Welcome to the Free Press blog! We post several times a week on everything from Internet access to free speech to media mergers, so check back often to see what we’re up to.
A scathing report in Britain
that Rupert Murdoch and other News Corp. executives engaged in an extensive
cover-up of “rampant law breaking” may have ramifications for the media mogul in
the United States.
How far-reaching those consequences are depends on U.S. politicians’
willingness to face down one of the most powerful media figures of our
generation.
This is how we watch TV in the 21st century: We fire up our laptops, our Roku boxes or our mobile devices. We open Hulu. We search for Parks and Recreation. Done.
But Hulu’s owners — Disney, News Corp. and Comcast, which respectively own ABC, Fox and NBC — are about to ruin this experience. If they have their way, you’ll need a cable subscription to watch any TV show on the Internet.
There’s a new and important voice in the ongoing fight for Net Neutrality: the voice of the shareholder.
You read that right.
On Friday, in an unprecedented move, AT&T shareholders voted on a proposal calling on the telecom behemoth to publicly commit to Net Neutrality on its wireless networks.
Yesterday
the House rushed through a vote on CISPA — the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and
Protection Act.
CISPA
supporters in the House were so rattled by mounting opposition to their creepy
bill — more than 1 million people told them to ditch it — that they passed the
legislation before our outcry could spread.
On Friday, the Federal Communications Commission ruled
that television stations must enter the 21st century and put the information in
their public and political files online. Now anyone with an Internet connection
will be able to access information about who is spending all that money on
political advertising. The files will also allow us to see how stations are serving
— or failing to serve — community needs.
Less than a week before the Federal Communications
Commission is set to vote on a proposal that would transform public access to
information about political ad spending, it seems the agency may be on the
verge of caving to industry pressure. Two out of three FCC commissioners have
expressed openness to a broadcast industry counter proposal to segregate
information about individual political ads, keeping that information offline
and locked in dusty file cabinets.
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is the most powerful corporate front group you’ve never heard of. Drawing the vast majority of its financing from big corporations, the group allows these firms to help write bills that it then secretly passes off to state legislators to get turned into laws.
