Media Power: For People or Corporations?

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Frustrated with TV ADS?Run your own for $6

Get FISA Right (GFR), the internet based activist group begun on mybarackobama.com to alter Sen. Obama's stance on government surveillance and telecom immunity, has moved on in a big way. After losing the legislative battle on FISA the group faced a challenging decision: disband and look for ways to effect government action on illegal surveillance individually or find new causes to organize members around. The active members knew they had captured lightning in a bottle with their melding of dedication to a cause and mastery of internet based activism. What they decided was to take the fight for rule of law and protecting your constitutional rights forward by empowering you to fund their new television ad.

kauffmanr :: Frustrated With TV Ads? Run Your Own for $6.
Thanks to the genius of SaysMeTV (a Venice, California, based company that buys cable advertisement space in bulk and sells 30 second spots to individuals) Get FISA Right has prepared and released its most ambitious project yet: a citizen funded television advertisement. GFR's talent rich group plus SaysMe's innovative airtime strategy is empowering supporters to fund it all over America. How much does 30 seconds of cable TV cost? Amazingly, not that much.

From $6 on CNBC in Cleveland to $2063 on ESPN in New York and everything in between, SaysMe has prices and networks for everyone. What is truly amazing about SaysMe is it brings the cookies of television advertisement down to the lower shelf. Anyone with a video camera, internet connection, and credit card can produce and distribute a message for the masses. The stranglehold that big media firms, large corporations, and wealthy citizens have over our airwaves is ending. More

The FCC and the Emperors of TV have no clothes

Big Media and their sock puppets at the FCC have engineered a massive theft of public resources -- the giveaway of more than ten thousand newly minted digital TV channels to themselves. They have finagled the regulatory process to exclude community groups, unions, local entrepreneurs, women, African Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, colleges, universities or local government entities from even being able to ask about getting channels for themselves, and imposed a news blackout on their evil deed. Their theft is settled law now, to be consummated in February 2009.
Their only fear is that the nationwide movement for media justice will awaken in time to inform and arouse the American people as it did 2003. A parade of pot-bellied naked corporate thieves are hoping nobody notices the crime scene or their progress to and from it, until it's too late.

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Back in 1996, both the Newt Gingrich congress and the FCC were perhaps just as insulated from popular will and the the people's interest as today, and just as subservient to the dictates of corporate broadcasters. Though now forgotten, it was well-known at the time that the advent of digital TV meant four to ten times as many TV channels. The top priorities of commercial broadcasters in the transition to digital TV were

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to avoid any public accountability for what they did with their existing channels, and
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to give themselves all the new channels without the issuance of new licenses, which might attract public attention to the otherwise opaque and obscure rule-making process.

The broadcasters paraded before Congress and the FCC. They promised more local news, more educational and cultural programming, more localism, more choices, more diversity of programming and viewpoints on the air, just as they had at the dawn of cable TV, but only if they were awarded all the stations with no public service obligations, and no public fuss or bother --- the usual corporate idea of a “free market”. The FCC, the Congress and President Bill Clinton gave them the nod, and that was that.

So it is that when the transition to digital TV occurs in February of 2009 and the number of TV stations multiplies by from four to ten times, no local entrepreneurs, no unions, community organizations, colleges, universities or other noncommercial, nonprofit broadcasters have any hope of gaining access to the new stations. All the new stations will be the provate property of the folks who already have broadcast licenses, with no obligations to do local news or public service, or educational or even local programming. The existing broadcasters get this gift of public spectrum, thousands of TV channels conservatively valued at $80 billion, for less than what a family in Wilmington NC pays for the yearly state tax on a used Ford --- for nothing. And they get it without the bother of new station licenses being issued, since that might attract undue public attention, with people inquiring about why someone else doesn't get a crack at them.


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Should the facts become public ---

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that although the broadcast spectrum is public property, current licensees will get all the new channels;
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that the new channels come at no cost whatsoever to broadcasters, although they are valued at more than $80 billion;
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that the new channels come with no obligations to do news, local content or public service;
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that local entrepreneurs, schools, colleges, unions, local civic bodies, local women and minority broadcasters are all denied any chance at the new channels;

that broadcasters have no new programming to put on the new channels, and even have a positive disincentive to, since it might compete with existing programming;
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the only broadcasters with responsible and accountable plans for the use of the new channels made available by the digital transition are noncommercial and public TV stations

a public uproar every bit as vast and potent as the one in 2003 could easily be sparked, provided the media justice movement itself is not asleep at the switch. More