What public interest obligations, you say? But they do exist and recently the FCC has gone as far as to suggest that they may be a bit more stringently enforced. Here is the updated and revised manual explaining the obligations of broadcasters.
Continue reading Commercial Broadcaster Public Interest Obligations
The movement for affordable broadband access is growing. Media Alliance’s “Digital Inclusion Advocacy Toolkit: Bridging the Digital Divide by Winning Community Benefits in Municipal Broadband Projects” provides useful information for community members who want to advance digital inclusion in their neighborhoods. A resource directory and a comprehensive glossary of terms makes this a must-read for everyone.
The Oakland Digital Inclusion Summit was a vital event for community sharing, networking, access to information and a framework for moving forward. Click here for the summit reader: some of the best resources on community broadband implementation around.
We knew the day was coming when we’d watch TV on our computers. And here we are. Three terrific documentaries available free and online. Enjoy! Continue reading Better Than Anything On Tv
This report from Friends of the Earth documents a tenfold increase in unregulated, unlabeled “nanofood” products on the American market since 2008. The products containing unlabeled nano-ingredients range from Kraft American Singles to Hershey’s chocolate. They are made by major companies including Kraft, General Mills, Hershey, Nestle, Mars, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Smucker’s and Albertsons. But due to a lack of labeling and disclosure, a far greater number of food products with undisclosed nanomaterials are likely currently on the market. These nanomaterials differ significantly from larger particles of the same chemical composition, and new studies are adding to a growing body of scientific evidence indicating they may be more toxic to humans and the environment. Continue reading Friends of The Earth – Tiny Ingredients, Big Risks
We seem to be in the midst of some kind of paradigm shift in the way that news is produced, packaged, and consumed. Increasing numbers of news shops are beginning to display their ideologies in their windows. They continue to give lip service to those cherished journalistic ideals of objectivity and impartiality, but the actual news product is shot through with bias.
Mind you, it was ever thus; but now, many news organizations are less reverential about the dogma of objectivity. For this we can thank right-wing media moguls like Rupert Murdoch, Conrad Black, and Sun Myung Moon, who took over ailing U.S. publications (New York Post, Chicago Sun-Times, and Washington Times) and transformed them into vehicles of ideological cant. This new posture was on grand display during the controversial 2000 presidential election. The mainstream media (with the notable exception of the New York Times and the Washington Post) resolutely ignored charges of vote suppression that were flying fast and furious from Florida’s black community. Continue reading MEDIA RACISM. By Salim Muwakkil.
We are told by media people that some news bias is unavoidable. Distortions are caused by deadline pressures, human misjudgment, budgetary restraints, and the difficulty of reducing a complex story into a concise report. Furthermore, the argument goes, no communication system can hope to report everything. Selectivity is needed.
I would argue that the media’s misrepresentations are not all the result of innocent error and everyday production problems, though such problems certainly exist. True, the press has to be selective–but what principle of selectivity is involved? Media bias does not occur in a random fashion; rather it moves in the same overall direction again and again, favoring management over labor, corporations over corporate critics, affluent Whites over low-income minorities, officialdom over protesters, the two-party monopoly over leftist third parties, privatization and free market “reforms” over public-sector development, U.S. corporate dominance of the Third World over revolutionary social change, and conservative commentators and columnists like Rush Limbaugh and George Will over progressive or populist ones like Jim Hightower and Ralph Nader (not to mention more radical ones). Continue reading METHODS OF MEDIA MANIPULATION, by Michael Parenti
Sitting in his Baltimore office the other day, Charles Margulis, Greenpeace’s quiet and thoughtful anti-genetic engineering warrior, seemed chagrined. Margulis is the one who virtually single handedly prompted Gerber’s recent decision to remove all genetically engineered (GE) ingredients from its baby food. He is also the one who shamed Kellogg into admitting that they exclude GE ingredients from their European cereals but do nothing to keep them out of American breakfast bowls. Continue reading MEDIA SERVE GENETICALLY MODIFIED FOOD INDUSTRY. by Jane Akre and Steve Wilson.
