The media has an agenda, every time we fail to understand their motives, we hurt the cause and our hope for a better future.  The media stands to lose billions of dollars if we get a decent FCC chair, they WILL lose billions if Obama is elected.

End of story, end of discussion.

Reading this story in the New York Times, that "Weather Channel Is Sold to NBC and Equity Firms", reminded me of a great idea I once had for a cable network.

Imagine this: every half-hour, for the convenience of viewers just stopping in for the TV news headlines, this channel would provide a decent update on the day's news events.  Some stories with more in-depth coverage would be included on a two-hour rotation.

I even had a good name for it: "Cable News Network."

It turned out, of course, that there already is an organization of that name -- I had assumed that the "C" in "CNN" stood for "Castrated" -- and that it was mostly dedicated to ensuring that we could enjoy the conservatice Sunday Morning pundit shows all week long.

So I came up with an alterative title: "Headline News."  It turned out that that too, rather than giving you the news over a half-hour whenever you tuned in, was largely devoted to maximizing the airtime given to conservative pundits and center-right thinking journalists for balance.  

I still think this would be a great idea -- if I could come up with a name that already hadn't been reserved for another purpose.

Last December the Federal Communications Commission pushed through new rules that gutted the local "cross-ownership" prohibition. This would mean more big conglomerates gobbling up our local papers and TV stations.

Last Thursday night, after receiving thousands of phone calls and more than 250,000 letters, the Senate cast a near-unanimous vote to reverse the FCC’s decision to let media companies own both a major TV or radio station and a major daily newspaper in the same city.

See below for why you should contact your Representative NOW.

A friend of mine works in robotics, funded entirely by the Department of Defense. He knows his work is funded because it could be co-opted for future military purposes.  To paraphrase his rationale for accepting such funding despite being staunchly non-militaristic, his purposes are peaceful, and such work is going to be done no matter what.  Second, he has no proprietary agreements with DoD, and by publishing his work, he puts the information into the public sphere.  While the first argument rings of an "If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em," mentality, the technology is both inevitable and valuable for multiple uses, and few realistic options exist for funding outside the DoD.  The second argument I like much better, as it speaks to a very practical issue of transparency: If government can use technology for malign purposes (thank heaven they don’t!), then at least the technology itself is publicly available, and can be used against them, as well.

When I was a kid in the 1970's, I wanted to be a disk jockey.  During the day, everyone in  my small Southern town had their radios tuned to the local radio station.  Pop and country music, local commercials ("Come down to Honest Dave's Car Lot - we'll fix ya'all up!"), and the news and Paul Harvey at noon. But at night I'd lay in bed fine-tuning my transistor radio to pick up WLS in Chicago (top 40 radio! Rock and roll!).  

Ah, those were the days.  Nearly every voice on the radio was someone I knew... and then one day, it was MY voice.

This short diary seeks to inform everyone on the state of media consolidation.  In this brief YouTube clip, you'll see why the Establishment opposes the merger of the satellite radio companies.  

The National Association of Broadcasters may regret asking Tim Robbins to give the keynote address at its annual gathering in Las Vegas yesterday.  In a calling to account matched only by Stephen Colbert’s White House Correspondents Dinner speech in satire and sarcasm, the actor took it to the NAB for obsessing over the latest celebrity sex scandal, subscribing to narrow viewpoints and, in the case of radio broadcasters, adhering to a "national playlist" of music.

I wish I had been there.  Since I wasn’t, Daily Variety gives it good coverage under the headline "Robbins Rocks Boat" (print edition).  See below the fold for what had to have been a highlight...

Media Consolidation is a cancer on our democracy - and most people have never heard of it. During the time that the San Diego Progressive Air America Radio outlet KLSD was under fire from Clear Channel; threatened with being turned into a Sport Talk format, three film makers, Jon Monday, Drew Reiff, and Jen Douglas decided to film the events as they were unfolding, in order to communicate something that is happening all around the country: the narrowing of political discourse as a result of Media Consolidation. You can watch a preview clip at: Save KLSD Preview

Visit our website at:
www.saveklsd.com

In Missouri, the Missouri Coalition for Lifesaving Cures is fighting a ballot initiative that would repeal the Stem Cell Initiative that was narrowly passed by voters in 2006. From an e-mail:

Missouri Coalition for Lifesaving Cures defended the will of voters Wednesday by continuing to challenge a drastic proposal to repeal Missourians' access to medical research, treatments and cures that are available to other Americans.  We maintained before the Missouri Court of Appeals Western District in Kansas City that the Secretary of State got it right when she described the proposed initiative as a repeal of the Missouri Stem Cell Amendment passed by voters in November 2006. Citizens have a right to know what this deceptive proposal would do: Make criminals of doctors, scientists and patients merely for seeking cures and treatments for diseases such as Parkinson's, cancer and muscular dystrophy.  

    I was just watching Wolf Blitzer's the Situation Room.  They were discussing the poll that suggested that a certain number of Clinton supporters (28 percent) might vote for McCain if Obama won the nomination, while 19 percent of Obama supporters might do the same if Hillary were the nominee.  During the entire five minute segment discussing this poll -- which clearly applied to both candidates and their supporters, the caption on CNN underneath the picture said "Obama Nod Helps McCain".  This caption remained the same for the entire story -- never did it show that the same applied if Clinton won.  

The newspaper industry is decline, perhaps fatally, for five reasons—all interrelated. You probably already know the reasons, but if you wanted to see them all written down in one place, then here you go.

As always, comment is invited. Be sure to take the poll, too!

On December 18th, the FCC passed a rule further deregulating media:

The three Republicans on the Commission, Chairman Kevin Martin, Deborah Taylor Tate, and Robert M. McDowell voted for the rule changes, while the two Democrats — Micheal J. Copps and Jonathan S. Adelstein — voted against the measure, despite oppositions by both parties in the Senate.

The new rule eliminated the ban on "newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership," meaning one company can now own a radio or television station and a major newspaper in the same city of town.

Despite the fact that, according to Josh Silver at Free Press, "99% of public comments did not support further consolidation," and despite the fact that, according to Tim Winter of the Parents Television Council, "Studies show newspapers do not take television and radio stations to task when they are owned by the same outlet," the FCC went ahead and gave big media companies more room to consolidate at the expense of local coverage, minority ownership, and balanced reporting.

But some in the Senate are fighting back. More info and action items after the jump...

I am intrigued by a number of articles which articulate how Democracy produced the Nazi state of Germany in the last century, titles such as:

How Democracy Produced a Monster

http://www.nytimes.com/...

 I propose to argue that with the loss of the Edwards candidacies that the netroots, as an alternative means of dissemination of information , is fatally damaged.  I intend to make my argument by pointing to three complete and utter canards, that is 3 "unfounded or false deliberatiely misleading"  narratives.  

To be sure all candidacies are subject to rivals throwing out shibboleths and seeing what sticks.  Nothing new there.  However, what is instructive about these three is that they came from within the netroots itself.  The principle I abstract from this behaviour is that when crunch time came - the netroots would rather turn its back on its own self-styled reason for being rather than buck the prevailing wind of conventional wisdom.  In the immortal words of Pogo,  "we have met the enemy and he is us."

For the past few months, David Goldstein (aka Goldy) has kindly given one hour of his Sunday night radio show over to Daily Kos, hosting Daily Kos contributing editors and guests. Yesterday, Goldy got the news that he, along with other local talk show hosts, were being fired. From his post at his blog HorsesAss.Org:

710-KIRO has canceled my show "for budgetary reasons." I’m not exactly sure about all the changes to the weekend schedule (I just talked to Bryan Styble, and he too got the ax,) but apparently syndication and reruns better fit the station’s current business model than live, local talk. Ah well.

Coming off a fall book where 710-KIRO weekends placed number three in the market, and a several month streak of jam-packed spot loads, I’d say the weekend shakeup was a bit of a surprise... that is, if Frank Shiers recent fate hadn’t been the handwriting on the wall. Over the past 14 months 710-KIRO has now shed itself of at least 38 44 hours a week of live local programming, and the salaries that go with it. It’s a trend that has been repeated at radio stations throughout the state, and I can’t say it’s one that ultimately better serves the community. For example, I had Gov. Chris Gregoire booked for a half hour this coming Saturday night — where are weekend listeners going to find local programming like that?

Here's where media consolidation hits home. There isn't another venue providing that kind of local programming, and it's not just Washington state or Seattle that's being hit. But that's a topic for another day.

Today, it's about Goldy and letting 710-KIRO and its parent company, Bonneville International know that we value local and progressive voices in talk radio. Our friends at the NW Progressive Institute have written an open letter to KIRO's management, and have more info in this diary.

On a personal note, and on behalf of the Daily Kos team, I want to thank Goldy for opening up the airwaves (and the bandwidth) to us. I would provide links to the archives of the shows we've appeared on, but they've apparently been scrubbed from KIRO's site. But I'm speaking for all of us when I say it's been a lot of fun to work with you, David, and I hope that we can find a way to continue.

Media Reform Information Center

In 1983, 50 corporations controlled the vast majority of all news media in the U.S.
...

in 2000, the number had fallen to six. Since then, there have been more mergers and the scope has expanded to include new media like the Internet market. More than 1 in 4 Internet users in the U.S. now log in with AOL Time-Warner, the world's largest media corporation.

In 2004, Bagdikian's revised and expanded book, The New Media Monopoly, shows that only 5 huge corporations -- Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch's News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, and Viacom (formerly CBS) -- now control most of the media industry in the U.S. General Electric's NBC is a close sixth.

http://www.corporations.org/...

http://www.corporations.org/...
------

  Not surprisingly, the Directors Guild of America has struck a tentative deal with Big Media. The DGA has always been perceived as more producer-friendly in the business because many of the heavy-weight directors are producers themselves and some are mini-empires. Of course, the spin that is being put out is that this is a great deal:

"It's really an excellent deal," Gilbert Cates, who led the directors’ negotiating committee, said in a telephone interview.

   Okay, so you can take that for what it is: self-congratulation that comes before most people can study the fine print. I would say the same thing if I was the negotiator. The deal appears to be predicated on the DGA's view that Internet-based revenues will be quite small over the life of the three-year deal. The question is: did the DGA sacrifice terrain that is now lost forever? From my vantage point, there are some good things here but also some areas of concern.

This diary is comprised of just a comparison between 04 and 08 -- and CNN's role in marginalizing and derailing candidates, for purposes of controlling the narrative for America and removing unwanted voices from access to living rooms in America. Lest people take in candidates on their own terms, without pre-packaging by Conglomerate Media Cartel, who send down their marching orders: Threaten to re-regulate & limit media consolidation, and you're filtered out.

08: Edwards deemed ANGRY by Wolf

VIDEO: http://www.crooksandliars.com/...