Airwaves & Liberty

Seems like almost every year, Bush proposes slashing all of most of the budget for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. That’s the entity that provides annual “Community Service Grants” to public and community radio stations around the country — including your beloved Pacifica stations. This year is no exception — as the note below explains, Bush has proposed cutting the CPB budget by 56 percent this year.

Even though the CPB has survived through seven years of Bush, this could be the year it gets hammered unless you help. Free Press has put together a handy form for you to contact your Senators and tell them what you think.

~Nathan

Tell Congress to Save Public Broadcasting
June 23, 2008
By Megan Tady

Throwing the remote at the TV or yelling at the radio after another unbelievable comment from a TV anchor (terrorist fist-bump, anyone?) sure does help to relieve some pent up frustration against the news media. But a busted remote certainly won’t get us any closer to getting more real news on our airwaves.

And neither will letting the Bush administration get away with their slash-and-burn tactics to stifle public broadcasting. The administration has proposed cutting the public broadcasting budget by 56 percent — putting at risk vital news, educational and cultural programming that millions of Americans say they prefer to commercial media.

Getting serious, independent journalism is already hard enough – now can you imagine the media landscape we would face if Bush chops down public broadcasting? It’s going to look pretty bleak.

But Congress has the ability to protect noncommercial media by not only restoring but increasing funding for diverse public media. The Senate is going to vote on the Bush cuts tomorrow. Tell your Senators to save public broadcasting now.

Pacifica couldn’t make it to this year’s National Conference on Media Reform, but I wanted to mention that Free Speech TV is there doing some live broadcasting, and that Free Press will post lots of audio and video from the conference to their website after it happens. ~Nathan

Bill Moyers, Amy Goodman, Van Jones, Phil Donahue, Laura Flanders, Dan Rather, and many other media luminaries are in Minneapolis, joining thousands gathered to challenge corporate media monopolies.

Free Speech TV, the nation’s first independent progressive television network, is offering 21 hours of live coverage from the National Conference for Media Reform.

The National Conference for Media Reform, hosted by Free Press, marks the epicenter of a growing national movement challenging corporate control of U.S. media systems.

DATES: June 6 – 8, 2008

TIMES (EDST): LIVE Friday 11am – 1pm; 2pm – 6:00pm
LIVE Saturday 9am – 2pm; 3pm – 7pm; 9pm – 11:30pm
LIVE Sunday 10:30am – 2:00pm
Repeats Friday 6pm – 9:00am Saturday
Repeats Saturday 11:30pm – 10:30am Sunday
Repeats Sunday 2:00pm – 3:00am Monday

Plays on Free Speech TV, DISH Network Channel 9415, with a live netcast at http://www.freespeech.org

Program Schedule - all times Eastern Daylight Time

Friday June 6
11:00am - 1:00pm Opening Plenary
2:00pm - 2:30pm Interview #1
2:30pm - 4:00pm Media and Election: Uncovering 2008
4:00pm - 4:30pm Interview #2
4:30pm - 6:00pm How Far Have We Come: People of Color in the Mass Media

Saturday June 7
9:00am - 10:00am Keynote: Bill Moyers
10:00am - 10:30am Interview #3
10:30am - 12:00pm From Broadcast to Broadband
12:00pm - 12:30pm Interview #4
12:30pm - 2:00pm Media and the War: An Unembedded View
3:00pm - 3:30pm Interview #5
3:30pm - 5:00pm Media Policy in a New Congress
5:00pm - 5:30pm Interview #6
5:30pm - 7:00pm Owning Our Own and Reaching the Masses
9:00pm - 11:30pm Keynote: Media Begins with Me

Sunday June 8
10:30am - 12:00pm TBA
12:00pm - 12:30pm Interview #7
12:30pm - 2:00pm Closing Plenary

For more information: freespeech.org, freepress.net

Reposted from Ars Technica:

By Matthew Lasar — June 05, 2008 -

If the Federal Communications Commission wants to prevail in its crusade to get United States Supreme Court approval of its new “fleeting expletive” policy, it is going to have to convince the High Court of two things. First, the FCC must prove that the broadcasting of dirty words said on the fly somehow actually hurts people, especially children. Second, the agency must demonstrate that it had the legal right to radically alter its policy towards these naughty phrases, which up until the recent past has been relatively benign.The Commission must show that The Law has always granted the agency permission to prosecute abbreviated dirty talk, whether the FCC has historically availed itself of this tacit approval.

Solicitor General Paul Clement’s brief to the Supreme Court on behalf of the FCC, submitted on Monday, accomplishes the second task adequately, I think, and the first task not at all. I doubt his arguments will convince many Ars readers. But don’t forget: all the DoJ and FCC have to persuade are the Supremes. The Supreme Court will consider the FCC’s appeal of a circuit court decision to strike down its recent fleeting expletive rulings this fall. Here’s a recap of how we got to this place:

My son asked me what [bleep] means

Five years ago, the rock singer Bono got a little out of control upon receiving the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song. “This is really, really fucking brilliant,” he had the bad taste to exclaim, adding “Really, really great”–just in case you didn’t get it the first time. The FCC did not approve of millions of television viewers seeing and hearing Mr. Bono convey his happiness in this manner, and said so. The “‘F-word’ is one of the most vulgar, graphic and explicit descriptions of sexual activity in the English language,” the agency declared in 2004. It “invariably invokes a coarse sexual image” and broadcasting it on a national telecast was “shocking and gratuitous.”

But the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau knew that it had a problem. Here was a Rock God exclaiming the F-word just once, which shows pretty restrained behavior, actually. So the Commission made it clear, for the first time, that Once Is Enough. “The mere fact that specific words or phrases are not sustained or repeated does not mandate a finding that material that is otherwise patently offensive to the broadcast medium is not indecent,” the FCC warned.

The agency imposed no sanction, however, noting that its stance was new. “Prior Commission and staff action have indicated that isolated or fleeting broadcasts of the ‘F-word’ such as that here are not indecent,” the Commission conceded. The Golden Globe broadcaster, NBC, “did not have the requisite notice to justify a penalty.”

But the human race kept testing the FCC’s patience on this issue. In 2002 and 2003 Fox Television broadcast the Billboard Music Awards, during which Cher and Nicole Richie acted like themselves. “I’ve also had critics for the last 40 years saying hat I was on my way out every year,” Cher explained in 2002. “So fuck ‘em.” In 2003, Richie had yet to get caught sitting in a Mercedes facing backwards in a freeway carpool lane while on pills, but she did have the presence of mind to ask the Billboard audience if they had “ever tried to get cow shit out of a Prada purse? It’s not so fucking simple.”

People complained to the FCC about these broadcasts. “My son and I were watching the 2003 Billboard Music Awards the other night… ” one protest began. “[M]y son asked me what f*cking meant.” Apparently the agency agreed that the last thing that television should do is prompt parents to teach their children about sex. After a long complex process that involved a public proceeding and some back and forth with the courts, in late 2006 the FCC applied its new Golden Globe standard to Fox Television. Granting an “automatic exemption for ‘isolated or fleeting’ expletives” would permit broadcasters “to air any one of a number of offensive sexual or excretory words, regardless of context,” the Commission said. The FCC found both broadcasts indecent, although it imposed no sanction or fine on Fox affiliates.

Sensing that this could be the beginning of something really expensive, Fox appealed the decision to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which all but called the FCC’s logic ridiculous. The court’s majority declared that the Commission had failed to produce “any evidence that suggests a fleeting expletive is harmful.” It laughed down the Commission’s insistence that any invocation of the words “shit” or “fuck” immediately force visions of number two or the wild thing upon TV viewers. “[T]his defies any commonsense understanding of these words, which, as the general public well knows, are often used in everyday conversation without any ’sexual or excretory’ meaning,” the Second Circuit declared. The court also found “divorced from reality” the agency’s claim that lenience on this matter would encourage broadcasters to slather the TV public with dirty words.

Most importantly, the court ruled that the FCC had run afoul of one of the most important and least noted laws around: the Administrative Procedures Act, which empowers courts to strike down “arbitrary” and “capacious” decisions by government agencies. The Second Circuit declared that the Commission had made this kind of bad decision because it failed to adequately explain why it changed its policy on fleeting expletives.

FCC Chair Kevin Martin could barely restrain his rage at this ruling. “I find it hard to believe that the New York court would tell American families that ’shit’ and ‘fuck’ are fine to say on broadcast television during the hours when children are most likely to be in the audience,” he said in a statement after the decision came down. The agency appealed the court’s ruling–and logic–to the Supremes.

Inescapably sexual

Perhaps the strongest part of the Solicitor’s brief is its refutation of the APA violation argument. Government agencies have the right to change their minds, Justice explains. The Commission acknowledged in Golden Globe that it had changed its policy. The agency had gone easy on its first victims in recognition of its change of course. It had offered reasons and arguments for the change. And the new policy remains true to the basic statutory authority given to the FCC, to prohibit the broadcast of “any… indecent… language” (the full text says “any obscene, indecent, or profane language”). “The word ‘any’ does not lend itself to a safe-harbor policy in which some indecency is permitted if it is not repeated,” the DoJ declares. What is arbitrary and capricious about enforcing the letter of the law?

But from this point of departure, the DoJ brief offers nothing but dogmatic arguments that will make sense to the decency regulation in-crowd, but won’t play anywhere else. Clement argues that the FCC recognizes context, having forgiven the broadcast of expletives in Saving Private Ryan. But the brief repeatedly asserts that “in certain contexts even a single word can be so offensive that it should be subject to regulation; that is why a one-free-expletive rule is incompatible with the proper application of a contextual analysis.”

The problem is that the Solicitor has to tune this logic to the words of Cher and Nicole Richie, proving their phrases have an “inescapably sexual connotation” and were designed to shock or titillate. To do this, DoJ lamely quotes various books, such as Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought: Language As a Window into Human Nature, into which the brief strangely inserts an additional phrase: “If you’re an English speaker,” Justice quotes Pinker as saying, “you can’t hear [words such as the F-word] without calling to mind what they mean to an implicit community of speakers…” But so what? Pinkers’ observation doesn’t make it true to a court of law. And it doesn’t make it true for you and me, we supposedly being the arbiters of the “contemporary community standards” part of indecency regulation.

The brief goes so far as to repeatedly quote complaining parents (”Mommy what is f[ ]ing?”) to make its point. “The [Federal Communications] Commission was not required to conduct further proceedings to arrive at the inescapable conclusion that such language presents a threat to children in the audience,” Justice says. How? And as for the fear that “the broadcast of vulgar expletives would increase in the absence of a change in policy,” the DoJ offers data that the networks used “offensive” language 98 times between 8pm and 9pm in 1990 and 216 times during the same hour in 2001? Again, so what? Is this a substantial increase in a country with over 2,200 television broadcast stations?

But whatever you or I might think of the DoJ’s logic, don’t forget: it’s the Supreme Court that will decide where this goes. And it was the Supreme Court that almost 40 years ago, in Pacifica vs. FCC, upheld the Commission’s indecency sanction against Pacifica station WBAI in New York City, even without being presented with evidence of any harm done by George Carlin’s famous “Seven Dirty Words” monologue.

Broadcasting is “uniquely accessible to children, even those too young to read,” the court narrowly ruled on July 3, 1978. “Pacifica’s broadcast could have enlarged a child’s vocabulary in an instant.” Rest assured that the fate of children will be invoked numerous times when the High Court hears oral arguments in this case.

Further reading:
* The Solicitor General’s brief to the Supreme Court

From the folks at Free Press:

‘Resolution of Disapproval’ unanimously approved, heads next for Senate floor

WASHINGTON — Today, the Senate Commerce Committee passed a “resolution of disapproval” that would veto the Federal Communications Commission’s latest attempt to dismantle longstanding media ownership limits.

“Our best chance to stop Big Media has just cleared a big hurdle,” said Josh Silver, executive director of Free Press, which coordinates StopBigMedia.com. “The Senate’s defense of quality journalism, local news and diverse and independent voices couldn’t happen at a more critical time.”

Last December, the FCC voted to remove the longstanding “newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership” ban that prohibits one company from owning a broadcast station and the major daily newspaper in the same market. The ruling still must pass muster in the federal court that reversed the FCC’s previous attempt to lift media ownership limits in 2003.

But the Senate is intervening right away. The resolution of disapproval (Senate Joint Resolution 28), introduced by Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) in early March, serves as a “legislative veto.” If passed by Congress and signed by the president, it would nullify the FCC’s new rules.

Today’s vote follows news that Murdoch’s News Corp. is close to completing a $580 million deal to purchase the Long Island daily Newsday from Tribune Company. News Corp. already controls the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal, and two TV stations in the New York market — and the new deal would violate longstanding media ownership limits.

“With Rupert Murdoch poised to expand his media empire, today’s vote shows the Senate won’t simply roll over and watch media consolidation continue unchecked,” said Silver. “This vote is a major turning point in the fight for better media.”

The legislation has 25 bipartisan co-sponsors including Commerce Committee Chairman Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), Vice Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) and Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.).

The Senate had 60 legislative days to pass the resolution from the time Congress was notified about the rule in late February. Last month, a House version of the resolution — which is not limited by the legislative shot clock — was introduced by Reps. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) and Dave Reichert (R-Wash.).

“Permitting further media consolidation goes against the core values the agency was created to protect,” said Joseph Torres, government relations manager of Free Press. “The FCC did not heed the overwhelming public opposition to its decision. The Senate appears to be listening.”

Read the FCC’s cross-ownership order: http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-07-216A1.pdf

Learn more about the FCC’s new rules: http://www.stopbigmedia.com/files/devil_in_the_details.pdf

Got this message from our friends over at the National Radio Project, aka Making Contact. Making Contact is distributed through Pacifica (as well as other channels), and is carried by many Pacifica stations and affiliates. Good work!

Making Contact director Lisa Rudman writes:

Hi: See finalists in * Radio category below. Interesting group to be a runner-up amongst…. IRE = INVESTIGATIVE REPORTERS AND EDITORS.

Congrats to Tena and EVERYONE who worked on the New Orleans Immigration piece(s). Add this to the recent awards for excellence in journalism form Society of Professional Journalists — Wow-ee Making Contact Rocks!

List of 2007 IRE Award Winners and Finalists - Radio:

CERTIFICATE:
Toxic Traces Revisited — Minnesota Public Radio News; Lorna Benson, Michael Edgerly
Judges’ comments: In 2005, MPR News documentary’s reporting forced the Health Department to lower the levels of perflourinated chemicals (PFCs) considered safe for humans after the chemical was found in Twin Cities drinking water. In 2007, the State Department of Health found the contaminant in the drinking water of yet another community. Once again, MPR delivered this complex environmental story to the public. Reporters obtained maps, internal government lists of possible toxic sites, fish testing results, and memos discussing the status of an investigation that seemed stalled. The result of the work was an indictment of a system that, without scrutiny and pressure, continued to fail in its duties.

FINALISTS:

Sexual Abuse of Native American Women — National Public Radio; Laura Sullivan, Amy Walters, Steven Drummond, Maria Godoy

Missouri’s Mental Health System — KCUR-Kansas City; Kelley Weiss, Laura Ziegler

New Orleans Now: Immigrants, Labor and the Human Cost of Rebuilding an American City - Part 1 — National Radio Project; Tena Rubio, Phillip Babich, Steve Masar

Violence Against Nursing Home Workers and Patients — Canadian Broadcasting Corporation; David McKie, Susanne Reber, Sandra Bartlett, Phil Harbord

You can see the full list with all media at http://www.ire.org/contest/07winners.html.

And you can listen to the show in question here:

Came across a column by Eric Alterman and George Zornick called “Think Again: FCC vs. The Public,” published yesterday at the Center for American Progress site. It reads, in part:

In recent years, and particularly since 2000, big media has had their way, like some mustachioed cartoon villain, and its aide-de-camp has almost always been the FCC. The agency has repeatedly pursued relaxed ownership rules, declined to investigate the involvement of telecommunications companies in warrantless wiretapping, and moved to protect and enhance the interests of large media conglomerates.

The rush toward media deregulation was already afoot when George W. Bush took office in January 2001. Ownership caps on radio stations were removed in 1996 following a bitter battle in Congress that was never once mentioned on the nightly news. (In fact, the only times the words “Telecommunications Act of 1996″ were ever mentioned on broadcast TV were once by Ted Koppel and once by Lisa Simpson. I swear I’m not making this up).

The act led to a dramatic reduction in the number of station owners-there are 30 percent fewer radio stations now than in 1996, and one company, Clear Channel, owns more than 1,200.

You can read the full article at http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2008/03/fcc_vs_public.html. I was also just forwarded a response, written by Dr. Carolyn M. Byerly, professor in the Howard University Department of Journalism. She writes:

Alterman & Zornick’s article on the FCC under the Bush presidency does a decent overview of the politics associated with media regulation, but totally buries the gender and race truths buried in those politics. I just dropped Mr. Alterman a note mentioning that deregulation has not affected everyone evenly. Female and racial minority broadcast ownership has declined under both Telecomm Act of 1996 (a Clinton-era gift) and the Bush-dominated FCC. Single-digit ownership is not acceptable in a nation that calls itself a democracy. I offer these insights on the heels of Black History Month (Feb) and the eve of International Women’s Day (tomorrow, March 8).

This post is from Matthew Lasar’s blog, http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080306-broadcasters-blast-fcc-localism-proposals.html.

~Nathan

By Matthew Lasar | Published: March 06, 2008 - 05:04AM CT

The nation’s broadcasting lobbyists cheered the Federal Communications Commission’s December 18, 2007 decision to relax its newspaper/TV station cross-ownership ban. But station owners and their reps have been far less enthusiastic about tentative FCC proposals announced on the same day to encourage them take their localism obligations more seriously. These include requiring a minimum amount of local programming, maintaining on a bare bones physical presence at each station, and setting up permanent advisory boards for each license.

The agency has also asked the public for comment on whether the FCC should take steps to limit station practices like voice tracking–using digital automation rather a live deejay. “We believe that such practices may diminish the presence of licenses in the communities and thus hinder their ability to assess the needs and interests of their local communities,” the Commission writes.

The FCC has classified these proposals as “tentative” because a public comment proceeding about them launched on January 24 must finish first. Since the comment cycle started, the Commission has gotten an earful from the commercial and religious wings of the broadcasting industry–all of which can be summarized in three words: no, no, and no.

“After reviewing the FCC’s purposed changes regarding Christian Radio Stations, I am not in favor of these changes,” writes one filer out of Terre Haute, Indiana. “If this nation loses the ability to proclaim Christian values, or hinders the efforts to disseminate the Gospel of Christ, it does so at its own peril. Only spiritual apostasy, moral degradation, and political anarchy can follow.”

This statement is obviously over the top. But even the most sober broadcaster remarks in this proceeding betray a deep hostility to the slightest amount of public interest regulation–a ‘never again’ attitude that the industry has cultivated since the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan’s FCC Chair Mark Fowler did away with most of the agency’s localism and public access rules. And while broadcasters are tearing the FCC’s localism proposals to shreds, the tens of thousands of anti-media consolidation commenters who flooded the FCC’s databases last year on its broadcast ownership proceeding are nowhere to be found.

RUMOR HAS IT

The combat began even before before the FCC issued its Order. Four days earlier, a filed statement signed by two-thirds of the country’s state broadcasting associations expressed concern about “rumors” of the agency’s impending move. The December 14th letter disclosed “surprise and disappointment” at news that the Commission may advocate “obligations on broadcasters that are describable only as a return to government-imposed mandates on programming” abandoned “over a quarter century ago as unnecessary in a competitive marketplace.” The comment further suggested that the FCC was plotting “specific requirements for meetings regularly with specific community leaders to get their input on programming–as well as requiring specific quantities of certain types of shows, such as news, public affairs, and similar programming.”

Actually the FCC’s Order is quite open ended. It asks the public how the Commission should handle local programming and community meetings, tentatively suggesting that “each licensee should convene a permanent advisory board made up of officials and other leaders from the service area of its broadcast station.” The document offers a variety of scenarios: quarterly meetings with advisors, some minimal amount of local programming measured in terms of hours or a percentage of the stations air time. But beyond concluding that some rules and procedures need to be established, the agency leaves the specific guidelines open to citizen comment.

But what is probably most unnerving to the broadcasting trade association establishment is the notion that the FCC is considering requiring anything specific from radio and TV station owners at all in the form of local programming or local presence community input. The Order even has the chutzpah to suggest that stations be attended at all times by, at minimum, one single human being. This “can only increase the ability of the station to provide information of a local nature to the community of license,” the agency writes. “Particularly in the event of severe weather or local emergency.”

Many of the license owner responses to this suggestion warn that they will cut back their license’s broadcast hours rather than comply with the requirement. And as for the community board suggestion, here is a form statement a group of religious broadcasters have sent to the FCC:

“The FCC must not force radio stations, especially religious broadcasters, to take advice from people who do not share their values. The NPRM’s proposed advisory board proposals would impose such unconstitutional mandates. Religious broadcasters who resist advice from those who don’t share their values could face increased harassment, complaints and even loss of license for choosing to follow their own consciences, rather than allowing incompatible viewpoints to shape their programming. The First Amendment prohibits government, including the FCC, from dictating what viewpoints a broadcaster, particularly a religious broadcaster, must present.”

In fact, the Order does not insist on any particular system by which stations should pick the members of these proposed advisory boards, much less suggest that the government dictate content. Given the document’s praise of stations that already have hand picked advisory boards, there is no evidence that the FCC would force license holders “to take advice from people who do not share their values.” And the Order does not threaten to “potentially dictate how we as journalists cover news in our community and what stories we cover,” as a filing from the National Gay And Lesbian Journalists Association suggests. It simply aims to ensure that radio and TV stations cover some mininum amount of locally based news.

But the alarm that some of these broadcasters’ comments express may have less to do with the specific proposals the FCC is making, and more with the fact that the agency is raising any questions at all about station practices, and whether they should have an impact on license renewal, presently a pro forma process by most assessments.

PREPARED PRAISE

Other than broadcaster comments opposing any possible localism requirement, the proceeding docket is filling up with nonprofits writing nice things about various radio and TV stations in their area. The Blind Babies Foundation of Oakland, California, for example, wrote to the FCC on February 14 to sing the praises of KRON-TV, which has publicized the activities of the charity over its airwaves and Web site. “And for these reasons,” the statement concludes, “I write this letter to demonstrate that our experience does not support the need for further regulation to ensure that our local station serves the local community.”

Ditto for Goodwill Industries of Mid Michigan, whose CEO praised WJRT TV, an ABC affiliate for its coverage of the community group. “In short,” the CEO’s letter concludes, “I believe additional regulation by the FCC to be totally unnecessary.” Call me a cynic, but unless these nonprofits are pros at filing FCC comments, chances are good that the television stations that they mention asked them to write these letters, wrote at least some of the content, and instructed them on how to file with the Commission. And none of these filings offer praise for TV coverage of local elections, not surprising since studies indicate that that is television’s biggest blind spot.

LESS THAN DILUTED

The tone of this proceeding is ironic, given that the FCC came to its tentative localism conclusions after a lengthy Notice of Inquiry launched in 2003, in which hundreds of community groups and nonprofits documented their experience of being ignored by their local commercial radio and TV stations. Where are all those citizen commenters now? It’s possible that after all the furor last year over the FCC’s media ownership proceeding, and the shift in attention to the Comcast/P2P controversy, the spotlight on the agency’s localism activities has faded, leaving only the ever present broadcast filers standing on the field.

When the FCC released this Order last December, Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein voted for it with some skepticism. “Although I and others will once again encourage the Commission to act immediately on these proposals, one can’t help but regard the prospects for quick implementation with a healthy degree of skepticism,” Adelstein remarked. “If history is any guide, the odds are that the Commission will either neglect to finalize these proposals, or when it comes time to finalize them, they may be so diluted as to render them meaningless.”

But given the direction of this proceedings’ comments so far, it seems unlikely that the FCC will be able to conclude much more than that the nation’s radio and television stations are doing a terrific job of covering local issues, and that the agency’s proposals amount to needless interference at best; maybe even a plot to impose secular humanism on Christian radio.

There is some overlap between Pacifica/community radio listeners and Air America listeners, so you may be interested to know that Air America’s ownership is changing again soon. Air America is, of course, a commercial radio operation, but it does provide a progressive megaphone, particularly in the moments when it manages to transcend its reputation of being Democratic Party apologists.

This text originally from the Huffington Post:

Charlie Kireker, a former political official and creator of Pendulum Media will succeed Stephen L. Green, the New York real estate CEO who helped lift the company out of bankruptcy, as chair of the board. The move will be finalized in mid March. Mark Green, Stephen’s brother and Democratic activist, will remain as Air America’s president.

“We look at what Steve and Mark Green have done as the transition role of saving and stabilizing the business and now we think it is a good opportunity to expand upon that,” Kireker told the Huffington Post. “The company has made a lot of progress, we have consolidated operations, and streamlined things to be more efficient. We are yet to profitability but we are heading there.”

Kireker is no stranger to the network. He was a minor investor in one of the companies that rescued Air America’s ownership from Chapter 11 bankruptcy last March. That year, the network — which was purchased by Green Family Media for $4.25 million — posted more than $13 million in losses. Sometime in 2009, Green said, he envisions that the network will be in the black.

Currently Air America has 65 affiliates, an estimated audience of nearly 2 million weekly, and is set to release a new web-based format for radio listeners.

“It took Fox News five years and a half billion dollar loss to get its feet, find its audience and become profitable,” said Mark Green. “We don’t have a ‘what’s his name?” [referring to Rupert Murdoch]. But, we now have secure funding and expanded management team, on-air talent and a business strategy that will get us where we need to be… Reports of our death were greatly exaggerated by the right wing zeitgeist that wanted us to go away.”

As for why the current team would leave the network on the brink of profitability, Green noted that his brother’s true passion was not in media but in real estate. “The Kireker group is new money, energy and new confidence in the growing of Air America. Steve was happy to be a bridge from phase one when we had financial difficulties to phase three when it is poised for takeoff…”

Both Green and Kireker said that the ownership change would have no effect on the network’s editorial content. “There are no programming changes at this time,” said Kireker.

Current political dynamics, however, could position Air America in unfamiliar terrain. Indeed, the network was conceived to be a response to the proliferation of right-wing talk radio. And since it was launched in march 2004, Air America has, for the most part, operated on a landscape of predominantly GOP power. With Democrats slated to expand on slim majorities in Congress and possibly take back the White House, the network’s affinity for railing against the powers-that-be may have to undergo an alteration.

“I don’t want to get ahead of myself,” said Kireker. “We hope there will be a Democrat in the White House and we think the prospects are good. And we think the country is showing an appetite for a more progressive agenda. So yes, Air America will no longer be, as it was in its early years, fighting against the majority Republican forces, though that began to shift, of course in recent years.”

A report from the Benton Foundation posted today. Benton’s stated mission is “to articulate a public interest vision for the digital age and to demonstrate the value of communications for solving social problems.” ~N

For over 12 years, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has been considering how the transition to digital television technology - and the increased capacity it offers TV broadcasters - should impact the compact between television stations and the communities they are licensed to serve. By law and FCC rules, these stations are licensed to serve the public interest, convenience and necessity. Over the years, this has meant different things, but the overriding mandate has been that stations must serve the interests of local communities, not the station owner’s own commercial interests.

In December, the FCC adopted new media ownership rules allowing newspapers to own television stations in their local markets. As part of these new rules, the FCC noted:

[T]he Commission has concurrently adopted a Localism Report and Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that addresses actions the Commission will take to ensure that broadcasters are meeting the needs of their local communities. With respect to other ideas raised in this proceeding, such as whether the agency should establish more specific minimum public interest requirements for licensees and how broadcasters could improve political candidates’ access to television, the Commission declines to take any further action at this time. We find the need to impose additional obligations premature in light of the Commission’s recent decision to require broadcasters to file enhanced disclosure reports about the programming they are providing to serve local communities’ interests and needs. Nevertheless, to the extent that circumstances change, we will revisit this decision and initiate proceedings as appropriate.

After much deliberation, the FCC has concluded that there needs to be improved communication between broadcasters and the communities they are licensed to serve. To facilitate improved communications, the FCC is asking for public comment on proposals to improve: 1) License Renewal Procedures and Processing Guidelines, 2) Renewal Application Announcements, 3) the Service Delivered to Underserved Audiences and 4) Remote Television Operation.

The FCC recently published the filing schedule for the new, proposed localism rules. Comments are due Friday, March 14, 2008 and Reply Comments are due Monday, April 14, 2008.

In addition, the FCC will be updating its 1999 publication The Public and Broadcasting,(2) to provide viewers more straightforward guidance on how they can participate in a station’s license renewal.

I. License Renewal Procedures and Processing Guidelines

The FCC has tentatively concluded that it should “reintroduce guidelines for the processing of renewal applications for stations based on their localism programming performance.” In reviewing applications for renewal, the FCC’s Media Bureau would, under a proposed plan, process applications filed by stations that have met or exceeded prescribed minimum percentages of locally-oriented programming, while the full FCC would consider applications by licensees had not met the prescribed minimum.

The FCC is asking for public input on:

* Whether the FCC should give processing priority to stations that meet certain measurable standards;
* Whether these minimums should be expressed as hours of programming per week, or, as in the past, percentages of overall programming;
* Whether the guidelines should cover particular types of programming, such as local news, political, public affairs and entertainment, or simply generally reflect locally-oriented programming;
* What the categories and amounts or percentages should be;
* Whether guidelines should include breakdowns of the times of day local programming is shown; and
* How local programming should be defined (i.e. must programming be locally produced).

II. Renewal Application Announcements

The FCC seeks comment on whether the existing rules governing so-called “pre-filing and post-filing announcements” that licensees must air in connection with their license renewal applications should be changed. Specifically, the FCC seeks comment on:

* Whether the same information that is currently required for on-air announcements about soon-to-be-filed and pending renewal applications should be posted on a licensee’s website during the relevant months (i.e., the posting begins on the sixth month before the license is due to expire and remains in place until after the deadline for filing petitions to deny);
* Whether to broaden the required language for these announcements, which currently provides the Commission’s mailing address as a source for information concerning the broadcast license renewal process, to include the agency’s website address and, where technically feasible, to provide a link directly to the FCC’s website.

III. Service Delivered to Underserved Audiences

The principle of localism requires broadcasters to take into account all significant groups within their communities when developing balanced, community-responsive programming, including those groups with specialized needs and interests. While the FCC has observed that each broadcast station is not necessarily required to provide service to all such groups, it has nonetheless recognized the concerns of some that programming �” particularly network programming �” often is not sufficiently culturally diverse.

The FCC has tentatively concluded that licensees should convene and consult with permanent advisory boards made up of leaders from the community of each broadcast station. In addition to informing broadcasters of issues of importance to their communities in general, such advisory boards should include representatives of all segments of the community, to ensure that those community elements have a continuing opportunity to communicate their group’s perceived needs and interests to their local broadcast station management.

The FCC seeks comment on a number of issues arising from this proposal, including under what circumstances a licensee with formal groups in place should be deemed to have satisfied this requirement. Specifically, the FCC asks:

* Will such community advisory boards be able to alert each broadcaster to issues that are important to its community of license?
* How should members of the advisory boards be selected or elected?
* Should the former ascertainment guidelines be a starting point to identify those various segments in the community with whom the licensees should consult?
* How can the advisory boards be composed so as to ensure that all segments of the community, including minority or underserved members of the community, would also have an opportunity to voice their concerns about local issues facing the area?
* How frequently should licensees be required to meet with these advisory boards?

IV. Remote Television Operation

The FCC is concerned about the prevalence of automated broadcast operations, which allow the operation of stations without a local presence, and the negative impact that such remote operation may have on licensees’ ability to determine and serve local needs. The FCC seeks comment on whether television licensees should be required to maintain a physical presence at their broadcasting facilities during all hours of operation.

V. You and Localism

When the FCC launched this proceeding, Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein said, “[O]ne can’t help but regard the prospects for quick implementation with a healthy degree of skepticism. If history is any guide, the odds are that the Commission will either neglect to finalize these proposals, or when it comes time to finalize them, they may be so diluted as to render them meaningless.” He added, “We need to put the meat in the sandwich we promised to deliver. It is high time we put this notice out for comment, but we should have actually implemented improvements to localism before we completed the media ownership item. Now that the Commission has acted to loosen the media ownership rules, it is all the more imperative we move immediately to implement some of the useful ideas broached here and others that we learn about in the comment period. We are already too late to have done this right.”

The “meat” Commissioner Adelstein will likely come from the comments of public interest organizations and the general public. In testimony delivered before the FCC in 2007, Media Access Project President Andrew Schwartzman called on the FCC to:

* Develop a meaningful and much more transparent license renewal process based on much more detailed information about broadcasters’ actual program practices.
* Reduce the term of broadcast licenses to three years.
* Require every single licensee to carry minimum amounts of locally originated, licensee produced, programming designed to address local needs, tastes and interests.
* Expand the number of low power FM stations.
* Develop meaningful programs to double the number of minority and female owned broadcast stations within the next five years.
* Deny must-carry privileges to over the air TV stations which devote more than 12 hours per day to home shopping presentations.

Mr Schwartzman also stressed that effective local service requires “institutional and personal attachments to the community. It requires a diverse workforce that is capable of conveying the many different perspectives found in each community. There is no way to document the qualitative impact of having a station operated locally by individuals citizens who live in the community and expect to remain there.”

Thousands of people have already told the FCC that they feel some broadcasters are failing on their localism mandate. To ensure meaningful localism rules, it may take the collective voice of thousands to compel the FCC to act.

A few excerpts from an article on the matter posted at Broacastingcable.com:

The Federal Communications Commission gave about 40 ABC affiliates two days, until Feb. 21, to pay their fine — $27,500 apiece — for airing a bare behind in an episode of NYPD Blue, but it canceled the fines for about one-dozen stations initially cited.

The FCC cited a statute of limitations that had expired for a pair of stations because they had gotten license renewals in the intervening years, and others were let off apparently because the complaints had not come from the market in which the station was located.

It was only a little over three weeks ago — Jan. 25 — that the FCC issued the notice of apparent liability for the Feb. 25, 2003, airing of a show that has been off the air for three years. It was running up against a five-year statute of limitations on taking action against the stations if they failed to pay the fine, which likely explains why it asked the stationsto pay up by Feb. 21, or only about 52 hours after the order is being released.

The FCC rejected an argument by Gray Television that its translator station should not be fined in addition to the station providing the signal that it was essentially retransmitting, but the FCC said translators are not de facto immune from the fines.

And a few excerpts from a Matthew Lasar article at Arstechnica.com:

The NYPD Blue scene shows a pre-adolescent boy accidentally walk in on an older woman undressing in the bathroom. Viewers get a glance at the woman’s naked behind before he backs out and apologizes.

The FCC declared the scene indecent “because it depicts sexual organs and excretory organs in a lewd and titillating way — specifically an adult woman’s buttocks.” ABC attorneys defended the show, arguing that buttocks do not constitute a sexual organ. But the FCC declared that this defense “runs counter to both case law and common sense,” citing the agency’s
“two-pronged indecency analysis” defining “sexual or excretory organs or activities” as offensive.

In its February 9 appeal, attorneys for ABC and its affiliates revisited these arguments in their appeal. They offered the FCC
medical textbooks that defined sexual organs as “biologically defined,” arguing that “[t]he only external organs or structures of the excretory system are the penis in males, and the urethral opening in females, which appears between the walls of the labia.”

The agency today again turned down this reasoning. “The Commission has consistently interpreted the term ’sexual or excretory organs’ in its own definition of indecency as including the buttocks,” the FCC declared, “which, though not physiologically necessary to procreation or excretion, are widely associated with sexual arousal and closely associated by most people with excretory activities.”

The FCC reiterated the “clear and unmistakable” visual depiction in question. “Here, the scene in question shows a female actor naked from behind, with her buttocks fully visible at close range,” the Commission concluded. “She is not wearing a g-string or other clothing, nor are the shots of her buttocks pixelated or obscured.”