May 2012

Looking to give subscribers a new reason to not drop home-phone service, Comcast is enhancing its Xfinity Voice service to allow free calls over Wi-Fi and other wireless data networks using mobile devices or PCs. In addition, as part of the Voice 2go service, customers will be able to forward phone calls to up to four additional phones or devices, and Comcast will supply up to four individual phone numbers to family members for no additional charge. "We're bringing customers features they would have thought could only be provided by a wireless carrier," said Cathy Avgiris, executive vice president and general manager of data and communications services for Comcast. "Really what we want is to answer the question of why a customer should want phone service at home.” Voice 2go represents a "reinvention of our phone service," said Avgiris.

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett may be buying newspapers — a move that is probably as much about cash flow and real estate as it is a long-term investment thesis — but he can’t possibly buy them all, and that leaves the rest of the industry struggling to try and confront the issues that are causing their decline. One of those issues is the ongoing disruption in the advertising world, but another is that the product newspapers offer is arguably increasingly out of touch with what readers want. The monolithic, ruthlessly objective, single-voiced editorial style that newspapers have grown so accustomed to doesn’t work in a world where anyone and everyone can be a publisher, a reporter, a columnist or an editorial writer.

New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen has written often about this problem, which he calls the “View From Nowhere,” and how the attachment not just to objectivity but to a kind of inhuman, artificially-balanced viewpoint is damaging newspapers and their credibility. What’s more, Rosen argues that it is bad for society as well, since it deprives people of the information they need to make important judgments about issues that affect their lives. And what is the “View From Nowhere?” As he put it: “It’s Bill Keller insisting that “torture” is the wrong word for the New York Times to use in describing torture because it involves taking sides in a dispute between the United States Government and its critics. It’s Howard Kurtz suggesting that Anderson Cooper was “taking sides” when he called the lies of the Egyptian government lies… And it’s that lame formula known as he said, she said journalism.”

[Commentary] There is much talk amongst radio talk show hosts about their rights of Free Speech. I do not condone any kind of censorship (outside incitement to violence,) and agree radio talkers have their rights. But so do We the People, and it is time we stand up for them. Right now. Starting in Wisconsin.

As evidenced in recent broadcasts from Wisconsin in midst of the Scott Walker recall election, to the doubling of Right Wing programming from the station in Sacramento that launched Rush Limbaugh, to the fact that 90 percent of the nation can hear only one political diatribe, "private censorship" has crept into our public airwaves. This corporate creation is damaging our democracy. The courts have actually ruled on behalf of We the People, but thanks to private censorship, We the People don't even know it. Despite what big corporate media tells us again and again, especially on the radio, broadcasting operates under unique rules designed to protect the public interest. Let me explain why broadcasting enjoys special treatment in the name of the public. Newspapers are private enterprise: anyone with enough capital can start a newspaper and write what they will. Cable TV is also private enterprise: when people write a check to Comcast or Direct TV, they pay private contractors, via cable or satellite, to bring programs from Playboy to Disney into their homes. But broadcasting, local radio and TV, is a public/private partnership: the public owns the airwaves needed for transmission; private business own the buildings, equipment, etc. needed to broadcast programming. When private business goes into broadcasting, it makes a deal with the public: a free license from the Federal Communication Commission -- if it agrees to "serve the public interest, convenience, and necessity."

Speaking at the national cable convention, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski offered cable operators some hope that carriage payments to broadcasters could go down, citing the rise in blackouts and an FCC examination of shared services agreements. But, he gave no indication the process is moving with any alacrity.

“Creators of programming have the right to charge for carriage of their programming,” he said at the Boston event. Consumers, though, have increasingly complained as stand-offs between operators and stations have led to stations removing their signals. The law governing restransmission consent has been in place for years, and Genachowski indicated it could use a reexamination. In the last five-plus years, stations have begun moving aggressively to charge operators -- cable, satellite and telco TV ones -- for offering their stations. Companies such as Nexstar and Sinclair led the charge early and now CBS and NBCUniversal are making noise about taking in hundreds of millions of dollars. “There are questions about whether that framework is addressing some of the issues that are coming up now,” FCC Chairman Genachowski said. Any amendment, however, may be beyond the scope of the FCC and lie with Congress.