All posts by Midnightschildren

Accountability and Representation, Internet Freedom, Press Room

Profiles in Corruption: How Telecoms Control the State Legislature

 

by Chris Witteman and Tracy Rosenberg. Originally published in 48 Hills. 

The last couple of weeks have not been good ones for those who see communications as a social justice issue.

The 2015 Open Internet Order, which ensured Internet neutrality and fairness, was finally stripped out of the law books per order of the Trump FCC, now run by a former lawyer for Verizon. San Francisco’s plan for a publicly-owned fiber broadband network was put on hold, and all indications are that Mayor Breed will likely bow to AT&T and Comcast by keeping it from resurfacing. And California’s own net neutrality bill, designed to reverse what Trump’s FCC had done, got ambushed by an upstart young Assemblymember. Continue reading Profiles in Corruption: How Telecoms Control the State Legislature →

Accountability and Representation, Press Room

Counterspin: Tracy Rosenberg on ICE’s Corporate Collaborators

Audio 1 Comment

 

This week on CounterSpin: “As a company, Microsoft is dismayed by the forcible separation of children from their families at the border,” the global tech company declared in a statement. “Family unification has been a fundamental tenet of American policy and law since the end of World War II.”  The same Microsoft bragged a few months ago about ICE’s use of its Azure cloud computing services to “accelerate facial recognition and identification” of immigrants, though the post has since been altered to omit the phrase “we’re proud to support this work with our mission-critical cloud.”

The spotlight on the White House’s inhumane agenda on immigration and immigrants is exposing more than the devastatingly cruel practices in force at the border, but also the numerous big corporate and institutional players that are—often invisibly—enabling that agenda. And just like the agenda, the impact of these collaborations extends well beyond immigrant communities. We’ll talk about all that with organizer/advocate Tracy Rosenberg, executive director of Media Alliance and co-coordinator of Oakland Privacy.

Propaganda Review Archives

Propaganda Review Issue 1, Volume 2 1987-1990

 

Everything old is new again. One of the advantages of being a venerable organization is that your ancestors have already taken a go at issues and problems recurring today.

Propaganda Review was a Media Alliance magazine that explored techniques of manipulation, our vulnerability to them, and a society obsessed with the engineering of consent.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

So, with the generous help of William Bowles, we are embarking on the project of excavating as much of Propaganda Review as we can in order to make it available for a bit of context in today’s “fake news” debate.

In this edition, you’ll hear from:

  • James Zogby on the perverse distortions in coverage of the Palestinian resistance. “Consider the number of articles about what
    the breaking of hands is doing to the souls of those young Israeli soldiers who are subjected to this kind of brutality-they are subjected to the brutality, not the fingers of the hands whose bones they’re breaking. There is far more concern for the souls of the Jews
    than for the bodies of the Arabs”. 
  • Barbara Haber on the mythic legacy of previous social change movements on young organizers. “The students were
    sharply aware of the power of media imagery to make and
    break movements.”
  • Peter Kornbluh on the Reagan-era State Deapartment’s Office of Public Diplomacy (OPD). “The OPD became a “vast psychological
    warfare operation”  aimed at Congress and the American people.”
  • Claude Steiner and Charles Rappleye on propaganda scholar Jacques Ellul. “Citizens crave propaganda from  the bottom of
    their beings. And propagandists respond.”
  • Jay Rosen on the follies of conventional election coverage by the press. “In the sheer overkill the press creates, one senses a desperate  attempt to affirm public interest in the election ritual.”
  • Nina Eliasoph on the perils of polls. “Polls are good for
    finding out what people think they should say  to pollsters.”

Continue reading Propaganda Review Issue 1, Volume 2 1987-1990 →

Media Ownership

The Online Privacy Quickie Sell-Out Deal

 

They could restore it but…..

At a time when it is difficult to pay attention to much besides the disaster that is the Trump adminstration’s”family separation policy”, the CA Legislature is rushing through an evisceration of online privacy, in a shameful ending to AB 375. The bill was  introduced with much fanfare in 2017 by Assembly privacy chair Ed Chau to replace FCC broadband privacy regulations repealed by Congress. Continue reading The Online Privacy Quickie Sell-Out Deal →

Media Ownership

An Open Letter To The Berkeley City Council

June 21, 2018

Honorable Mayor Jesse Arrequin and Members of the Berkeley City Council:  Ben Bartlett,  Cheryl Davila, Lori Droste, Sophie Hahn, Kate Harrison, Linda Maio, Susan Wengraf,  Kriss Worthington

cc: City of Berkeley City Manager Dee Williams-Ridley, City of Berkeley City Attorney Farimah Brown, City of Berkeley City Clerk

City of Berkeley  2180 Milvia Street  Berkeley, CA 94709

In Re: Council Subcommittee Urban Shield Vote

On behalf of Media Alliance’s constituency in your city, I am writing to you with regard to Mayor Arreguin’s statment on June 19, 2018.

The purpose of this letter is to do two things:

  1. To identify the language in the Berkeley City Charter and municipal code that addresses agreements with other law enforcement agencies, including the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department.
  2. To provide documentation of two previous Council votes in December of 2015 and June of 2017 in which the council purported to direct the Berkeley Police Department  and the Berkeley City Manager in whether or not to participate in the Urban Shield SWAT competition.

Continue reading An Open Letter To The Berkeley City Council →