July 2012

The Federal Communications Commission is looking into the damage that the massive storm that swept from the Midwest into the Northeast on June 29 caused to wireless and landline phone networks in the mid-Atlantic.

As of the morning of July 2, 16 percent of cell towers in West Virginia were still disabled. Nearly 11 percent of Maryland's towers were down, as well as 9 percent in Virginia and 3 percent in Washington, D.C., according to the FCC. Widespread power outages also caused problems for many 911 call centers in the region. Lauren Kravetz, a spokeswoman for the FCC's Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau, said the commission is still investigating the problems with emergency calls, but that 911 operators might have been unable to identify a caller's number and location. She said it is unclear how many people were unable to make an emergency call at all.

Free Press dropped its lawsuit over the Federal Communications Commission's network neutrality rules. The group had argued that the FCC’s rules did not go far enough, and the goal of its lawsuit was to force the FCC to expand the scope of the regulations.

The Free Press suit alleged that the rules arbitrarily provided less protection for wireless Internet access, such as through smartphones, than traditional wired Internet access. "We felt that there were better ways to accomplish our goals of promoting Internet freedom, and decided to direct our resources elsewhere in the continued campaign to preserve the open Internet," said Matt Wood, Free Press policy director.

Two months ago, 14-year-old Julia Bluhm of Waterville, ME decided that she was tired of listening to her ballet classmates complain about their bodies, which weren’t always as rail-thin or clear-skinned as those of the retouched models in their favorite magazines. So Bluhm, a member of SPARK (an organization that aims to end the sexualization of girls in media), started a petition on Change.org to ask Seventeen magazine to print one unaltered photo spread a month. And after collecting nearly 85,000 signatures, staging a demonstration outside of Seventeen’s New York offices, launching a Twitter campaign, and meeting with editor in chief Ann Shoket, the teen magazine finally listened.

In the August issue of Seventeen, Shoket wrote an editor’s letter addressing the concerns of Bluhm and her supporters. “Recently I’ve heard from some girls who were concerned that we’d strayed from our promise to show real girls as they really are… Like all magazines, we retouch images -- removing wrinkles in fabric, stray hair, a few zits, random bra straps -- but we never alter the way the girls on our pages really look,” wrote Shoket. “While we work hard behind the scenes to make sure we’re being authentic, your notes made me realize that it was time for us to be more public about our commitment.” So as an extension of its ongoing Body Peace Project, Seventeen is launching the Body Peace Treaty, which includes pledges to “never change girls’ body or face shapes… always feature real girls and models who are healthy,” and “be totally up-front about what goes into our photo shoots.”

From “Crushing New Taxes” to “a step in the right direction,” social media leapt into action following the Supreme Court ruling last Thursday which let the Affordable Care Act stand – including the controversial element requiring all individuals to obtain health insurance by 2014.

The response was passionate, and at first heavily tilted toward those in favor of the ruling, according to a special report by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. But by the end of the weekend, the tenor of the conversation had changed as those in opposition became more vocal. This sentiment matches closely the divided public opinion over the health care ruling. Each of the three platforms studied—Twitter, Facebook and blogs—came down in somewhat different places. On Twitter, where the conversation was by far the heaviest of the three platforms (some 2.1 million statements in all), users were evenly split between those who favored the ruling and those who opposed it (18% of the conversation voiced support for the ruling while 17% voiced opposition). On Facebook, dissenters slightly edged out those in favor (29% opposed and 25% in favor). And in blogs, opposition to the ruling outweighed support by nearly two-to-one (29% opposed versus 15% in favor). These are some the findings of PEJ’s study of 2,133,392 statements on Twitter, 82,770 on Facebook and 20,459 on blogs from the time the ruling was announced, 10:15 a.m. Thursday June 28, through Sunday, July 1.