposal for Domain Name Veto The Obama administration has failed in its bid to allow it and other governments to veto future top-level domain names, a proposal that raised questions about balancing national sovereignty with the venerable Internet tradition of free expression.
Declan McCullagh, CNet
When the Internet Nearly Fractured and How It Could Happen Again When the entire country of Egypt was forced offline by its government last month, it served as a global wake-up call that the Internet is a more fragile medium than we imagine it to be. What happened in Egypt was particularly striking, but other, more subtle tests of the Internet's resilience abound.
Nancy Scola, The Atlantic
Are Amazon.com's Days of Tax Free Selling Numbered? Amazon has successfully fended off pesky state tax collectors for 16 glorious years. But the battle has entered a new stage as Amazon builds warehouse/fulfillment centers in more locations, states grow hungrier for revenue, and a rising sales tax rate puts retailers who do collect tax at an ever bigger disadvantage.
Janet Novack, Forbes
he National Conference for Media Reform 2011 promises to be the biggest event in the country that tackles what is arguably the biggest issue in the country: the state of our media. Book your ticket to Boston. Then start planning your own journey through our three-day event. Register now!
In Other News...
At Comcast, No Fear of Web Video Comcast Corp.'s chokehold on its subscribers' video consumption is slipping away as new video providers muscle in on the business. But Brian Roberts, Comcast's chief executive, says he's still optimistic about the future of the country's largest cable operator, which isn't just a cable concern any more.
Wall Street Journal
Sudden Death for Cable? YouTube Talking About Streaming Live Sports Google's YouTube unit is talking with professional sports leagues about streaming their games live. If it happens, it could have a major impact on cable which has been using live sporting events as a differentiator with over-the-top competitors like Google, Apple and Netflix.
FierceCable
Consumer Reports Revives iPhone Antenna Gripe It looks like deja vu when it comes to reception issues on the iPhone 4 tied to its external antenna. Consumer Reports said it found the same problem with weak reception on Verizon Wireless' new version of the phone that it did when AT&T released the iPhone 4 in July.
MediaPost
How Social Media Is Pushing the Limits of Legal Ethics That some people simply cannot keep their social media usage to an acceptable level is no secret. Only unlike a student spending the entirety of Biology 101 updating her Facebook page or an NBA player tweeting from the locker room, this type of behavior can have real consequences when the user in question is sitting in a courtroom.
GigaOM
Qaddafi YouTube Spoof by Israeli Gets Arab Fans A YouTube clip mocking Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi's megalomania is fast becoming a popular token of the Libya uprising across the Middle East. And in an added affront to Colonel Qaddafi, it was created by an Israeli living in Tel Aviv.
New York Times
Thailand to Further Probe Killing of Reuters Journalist Thai investigators said they were still trying to establish who killed Reuters cameraman Hiro Muramoto last year after reversing preliminary findings that a soldier probably fired the fatal bullet.
Reuters
A Limit on Lending E-Books Until now, libraries that have paid for the privilege of making a publisher’s e-books available for borrowing have typically been granted the right to lend an e-book -- say, the latest John Grisham thriller -- an unlimited number of times. HarperCollins said that it had changed its mind. Beginning March 7, its books may be checked out only 26 times before the license expires.
New York Times
Small Towns Mourn Fast-Closing Post Offices Post offices have withered along with the rest of small-town Iowa, with an average of about six offices in the state closed annually in recent years. But the waves of closures on tap in 2011 -- likely to number in the dozens out of the state's 850 or so offices -- will be on an unprecedented scale.
Des Moines Register
Oprah's New Channel Struggles to Pull in the Viewers Oprah Winfrey is finding out just how hard it is to build an out-of-the-way channel into a television destination. OWN, her two-month-old channel, is attracting fewer viewers than the obscure channel it replaced, Discovery Health.
New York Times
Upcoming Events
FCC March Open Meeting
Mar 3: Washington, DC
Net Neutrality: Who Owns the Internet?
Mar 8: New Brunswick, NJ
NTEN 2011 Lobby Day and Annual Conference
Mar 17-Mar 19: Washington, DC
The National Conference for Media Reform 2011

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)