Free Press

The House Commerce Committee selected Rep Marsha Blackburn (R–TN) to chair the Subcommittee on Communications and Technology. Rep Blackburn, who will take over the subcommittee from incoming full Committee Chairman Rep Greg Walden (R–OR), has long sided with the phone, cable and entertainment industries against ordinary Americans:

In 2011, she supported the ill-fated SOPA bill, which would have allowed the film and recording industries to black out large tracts of internet content without due process.
In 2013, she co-authored a letter to the FCC opposing the agency’s Lifeline Program, which helps low-income households gain access to high-speed internet services. She continued her opposition to the program throughout 2016, criticizing the FCC decision to help subsidize broadband in addition to traditional phone service.
In 2014, she introduced an amendment to appropriations legislation that would have blocked federal efforts to protect world-class municipal-broadband initiatives local residents and governments have launched in towns and communities across the country, including in her home state of Tennessee.
She has repeatedly opposed Net Neutrality protections and in 2015 introduced the “Internet Freedom Act,” which would have stripped the FCC of its clear authority to prohibit online discrimination and protect the open internet.
In 2015, she joined with other House Republicans against the FCC proposal to protect broadband users’ privacy by requiring internet service providers to seek consumers’ permission before exploiting their online data for their own monetary gain.

[Commentary] Recently, a broad coalition of civil rights, civil liberties, privacy and immigrant-rights groups met with representatives from the FBI and Justice Department to demand more transparency around the use of an increasingly popular law enforcement tool: facial recognition technology. The meeting was in response to a recent report from the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology that found that law enforcement agencies across the country are adding this technology to their arsenal of investigatory tools.

While the report found that the practice affects over 117 million people, agencies across the board have failed to put in place safeguards to protect our privacy. Worse yet, while the technology potentially threatens the rights of everyone in America, the report uncovered damning racial biases within the systems.

On Dec 14, Free Press held a community-building dinner at Gallery Aferro in Newark (NJ) as part of our News Voices: New Jersey campaign, which connects reporters and residents in ways that benefit both groups. A group of 60 individuals — including statewide allies, Newark-based community activists, and journalists from Newark and around the state — came together to break bread, share ideas, learn more about each other and build trust ... all things we needed to do to begin working toward a common purpose. That goal? Strengthening local media. Those who were new to News Voices came with open minds, not sure what to expect. As a Free Press organizer, I had questions too: Should we talk about what we’re doing to better the lives of our members? Should we share ideas and strategies we think are essential to reshaping local media? These are all valid and important questions. But we also sought to raise an even more crucial question that can lead to pivotal change: If you could reinvent local media to serve residents’ information needs, what would it look like?

In this report, we demonstrate that communities of color find themselves on the wrong side of the digital divide for home-Internet access – both in terms of adoption and deployment – in a manner that income differences alone don’t explain. Once we control for other economic and demographic factors that contribute to this divide, the data illustrate persistent broadband adoption and deployment gaps for people of different races and ethnicities. We find that several personal and household characteristics are associated with home-Internet adoption, including race and ethnicity, along with family income, educational attainment, and use of the Internet at work or school. There are however large differences in some of these factors depending on a person’s race or ethnicity.

We conclude that public policies aimed at closing the digital divide must focus on correcting failures endemic to the home-Internet market, such as supra-competitive pricing, provider cross-subsidization, and the lack of a functioning resale/wholesale market. Confronting these market failures would increase the ability of people in marginalized communities to access advanced telecommunications services and purchase those services in an equitable manner.

At Free Press, we fight for everyone’s rights to connect and communicate — including making sure people get the news and information they need. That’s why I’m excited about a new campaign we just launched — showcased at NewsVoices.org.

The News Voices campaign aims to build a network of activists who want to change media, technology and journalism at the local level. We’re starting in New Jersey, where we launched our first News Voices campaign over a year ago. We’ve since held events that bring together local reporters and residents to discuss underreported issues, build relationships and spark new ideas. In New Jersey, a debate is playing out about how to spend the proceeds from the anticipated sale of four valuable public TV station licenses. The sale could generate hundreds of millions of dollars to meet a variety of state needs. We believe a significant portion of this money should be used to improve local journalism and better serve the information needs of communities statewide.

Free Press and the Free Press Action Fund launched a campaign to set aside proceeds from the auction of public TV station licenses to strengthen local journalism and community-information projects. According to new Free Press research, at least 54 public television stations around the country are taking part of the ongoing Federal Communications Commission broadcast incentive auction. Spectrum held by public TV stations alone is expected to bring in as much as $6 billion in the auction, with state governments, local school boards, university trustees and other station owners each likely raking in tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars for taking their stations off the air or moving down the dial to free up bandwidth to meet the growing demand mobile data.

The initial phase of the campaign — which is being launched at NewsVoices.org — will focus on New Jersey and urge lawmakers there to devote a portion of the proceeds from auctioning state-owned public TV licenses to support innovative journalism and community-driven projects across the state. Free Press and the Free Press Action Fund will be pushing to create a $250 million permanent public fund to support local information needs for decades to come. Ideas for use of proceeds include support for community-focused digital news sites, blogs, podcasts, YouTube channels, public data access apps and other civic engagement tools.

The Free Press Action Fund recently set out to determine which public TV stations are taking part in the Federal Communications Commission's broadcast incentive auction. First we noted which stations had already publicly announced their intention to participate or not. Then in July, we contacted by phone all auction eligible public broadcasters that had not yet publicized their plans. Here's what we found:

• 54 public TV stations confirmed that yes, they are participants in the auction.
• 87 public TV stations confirmed that no, they aren't participants in the auction.
• 40 stations refused to say whether they applied to participate.
• 104 stations didn't respond to the survey.

The participating stations the Free Press Action Fund identified are concentrated in 18 states and the District of Columbia. If they were to sell their spectrum at the maximum opening-bid prices, they would collectively stand to earn over $14 billion.

[Commentary] One of President-elect Donald Trump’s top tech-policy advisers has a plan: Do away with the main agency that protects the rights of Internet users and media consumers in America. You heard that right. Mark Jamison, who President-elect Trump chose to help oversee the tech-policy transition team, thinks that getting rid of the Federal Communications Commission would be a good thing for this country. “Most of the original motivations for having an FCC have gone away,” Jamison wrote in Oct, claiming that a heavily consolidated media marketplace would discipline itself to benefit ordinary people. He’s dead wrong.

If President-elect Trump were the least bit sincere about his claims to “drain the swamp” of lobbyists and special-interest operatives, he couldn’t have done much worse than selecting Jamison and Jeffrey Eisenach. If he wants to make good on his pledge to block AT&T’s $107-billion acquisition of Time Warner — which he called “too much concentration of power in the hands of too few” — he’ll have to lock horns with these two big-media boosters.

The American mainstream media spent the last year normalizing and propping up a racist, xenophobic, misogynist candidate whose closest advisers include white nationalists and politicians with a track record of oppressing women, people of color, and the LGBTQI community. In the days since the election, hundreds of hate crimes have been reported. We’ve seen our friends and families living in fear. And yet the media continues to treat President-elect Donald Trump like he’s nothing out of the ordinary. It’s never been more apparent that the corporate media have failed the people of this nation. But the march toward centralized, consolidated media and communications platforms pushes on.

Look no further than AT&T, which just before the election announced its plan to buy Time Warner, the owner of CNN, HBO and TNT. If approved, it would be one of the biggest media mergers ever. Whether President-elect Trump will remain opposed is an open question. But one thing is clear: The last thing we need right now is a more powerful media gatekeeper. We must block this deal.

[Commentary] Donald Trump’s victory poses a serious and immediate threat to our friends and families, our loved ones and neighbors. We started Free Press to fight for your rights to connect and communicate — and that’s exactly what we intend to do. Here’s what we will do next:

Resist. We intend to be vigilant watchdogs in our corner of the world, exposing and disrupting any attempts to take away your freedoms or silence dissenting voices.
Rethink. We’re living with the results of the corporate media’s utter failure in 2016. Instead of accepting the status quo, we must reimagine and recreate a media that is more focused on serving communities than cozying up to power.
Rebuild. We’re committed to strengthening our organization to meet the challenges in front of us. That means bringing on more organizers and advocates, redoubling our commitment to racial equity, and networking with allied groups dedicated to transforming our democracy and society.