|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 . '/' . substr('9780807859858',-6,3) . '/' . '9780807859858' . '.jpg'; ?>)
By Russ Castronovo (Editor), Susan Gillman (Editor)
By Ann Patchett
$22
|
|
|
|
|
This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: With marijuana, alone, the administration has adopted multiple, contrary positions. Also: The past and future FCC, why we don’t execute terrorists, and baby books for kids.
Posted on May 10, 2013
READ MORE 
|
Photo illustration from an image by Colin Grey (CC-BY)
|
This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: With marijuana, alone, the administration has adopted multiple, contrary positions. Also: The past and future FCC, why we don’t execute terrorists, and baby books for kids.
Posted on May 10, 2013
READ MORE 
|
Image from Core Capital Partners website
|
Forget the CIA. The Federal Communications Commission is like the fourth branch of American government, and its officials are not elected.
Posted on Apr 30, 2013
READ MORE 
|
Flickr/Florian
|
Not surprisingly, the idea is being met with resistance by the $178 billion wireless industry, which is actively lobbying policymakers against the proposal.
Posted on Feb 4, 2013
READ MORE
|
|
A look at the day’s political happenings, including a GOP contender for a top Cabinet post in the Obama administration and why Michigan Republicans should have taken a closer look at the right-to-work legislation they passed.
Posted on Dec 13, 2012
READ MORE
|
|
“In 1983, 50 corporations controlled a majority of media in America. In 1990 the number had dropped to 23. In 1997, 10. And today, six,” Bill Moyers says in conversation with Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont.
Posted on Dec 11, 2012
READ MORE
|
|
Trying to sort out the status of Obamacare can be tricky thanks to our dysfunctional leadership class; Republican state Sen. Marty Golden wants to teach Brooklyn’s women “the art of feminine presence”; meanwhile, a group of Mormons quits the church in a mass ceremony in Utah. These discoveries and more after the jump.
Posted on Jul 4, 2012
READ MORE
|
Photo by The Agency (CC-BY-SA)
|
A look at the day’s political happenings, including the resignation of an Obama administration official, Mitt Romney addressing immigration and Rush Limbaugh’s latest eyebrow-raising comment about Nancy Pelosi.
Posted on Jun 21, 2012
READ MORE
|
Franz Jantzen/Supreme Court
|
The Supreme Court threw out the FCC’s heavy-handed sanctions on Fox and ABC but stayed mum on whether the commission’s prudish and outdated indecency policy violates free speech laws.
Posted on Jun 21, 2012
READ MORE
|
halilgokdal (CC-BY)
|
By Justin Elliott, ProPublica —
Last Friday, the Federal Communications Commission fined Google for deliberately impeding an investigation into the collection of sensitive wireless network data as part of the search giant’s Street View mapping project. The company will recoup that cost in less than the time it will take you to read this article.
|
AP / Paul Sancya
|
By Juan Cole — Politics has become a game of the super rich, but the money they donate is significant only because of the way it is spent: on TV and radio advertising.
|
Felipe Kamakura (CC-BY)
|
Something called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) could radically alter the way we share information and ideas online by empowering the FCC and a few corporations to give us what commentator Elliot Cohen explains would be our version of China’s Internet censorship.
|
Flickr / jonny.hunter
|
American university students are quickly losing an important means of sharing their passions and ideas with the public: college radio. Noncommercial student-run stations are being forced to the Web or elsewhere as college administrators sell their broadcast licenses to make some quick, much-needed cash. (more)
|
United Nations
|
Months after the start of the uprisings that are roiling the Middle Eastern and Arabic world, the United Nations has recognized the essential role the Internet plays in human aspirations, deeming unhampered Internet availability a basic human right. (more)
|
|
Meredith Attwell Baker, one of two Republican FCC commissioners, voted in late January to approve the merger of Comcast and NBC. Less than four months later, she announced that she is leaving the FCC to become a lobbyist for the merged company. (more)
|
Flickr / wallyg
|
With murmurs of a veto in the background, Republicans successfully pushed a measure through the U.S. House rejecting the FCC’s 2010 net neutrality rules for Internet service providers.
|
Illustration from Mr. T in DC
|
By Derek Lazzaro — Apparently having learned nothing from its failure to rein in Enron, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and the rest, Congress is pushing to deregulate Internet service providers.
|
Flickr / Dan Edelstein
|
House Republicans have succeeding in amending a spending bill to deny the FCC money to implement new (and heavily gutted) network neutrality regulations. That’s right: banning a government agency from using government money to do government work.
|
Flickr / cursedthing
|
Speaking to a Netroots gathering, the Minnesota senator called net neutrality the “free speech issue of our time” and condemned the FCC’s decision to “create essentially two Internets.” Franken also said of the FCC-approved union of Comcast and NBC, “I hate this merger” ... (more)
|
AP / Matt Rourke
|
By Elliot D. Cohen — The recent FCC decision to “protect” the free and open Internet was long awaited by activists but it turned out to be smoke and mirrors, catering largely to service providers such as Comcast and AT&T.
|
|
The placebo effect even if you know it’s a placebo, the conglomerate approval of the Comcast-NBC merger, and the introduction of Google Body. These discoveries and more after the jump.
Posted on Dec 24, 2010
READ MORE
|
Flickr / balleyne (CC-BY-SA)
|
How is one to make sense of the FCC’s big vote Tuesday? Does it represent a gain for the net-neutrality cause, or is the corporate takeover of the Web upon us in earnest? Well, one thing seems certain: Nobody is all that happy with the outcome—except, that is, for some lobbyists.
|
Wikimedia Commons / Jonathunder
|
It may seem as though the Federal Communications Commission might be onto something with the set of guidelines its members will probably approve Tuesday, but do these rules actually add up to what Sen. Al Franken and other skeptics are calling “fake net neutrality”?
|
|
By Amy Goodman — As the 2010 elections come to a close, the biggest winner of all remains undeclared: the broadcasters. The biggest loser: democracy.
|
Flickr / fccdotgov
|
It’s a bird? It’s a plane? No, it’s super Wi-Fi! The FCC has finally approved a proposal to open the unused space between broadcast television channels—dubbed “white space”—for high-speed wireless broadband ... or, in more campy terms, super Wi-Fi.
|
Flickr / The Pug Father (CC-BY)
|
Google and Verizon have decided they would do a better job writing the regulations that govern their Internet businesses, and so the two have come up with a “policy framework” that has progressive groups and net neutrality advocates steamed.
|
Flickr / fccdotgov
|
The FCC has reignited the battle for net neutrality after it requested public comment on three different plans for broadband Internet regulation. The new plans were introduced after a court ruling knocked down FCC measures to oversee Internet service providers.
|
Flickr / fccdotgov
|
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has announced that the agency will work to reclassify broadband Internet as a telecommunication service, like the telephone, effectively allowing the agency to oversee Internet transmission.
|
Flickr / Knight725
|
The future of the Internet looked a little bleaker to Net neutrality advocates this week after a federal appeals court decided that the Federal Communications Commission couldn’t stop Internet service provider Comcast from messing with the load times of certain websites ... (continued)
|
Flickr / kainet
|
Congress asked the FCC to develop a national broadband plan, and the agency is running with it. Among the FCC’s just announced long-term goals: for every American to have access to affordable broadband, for at least 100 million Americans to have access to 100-mbps download speeds and for the U.S. to have the broadest and fastest wireless networks in the world.
|
|
Legal battles famously have a way of dragging on, but in the case of the ongoing tussle over Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” during the 2004 Super Bowl, it’s getting a little ridiculous. Yes, that was six years ago. No, the involved parties are not done with their various attempts at fining and appealing said fines.
|
Flickr / Adam Pieniazek
|
Thanks to the runaway success of the iPhone, AT&T has the largest wireless network in the country—and the lousiest. Fed-up subscribers, who pay the telco about $30 a month just for data (and another $40 or so for voice), are planning an assault this Friday called Operation Chokehold. (continued)
|
|
The Federal Communications Commission has a long and disappointing history of generally failing to regulate ever-larger media and telecommunications companies, except, during fits of prudishness, in the area of so-called indecency. But the latest incarnation of the FCC is proving to be more of a consumer advocate than its predecessors. (continued)
|
adamofficial.com
|
Janet Jackson escaped unscathed this time, but it seems that the FCC may have gotten on ABC’s case for airing “American Idol” alum Adam Lambert’s public displays of homoeroticism during his American Music Awards performance last month. A law firm associated with the late Rev. Jerry Falwell ... (continued)
|
Flickr / brewbook
|
Federal Communications Commission Chair Julius Genachowski proposed two rules Monday that would preserve the Internet’s status quo of openness and equality. If the rules are adopted, Internet service providers—including mobile carriers—would be barred from restricting or blocking access to “lawful” content.
|
facebook.com
|
We talk with UC Santa Cruz history professor Matthew Lassar about the FCC, how Internet has altered the media, and why college kids can’t stop checking their Facebook accounts during classroom lectures.
|
guardian.co.uk
|
It was the “wardrobe malfunction” seen around the world, and for most it’s really old news by now, but Janet Jackson’s famous mammary flash from the 2004 Super Bowl has once again come to the attention of the top U.S. court.
|
|
The FCC has incredible power over the health of our democracy, from how we get our information to the technology we use to freely express ourselves—and the billions of dollars made in between—yet we tend to know little about the people who wield that power. The latest technocrat nominated to take charge of the commission is Julius Genachowski, an old school chum of the president.
Posted on Mar 4, 2009
READ MORE
|
guardian.co.uk
|
Now, this is just getting weird: Nearly five years after the shocking (!) “wardrobe malfunction” that shamed exposed nipple owner Janet Jackson and seared the tender eyeballs of select members of the federal government, the FCC is soldiering on in its quest to slap offending network CBS with a $550,000 fine.
|
Composite: Flickr: oneras/free tibet
|
By Aram Sinnreich and Masha Zager —
As tools like the Web, e-mail, voice over IP, Internet video, mobile phones and peer-to-peer file sharing become increasingly vital to our lives, limitations on speech and threats to our privacy are becoming increasingly important civil rights issues.
|
|
While YouTube teems with clips from the extensive career of the late, great George Carlin, it would be impossible to capture the full scope of his comic genius. Having said that, here are a few highlights.
|
blogspot.com
|
After two months and 261 rounds of bidding, the FCC announced Tuesday that it has raised a total of $19.6 billion from the sale of the U.S. wireless spectrum. The revenue, slated to fund “public safety and digital television transition initiatives,” is nearly double what Congress had previously estimated for the publicly owned spectrum.
|
AP photo / Stephan Savoia
|
Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich won’t accept his exclusion from ABC’s debates on Saturday without a fight. Kucinich filed a complaint with the FCC Friday, claiming ABC is denying him equal time and noting that parent company Disney has made campaign contributions to the four invited Democrats.
|
|
By Amy Goodman — On Dec. 18, the five commissioners of the Federal Communications Commission met in Washington, D.C., and, by a 3 to 2 vote, passed new regulations that would allow more media consolidation. This, despite the U.S. public’s increasing concern over the nation’s media being controlled by a few giant corporations.
|
|
By David Sirota — A recent study found that one-third of Americans “believe in a broad smorgasbord of conspiracy theories,” which really isn’t that surprising considering we have a government that has gone out of its way to undermine the rule of law and public accountability.
|
|
Despite opposition from Congress and the public, the FCC has decided it’s in the nation’s best interest to relax decades-old ownership rules that prohibit media giants from owning newspapers and broadcasts outlets in the same local market. The idea behind the old rules, crazy as it sounds, is that it’s probably not a good thing to get all of your information from the same place. The FCC’s three Republicans and America’s media conglomerates disagree.
|
|
For years, we’ve been hearing about big companies increasingly taking over the American news business, as well as media execs jumping into bed with government higher-ups, but this report about the federal government and major corporations actually producing and planting prepackaged “news” stories in outlets around the country raises the Big Brother threat level to at least Orange.
|
|
The Bush administration’s domestic spying program has depended on the willing participation of America’s telecommunications giants, and all but one, Qwest, were willing to comply. Truthdig contributor Onnesha Roychoudhuri investigates the complex world of national security and regulation to find out whether Qwest’s extraordinary bad luck in recent years has been more than a coincidence—and what it means for what’s left of your privacy.
|
|
By Amy Goodman — The FCC is providing a once-in-a-generation opportunity for local noncommercial radio. With tycoons like Rupert Murdoch snatching up more trophies for his media empire, local alternatives are needed now more than ever.
|
|
Feel strongly about Net Neutrality? Want to keep the online realm as free of pesky gatekeepers as possible? SaveTheInternet.com says yes to the above and is leading a rally to remind the FCC to work for the American people—not big corporations.
|
View older articles:
1 2 >
View the most popular tags overall?
|
|
Does Anything Change in Los Angeles With Election of New Mayor?
Newsletter 
Like Us
Follow Us
Get Our Feed
