On August 18, 2010, the Federal Communications Commission mailed the second of its Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) audit letters for 2010 to randomly selected radio stations. The FCC annually audits the EEO programs of randomly selected broadcast licensees and multi-channel video programming distributors (MVPDs). Each year, approximately five percent of all radio and television stations and of all MVPDs are selected for these EEO audits.
Plenty of people are worried that the Google/Verizon net neutrality proposal has too many exceptions. The recording industry is worried that it doesn't have enough. In a letter sent to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, the RIAA and other music trade groups expressed their concern that the riddled-with-gaping-loopholes policy framework nevertheless might put a damper on ISP attempts to find and filter piratical material flowing through the Internet's tubes.
Failure to allow for this sort of behavior would lead to an Internet of "chaos." "The music community we represent believes it is vital that any Internet policy initiative permit and encourage ISPs and other intermediaries to take measures to deter unlawful activity such as copyright infringement and child pornography," says the letter. "We all share the goal of a robust Internet that is highly accessible, secure and safe for individuals and commerce. An Internet predicated on order, rather than chaos, facilitates achievement of this goal."
The music industry is airing out a possible deal with radio broadcasters to settle a decades-old dispute over royalty payments for works played on AM and FM stations, says a spokesman for the musicFIRST Coalition, Marty Machowsky.
The tentative agreement now being circulated among recording studios and artists is considered "a tremendous breakthrough." The deal, which would need approval from Congress in performance-rights legislation pending in both the House and Senate, would require radio broadcasters to pay record labels and artists up to 1 percent of net revenues, with smaller stations paying less. The National Association of Broadcasters estimates that would cost broadcasters about $100 million a year -- much less than they would expect to pay under the pending legislation backed by the recording industry. Broadcasters would get a reduction on rates for Internet streaming services and a requirement that FM radio chips be included in all new mobile phones, among other things.
The News Corp empire is vast and wide, and it deliberately slants the news while shamelessly promoting blatant disinformation in platform after platform all over the world.
Ask yourself, why does News Corp continue to publish a newspaper, The New York Post, which loses -- according to Murdoch family sources -- in the area of $50 million a year? Is it because the company is so proud of this terrible tabloid? Hard to believe. And why did Murdoch pay so high a premium to purchase The Wall Street Journal, an "investment" that has already cost the company billions and will certainly keep doing so as its value continues to diminish over time? Murdoch controls so many media properties in so many places that the notion of focusing on one single donation to one group might be considered trivial by comparison. The entire empire is at the disposal of political conservatism. The Republican Governors Association is just one more vehicle.
General Electric, which owns NBC Universal, gives money through its GEPAC. According to Opensecrets.org, in the current 2010 election cycle, GEPAC has given $581,400 to Democratic candidates in the House and $108,500 in the Senate. That is compared to $302,600 for House Republicans, and $107,000 for Senate Republicans. Before you start screaming "bias!" it appears that GE has a habit of giving more money to whichever party it believes has more power and influence. In 2002, 2004 and 2006, Republicans received more money from the PAC than Democrats.
Walt Disney gives to politicians through the Walt Disney Productions Employee PAC. The PAC gave almost the same amount of money to Democrats and Republicans in both House and Senate races, with Democrats receiving just a little bit more than their Republican counterparts. Comcast, which is the nation's largest cable company, and is closing a deal to acquire NBC Universal, gave $572,600 to Democratic House candidates with $461,000 going to Republicans. In the Senate it gave $131,750 to Democrats and $101,500 to Republicans. As with GE, it typically gave more money to Republicans when they were in power.
CBS gives money through its CBS PAC, and split donations fairly equally between Democrats and Republicans. The exception is in the Senate, where Democratic candidates received slightly more from the PAC.
CNN parent Time Warner gave more money to Democrats than Republicans in 2010, but as with the other PACs, the divide between the two was not huge, and when Republicans were in power, they tended to be ion the receiving end of more money.
What should the takeaway from this exercise be? Yes, News Corp.'s donation to the RGA was much larger than any of the PACs spent on House or Senate races, but at the end of the day, these companies seem to be pragmatic with where they give their money.
The number of U.S. movies showing people smoking has declined since 2005, but cigarettes still feature in far too many films and could be influencing young people to take up the habit, according to a new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report.
The report's authors -- a team from CDC, the University of California San Francisco and elsewhere -- recommend that movie ratings also consider whether the film depicts smoking and suggested strong advertisements about the dangers of smoking precede movies that show tobacco use. "This analysis shows that the number of tobacco incidents increased steadily after the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement between the state attorneys general and the major cigarette companies, in which the companies agreed to end brand placement," the authors wrote. They said the Motion Picture Association of America had done little to make changes but noted some studios had made voluntary changes and said Viacom was the first company whose movies rated for youth showed no use of tobacco in 2009. They suggested more policies could encourage filmmakers to do better.
[Commentary] If local visionaries have their way, Humboldt County's General Plan will include a new Communications Element focusing on fundamental policies to develop local communications infrastructure and services to meet local needs.
In the General Plan, the county could create a policy framework to support local broadband media for the next generation. With clear vision in the plan, future networks will better serve public safety, health, education, civic engagement, economic development and other community purposes. First, the county's General Plan must affirm that communication is an essential human need, a fundamental human right and the basis of individual and societal development, essential to ensure liberty and justice for all. The General Plan should endorse five important principles: ensuring universal access; supporting digital literacy; preserving net neutrality; protecting the right to privacy and planning for balance in future capacity. [McLaughlin is executive director of Access Humboldt]
One of the fastest-growing online businesses is the business of spying on Internet users by using sophisticated software to track movements through the Web, so that the information can be sold to advertisers. Julia Angwin recently led a team of reporters from The Wall Street Journal in analyzing the tracking software.
They discovered that nearly all of the most commonly visited websites gather information in real time about the behavior of online users. The Journal series identified more than 100 tracking companies, data brokers and advertising networks collecting data -- which are then sold on a stock market-like exchange to online advertisers. In a recent conversation with Fresh Air contributor Dave Davies, Angwin explains how consumer surveillance works, how users can disable the tracking software -- and how advertisers are continually evolving to keep up with the data they receive. She notes that many Internet users are unaware that their information is being tracked and then traded.
The Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice issued today revised Horizontal Merger Guidelines that outline how the federal antitrust agencies evaluate the likely competitive impact of mergers and whether those mergers comply with U.S. antitrust law.
These changes mark the first major revision of the merger guidelines in 18 years, and will give businesses a better understanding of how the agencies evaluate proposed mergers. A primary goal of the 2010 guidelines is to help the agencies identify and challenge competitively harmful mergers while avoiding unnecessary interference with mergers that either are competitively beneficial or likely will have no competitive impact on the marketplace.
To accomplish this, the guidelines detail the techniques and main types of evidence the agencies typically use to predict whether horizontal mergers may substantially lessen competition. The revised merger guidelines derive from the agencies' collective experience in assessing thousands of transactions focusing on the types of evidence the department and the FTC use to decide whether a merger of competitors may harm competition. Many of the proposed refinements and changes reflect issues previously identified in the "Commentary on the Horizontal Merger Guidelines," which the agencies jointly issued in 2006. In crafting the revisions, the agencies considered a wide range of opinions gathered through a series of joint public workshops, as well as hundreds of public comments submitted by attorneys, academics, economists, consumer groups and businesses.
The 2010 guidelines are different from the 1992 guidelines in several important ways. The guidelines:
Media Access Project announced the departure of its Vice President, Parul P. Desai, to join Consumers Union as Policy Counsel. Tyrone Brown, MAP President, said, "Over her five years of public service at MAP, Parul has been tireless advocate for the public interest in wireless, broadband, low power FM radio, digital radio, and countless other communications and technology policy issues. In addition to her successes in legal advocacy, her dedication to building relationships with nationwide social service and civil rights organizations has had a direct, positive impact on the diversity of participation in media policymaking."
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