Posted by Tracy Rosenberg on February 19th, 2014 Mag-Net Blog
The San Francisco Bay Area is often seen across the country as a blue outpost and a place where liberal ideas predominate. This image is especially widespread in media reports which emphasize cultural and political innovations. But the local media system which indulges in the self-congratulatory blather is itself a retrograde example of corporate consolidation and dominance. More like Texas than Vermont, if you like.
If the purpose of media systems is to connect and to exchange information, then Bay Area communication is about as controlled by big media corporations as the US is dependent on imported oil. The statistics are terrifying: Continue reading Mergers Lock In The Status Quo→
Common Frequency, which performs engineering and regulatory assistance for educational radio stations across the Western US, says the pending decision to eliminate the main studio rule is an “egregious” oversight that disregards that only 16% of Puerto Rico’s 3.34 million residents have regained electricity, more than three weeks after Hurricane Maria ripped through the island.
Media Alliance has been involved with the sale/liquidation of the 5th largest public television station in California, KCSM-TV, headquartered at the College of San Mateo for 50 years, for several years. Since 2011, we’ve been following the station’s fate through two sale processes into the final May 2014 decision, when the trustees of the San Mateo Community College District signed on the dotted line with a fully-owned subsidiary of hedge firm the Blackstone Group to sell off the station’s spectrum to wireless companies in a spectrum auction.
On the evening the final decision was made in May of 2013, the trustees rushed to a vote and called private security over concerns about disruptions to the meeting by a few community advocates who came to the meeting to try to change the board’s mind – including MA executive director Tracy Rosenberg, former KRON host Henry Tenenbaum, KAXT owner Ravi Kaipur and patent attorney and media activist Pat Reilly. Continue reading KCSM-TV Update→
For Immediate Release: Thursday, December 11, 2014
SAN FRANCISCO, CA – Advocacy groups representing low income Californians, consumers, and diverse media voices urged the California Public Utilities Commission (PUC) to reject the proposed merger between Comcast and Time Warner Cable in filings made with the PUC late yesterday.
An op-ed on the FCC review of retransmission rules and their potentially destructive impact on low-income audiences whose access to pay TV and high-speed broadband is limited due to affordability issues.
A founding principle of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is protecting the public interest in communications – in television, radio, internet and new emerging mediums. In a country of increasing diversity, the public interest is not a “one size fits all” proposition. In the United States of 2016, the public interest must serve a Spanish-speaking mother in Los Angeles as well as it serves a rural rancher in South Dakota or a millennial urbanite in Brooklyn.
After the Trump Congress invoked rarely-used Congressional Review Authority (CRA) to revoke enormously popular broadband privacy rules that required opt-in consent for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to sell user search and browser data, revolt broke out.
by Peter Lee San Francisco Chronicle April 29 2015
Credit to the Federal Communications Commission for doing its job — about 20 years too late.
Due to opposition from the FCC and U.S. Department of Justice, Comcast dropped its proposed $45 billion bid to purchase Time Warner Cable on Friday, preventing two of the nation’s least-popular companies from becoming one enormously unpopular mega-company.
For consumers, the failed merger represents something of a muted victory. The FCC’s record on protecting consumers has been beyond abysmal since the federal government deregulated the telecom industry in the mid-1990s, but Friday’s decision shows the agency is still, apparently, willing to draw the line somewhere.
