In June 2009 a coup d’etat overthrew Honduras’ democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya. Since the coup, human rights conditions in that country have deteriorated. Radio has become a vital organizing tool for defending the rights of indigenous people and fighting environmental destruction, while providing needed information and education to people in rural areas.

In April of this year Meredith Beeson and Ellen Knutson traveled to Honduras with a delegation from the Witness for Peace Solidarity Collective. As part of their solidarity work with human rights groups and environmental activists who are experiencing political repression, they also visited community radio stations that are providing critical information lifelines. Meredith is a community radio producer at KRSM in South Minneapolis, MN, who also worked with print and radio journalists on an earlier delegation. She and Ellen join the show to tell us about what’s happening in Honduras, and the important role of radio.

Show Notes:

• Witness for Peace Solidarity Collective
• Radio Dignidad
• Movimiento Amplio por la Dignidad y Justicia (MADJ)
• “Town Square” is Meredith’s show on KRSM in South Minneapolis
• Radio Progreso
• COPINH – Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras
• Media Landscapes: Radio in Honduras
• Honduras Solidarity Network

The post Podcast #198 – Defending Human Rights with Radio in Honduras appeared first on Radio Survivor.

This November 30 marks the 20th anniversary of the protests against meetings of the World Trade Organization that shut down the city of Seattle. It also marks the birthday of the Indymedia movement, which brought together grassroots media activists from public access TV, print, community radio and internet technology to create a radical open publishing system and network of affiliated centers that let citizen journalists instantaneously publish words, sound, pictures and video years before the advent of YouTube or Twitter.

In the U.S. this movement helped to further solidify much of the support for what would become low-power FM community radio. Established just two months later, in January 2000, LPFM allowed for the greatest expansion of community radio in history. Though the Indymedia movement was not a formal causal agent in the creation of LPFM, that energy sparked at the WTO helped to spur media activists to take advantage of the new service.

With these coming anniversaries, we at Radio Survivor would like to help tell this history, which still remains poorly documented. We need your support to do this.

We’re need to have 100 people making monthly contributions to our Patreon fundraising campaign by July 1, 2019 August 1, 2019. That will allow us to allocate the time and resources necessary to do the reporting, writing and product needed to begin telling this story on our radio show and website beginning with the November 30. For some of us, this means being able to prioritize this work over other freelance gigs or having the ability to do travel that is otherwise out of reach.

As of July 22 we have 42 monthly contributors, so that means we have 58 patrons to go. The good news is that it only takes a contribution of $1 a month to get us closer to our goal, though it’s great if you can contribute more.

To say thank-you, all of our patrons get access to bonus content, including bonus episodes of our podcast, ready-to-print radio station postcards and more. With contributions of $20 or more you can become an underwriter on our show, getting a monthly announcement that you’ll co-write with us.

We think this is an important history that risks being forgotten. In particular we think it’s vital for today’s community broadcasters, podcasters and listeners to know and learn from. When you support our work you help to educate thousands of community media activists while preserving this record for the future.

Please join our Patreon now to support this work.

Don’t hesitate drop us a line if you have any questions or suggestions.

The post Help Us Tell the History of Indymedia & LPFM appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Why didn’t the internet just stop working the day after the FCC voted to end network neutrality? Prof. Christopher Terry from the University of Minnesota joins to answer that question, and explain what happens next. He also lays out where is the fight over internet freedom going next, and what the real threat is for independent and community media.

Then we learn more about public access TV and how one station in Portland, OR is evolving and innovating to keep up with the times. We talk with two staffers from Open Signal Portland Community Media: Chris Lawn, Media Services Technical Lead and Rebecca Burrell, Director of Strategy and Development. We hear about the fundamentals of the medium and how Open Signal is rethinking how “access” can be more than just giving people equipment and airtime.

Show Notes:

• Open Signal Portland Community Media
• New York attorney general announces a multi-state lawsuit challenging the net neutrality vote
• The FCC just killed net neutrality

The post Podcast #121 – What Happens After Net Neutrality; Open Signal Public Access TV appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Today the Telecommunications Act of 1996 turns 21. As some have remarked, the law is now old enough to drink, even while others note that it’s driven many to drink in the last two decades.

Happy Birthday 1996 Telecom Act. You’re old enough to drink now, which is fair since that’s what you’ve made the rest of us do for 21 years.

— Christopher Terry (@ChristopherTerr) February 8, 2017

It’s hard to overstate the effects of the Telecom Act on our contemporary media and communications environment. The act’s elimination of the nationwide radio ownership cap and raising of local ownership limits cleared the way for massive consolidation and the creation of the debt-ridden behemoths iHeartMedia (née Clear Channel) and Cumulus. Deregulation of cable ownership also led to consolidation in that industry, along with a rise in monthly fees.

One of the Act’s most tarnished legacies is the biannual ownership rules review that the FCC is supposed to undertake. Our friend Prof. Christopher Terry puts an even sharper point to it, calling it a “legacy of failure.” To understand why it’s a failure, read his first post, and his two follow-ups: “Could the FCC’s Legacy of Failure Trigger Even More Consolidation?” and “The FCC’s Legacy on Media Ownership: Now with More Failure!”

Prof. Terry also outlined the Telecom Act’s impact on radio exactly one year ago on episode 33 of our podcast:

Now with many lawmakers and players in the telecom and media industries calling for a fresh update, and with a deregulation-happy administration in the White House, it begs the question if we’ll see even more consolidation across media, radio included. No doubt the denizens of the executive suites at iHeart, Cumulus, Entercom and CBS Radio are salivating at the prospect.

Although the FCC does have a bit of leeway in how it regulates ownership, as Prof. Terry points out, the agency’s hands are pretty well tied by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals right now. Though on his most recent appearance on the podcast he did point out that the Commissioners, led by new Chairman Ajit Pai, can issue all sorts of waivers that grant exceptions to existing rules.

But when it comes to a revision of the Telecom Act, that fight will be in Congress. Those concerned about how well the public interest will be represented in that battle should be reminded that the ’96 Act passed with enthusiastic support from both parties in Congress, and was easily signed into law by President Bill Clinton. Pressure on congresspeople of all stripes will be necessary.

The post Happy (?) 21st Birthday to the Telecom Act of 1996 appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Reports of FM’s death in Norway are premature. That’s according to the Norwegian Local Radio Association (NLF – Norse Lokalradio Forbund in Norwegian) which sent us a press release saying that 200 local commercial and community radio stations outside the country’s four largest cities will continue broadcasting in analog. Waves were made in the international press the last few days with the initial report that Norway will shut down FM radio service in 2017.

However, according to the NLF, only 23 local radio stations in Oslo, Bergen, Trondheim and Stavanger, along with major national broadcasters, will make the transition from analog to digital DAB broadcast. The group also highlights a recent report from the Government Statistical Bureau that says only 19% of listening is on broadcast DAB, below the 50% threshold set as a prerequisite for the change.

Apparently, the analog switch-off still requires approval in Parliament, where it has majority support, but opposition from the Progress Party–part of the governing coalition–and the Green Party. Part of the objection is based on claims by groups like the NLF saying DAB’s adoption was spurred by lobbying from the Digitalradio Norge AS company, not by consumer demand. That should sound familiar to HD Radio critics in the US.

There is also concern that foreign motorists from across Europe, where DAB penetration is much lower, will have no access to radio while visiting Norway’s major cities, cutting them off from news and information like traffic reports and emergency alerts.

I’ll admit that I was skeptical of the broad, sweeping claims of FM’s demise in Norway, especially since only the big national stations were mentioned in the Culture Ministry’s release. While I argued that the country is an outlier in making such a transition, I should have been more forthright in expressing my doubts that it would affect all FM stations.

Unfortunately, my inability to read Norwegian hampered my ability to do better research. That’s not an excuse, by the way. I have now found that Google Translate does a very good job with Norwegian.

Instead it’s just another lesson that I, and journalists in general, shouldn’t abandon our critical eye in the face of a juicy headline. I’ll keep a closer eye on what happens in Norway, because the political and regulatory aspects certainly hold lessons for communication policy in all countries.

The post FM in Norway Isn’t Dead, Says Norwegian Local Radio Association appeared first on Radio Survivor.

It’s not like we didn’t see it coming. The FCC is taking flak from Congress about its Open Internet rules passed last month, and this week the first wave of lawsuits has been filed. The United States Telecom Association is the biggest plaintiff, representing the nation’s largest broadband providers. The other suit was filed by Alamo Broadband, a small Texas-based ISP.

In its suit, US Telecom charges that the Open Internet Order “is arbitrary, capricious, and an abuse of discretion,” and violates federal law, including both the Constitution and the Communications Act. On its blog the group says it ”supports open Internet rules, but disagrees with the Federal Communications Commission’s decision to reclassify broadband Internet providers as common carriers."

There is some debate about whether or not these suits are actually premature, since the Order itself does not go into effect until sixty days after being published in the Federal Register–something that has not happened yet. For its part, the FCC contends the lawsuits indeed are premature.

As communications attorney Harold Feld explains, US Telecom is covering its bases with the early petition. There’s the off chance that a court could find that because the Order is a complex beast, with aspects that qualify as “adjudication,” as well as rulemaking, that the window for filing a challenge was ten business days after release. Feld thinks this is unlikely, resulting in either these suits being dismissed, or the Appeals Court sitting on them until sixty days after the Order is published in the Federal Register.

FCC Chairman Wheeler has come in for heavy doses of criticism in his appearances in front of several Congressional committees since the Open Internet Order passed. Mostly these are cases of all smoke, no fire. While Republicans control Congress and the committees and generally oppose the Commission applying Title II utility regulation to internet service, it’s not clear there are enough votes in either the House or the Senate to pass legislation to change or nullifying the Order.

Republican Senator John Thune and Representatives Greg Walden and Fred Walton have been working together on proposals for legislation that would kill Title II, while also implementing many aspects of Open Internet protections, like a ban on creating a paid “fast lane.” This proposal is more net neutrality-like than any coming from Republican legislators before, and could appeal to some Democrats, though it’s not clear how wide support is even amongst Republicans.

It’s a serious question how many Dems want to oppose the FCC and the President on the issue. Furthermore, President Obama is not particularly likely to sign such legislation, if passed.

An alternative approach for circumventing the Open Internet Order was suggested by suggested by Wheeler’s own colleague, Commissioner Ajit Pai, at a Monday hearing of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government. Pai told the assembled representatives that “Congress should forbid the commission from using any appropriated funds to implement or enforce the plan the FCC just adopted to regulate the Internet.” Again, such a move would require the President’s signature, though bundling it in with other appropriations makes it a more effective bargaining chip.

Expect more smoke and dust as the ISPs and their pals in Congress run around looking for ways to puncture the Open Internet Order. This will be a long fight, and most probably resolved by the Appeals Court, and not any time too soon.

The post Digital Watch: Congressional & Legal Challenges to Open Internet Order Begin appeared first on Radio Survivor.

This was a particularly active week in Washington with regard to legislation that affects radio and our overall communications technology landscape. Here’s what happened.

Innovation Act Passes the House

The Innovation Act passed the House on Thursday by a vote of 325 to 91 with broad bipartisan support. The bill is intended to fix some gaps of patent law, in particular those which permit patent trolls to go after customers and users of technologies, like the trolls who are suing podcasters and HD Radio broadcasters.

Like most legislation that goes through the Capitol Hill sausage grinder, it’s not perfect. But the Innovation Act as it is would likely do more to protect the podcasters and broadcasters currently being threatened with lawsuits for using technology that is either freely available or, as in the case of HD Radio, they license from another company. The bill would allow a technology owner, like HD Radio’s iBiquity, to step in on behalf of its customers.

Patent trolls depend on many of their targets settling because of the often prohibitive costs of defending themselves in court. The Innovation Act provides some potential relief by making the plaintiff liable for the defendant’s legal costs if they lose and the lawsuit is deemed “unreasonable.”

Now it’s up to the Senate to craft its own version of the bill.

House Republicans Announce Communications Act Update

The chairmen of the House Commerce Committee and the Communications and Technology Subcommittee announced during a Google Hangout on Tuesday that they intend to begin a review of the Communications Act, last revised in 1996. Representatives Fred Upton (R-MI) and Greg Walton (R-OR) were joined by former FCC Chairman Robert McDowell, who served under President Bush, to discuss their plans for the update.

They were long on generalities and short on specifics, mostly emphasizing the changes in internet and wireless technology since the ’96 Act. Revealing an obvious deregulatory bias, McDowell recalled how the 1996 Act was built on the 1934 Act which itself was built on the foundation of the 19th century Railroad Act. He emphasized that different technologies are regulated based on their history which he said is increasingly “irrelevant.”

Radio felt an enormous impact from the Communications Act of 1996 because it eliminated the national cap on station ownership and greatly relaxed the market caps, resulting in a tidal wave of over-leveraged industry consolidation that arguably gutted most commercial stations of their local staffs and service. Though no specific mention of radio was made in the hangout, rules about internet service, wireless broadband and other digital technologies would affect the broader radio landscape, which itself is no longer confined to the broadcast airwaves.

Rep. John Dingell (D-MI) has long been an active player in communications law and policy. In a statement, he urged caution with a Communications Act update. “Changes should not be made simply for change’s sake, but rather based on clear and documented need,” he said. “I urge my colleagues to proceed in a bipartisan manner and to hold numerous hearings in order to generate the record an undertaking this substantial will require.”

The post DC Update: Innovation Act passes House, Republicans announce Comm Act update appeared first on Radio Survivor.

The White House has responded to a petition asking the Federal government to eliminate Rush Limbaugh from the lineup of radio programs available on the American Forces Network for overseas troops.

“Thank you for your interest in American Forces Network (AFN) programming . . . ” the statement begins, but: “AFN does not censor content, and we believe it is important that service members have access to a variety of viewpoints,” Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Bryan G. Whitman says.

Whitman was answering a missive endorsed by 29,189 signers on the government’s “We the People” site. The protest followed Limbaugh’s infamous “slut” comment, directed at a law-student trying to testify before Congress regarding the contraception mandate in the Affordable Care Act. Here’s the substance of the petition:

It is not bad enough that [Limbaugh] provides partisan blather, that he demeans our President.

He has regularly demeaned women.

His remarks this week were well beyond the pale of what should be broadcast to our military and their families, supported with our tax dollars.

We have a moral objection to our tax dollars being used for such a purpose.

You should move immediately to cancel any further broadcast through government facilities of his venom.

There is no excuse for the US Government, in any capacity, giving this man an audience.

To which Whitman countered:

AFN is charged with providing current information and entertainment programming to our Department of Defense audiences overseas, similar to what they could see and hear via the media in the United States. AFN acquires top-rated radio programs, as measured by audience ratings in the United States, and delivers them via satellite to our soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen stationed worldwide in 177 countries. AFN does not advertise on, provide any funding for, offer products for sale, or sponsor any of the programs (including the Rush Limbaugh Show) it relays to its audiences.

The petition had been launched by OleHippieChick of the Daily Kos. angelajean, spokesperson for Military Community Members of the Daily Kos, expressed disappointment at the response:

“I had high hopes that someone within the military chain of command would see sense,” she wrote. “I had even higher hopes that civilians within the Obama Administration would see that this is not a case of ‘fair and balanced’ representation of the political point of view. . . . Honestly, I could care less which talk show hosts they want to place on our airways as long as those hosts are not misogynists, racists, or make common use of hate speech.”

The post Uncle Sam: Thank you, but we won’t dump Rush Limbaugh appeared first on Radio Survivor.

An advertisement for hkreporter.com in a Hong Kong hotel/shopping district.

I am still in Hong Kong, just days after the city’s huge annual demonstration commemorating the handover of the city to the People’s Republic of China. Politically, Hong Kong is a 7 million person town in turmoil. Its newly elected chief administrator, Leung Chun-ying, already faces charges that he lied about illegal structures in his luxury home. Rival politicians have called for him to resign. Leung had to flee a community meeting yesterday, when angry district residents pressed him on this and other issues.

Much of this turbulence plays itself out over the radio. Yesterday the city’s top education administrator probably failed a crucial test in the eyes of many Hong Kong residents. During a radio interview, Eddie Ng claimed that he cried during the military suppression of students on June 4, 1989 in and near Tiananmen Square, but refused to condemn the PRC’s actions. “Students should have freedom of expression, but it [the protests] led to unfortunate events,” the South China Morning Post quotes Ng as saying [link requires registration].

A furious caller responded to his equivocation. “No Chinese should say it’s an unfortunate event,” the called declared. “It’s sinful. Maybe your tears were sincere but what you have said today is hypocritical.” Hong Kong residents see the question as a litmus test, determining whether a local politician is loyal to the city or to Beijing.

Ng’s interviewer is no stranger to controversy himself. Albert Cheng Jing-han has a complicated career that includes running media companies and hosting talk radio shows. According to Wikipedia, by 2003 Cheng won the sobriquet “Chief Executive before 10 AM,” largely because of his broadcast criticisms of the government, especially during the SARS outbreak of that year.

Fired from his radio job, Cheng successfully ran for the Legislative Council (Legco) in 2004. Four years later he quit Legco and obtained a radio license for his Wave Media company. He has been in the talk radio show business ever since. Digital Audio Broadcasting is on the way too, it seems.

Cheng isn’t the only radio politician in town. There’s also Stephen Shiu, proprietor of his own Internet radio site: Hong Kong Reporter, which I profiled several days ago. Shiu is about where Cheng was five years ago, running for Legco as a member of the “People Power” faction.

At the huge handover demonstration that I attended on July 1 (400,000 people), I asked some young people about Shiu. “I like him,” one student told me, “but I take him with a grain of salt.” Seems like Hong Kong residents take everything with that spice, politicians and radio hosts alike.

The post In Hong Kong a thin line between radio and politics appeared first on Radio Survivor.

I am visiting Hong Kong, which has been rocked by demonstrations protesting the arrival of China’s President Hu Jintao (Update: I took the YouTube video above at today [Sunday’s] amazing pro-democracy demonstration on Hong Kong Island). He’s in town to commemorate the 15th anniversary of “The Handover,” as it is called around here. That’s the transfer of administrative control of this vibrant metropolitan region from the British empire to the People’s Republic of China.

Hu’s arrival comes as Hong Kong is getting a new chief executive, Leung Chun-ying, whose administration is already mired in scandal. Contrary to what Chung-ying said during his election bid, his luxury home contains various illegal structures. This is a big deal in a city of seven million facing skyrocketing housing prices and a widening gap between the rich and poor. Yesterday police briefly held a reporter who asked Hu about the Tianenmen Square crackdown of 1989.

A view of the densely crowded Mong Kok district of Hong Kong, a city beset by anxiety over housing prices and income inequality (photo: Matthew Lasar).

Positioned in the middle of this crisis is a remarkable radio journalist named Stephen Shiu, proprietor of his own Internet radio site: Hong Kong Reporter. The Economist describes him as a boisterous deejay whose laughter booms “even as he explains how the city’s next leader plans to crush the very heart of liberal Hong Kong.” 250,000 Hong Kong residents listen to Shiu’s commentaries—”a young and angry force that excels at taking noisily to the street in waspish black and yellow, putting two fingers up to the Communist Party.”

Shiu is a talk deejay and a politician. Not only is he a prominent voice for a faction called People Power, but he’s a candidate for Hong Kong’s Legislative Council, or “Legco” as it is known. I don’t pretend to understand Shiu’s commentaries and speeches, but you can see for yourself from these YouTube clips that his engaging presence has won him a huge following. I hope to get some opinion of him from Hong Kong residents over the next few days.

The post On the trail of insurgent Internet radio in Hong Kong appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Rush searches for his national advertisers.

More than a week after Rush Limbaugh proffered a weak apology for his repeated misogynistic comments on-air about Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke, his show is left with virtually no national advertisers, but he remains mostly unrepentant.

On Monday word broke that Limbaugh’s syndicator, Clear Channel-owned Premiere Radio Networks, is suspending all national advertising on his program for the next two weeks. As it is Limbaugh is left with only two national advertisers, Lifelock and online gold peddler Lear Financial. Think Progress counts a total of 140 local and national advertisers who have pulled their support for Limbaugh’s program, while Media Matters is keeping a daily tally of the ads heard on the program’s flagship station WABC in New York.

Predictably, Limbaugh himself isn’t backing down during his program. On Tuesday’s show he bragged that despite the outrage and criticism of his treatment of Fluke, for his political opponents “it wasn’t a big winner for them. Didn’t work out the way they had all envisioned.”

Whether or not Rush is reigned in, Sandra Fluke isn’t backing away from her vocal support in favor of private health insurance coverage for contraception. On Tuesday CNN.com published an Op-Ed piece from Fluke in which she calls out the “smears” against her and other women as an attempt to silence her and others who support the same cause.

She also counters the deceptive claims made by Limbaugh and others that she and other advocates are asking for government-supported contraception. Fluke writes,

despite the misinformation being spread, the regulation under discussion has absolutely nothing to do with government funding: It is all about the insurance policies provided by private employers and universities that are financed by individual workers, students and their families — not taxpayers.

Despite the advertiser exodus, I’m not surprised that ol’ Rushbo is still there. While I’m certain the bleeding will hurt in the short run, since that’s how Premiere makes a good portion of its money from the program, it will take more than a few weeks without national ads to give either Limbaugh or Premiere a reason to change strategy. Apparently Rush even refused to take back a sponsor this week which was amongst the first to pull its ads when the backlash hit.

However, if the big stations, like WABC, start losing more of their own advertisers, then they might be pressed to find a less risky alternative. Former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee’s new program is the one being cited most often.

It does appear that watchdogs like Think Progress and Media Matters will be helping to keep up pressure on Limbaugh advertisers for the moment. Whether that will last long enough to have any lasting impact on Limbaugh’s program is an open question. I daresay there will be quite a few new, perhaps less prominent advertisers lining up once the smoke clears. I’m doubtful that Rush will lose a substantial number of stations, nevermind lose his show altogether.

I suspect the lasting impact will be a bit more subtle. Limbaugh may be a bit more cautious about attacking women who are not established political actors. The program may also be less able to rely on big-name national advertisers for a longer time. But in the end, I doubt it is likely to add up to more than a few percentage points difference in Limbaugh’s already substantial yearly salary.

However, if he slips up this royally again any time soon, I do think he’ll be in a bit more jeopardy.

The post Sandra Fluke continues to speak out while syndicator suspends national ads on Limbaugh show appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Michael Berry

Last week I reported on conservative Houston talk radio host Michael Berry who was accused of committing a hit-and-run damaging a bouncer’s car while leaving a local gay bar. While he has not admitted any guilt in the matter, on Thursday Berry offered $2000 to the aggrieved bouncer, Tuderia Bennett, in order to cover damages. A letter from Berry’s attorney states,

“I wanted to make you aware that from the very beginning of HPD’s investigation, Mr. Berry made it known to HPD that if they were of the opinion that he caused damage to your car, Mr. Berry wanted to make it right with you.”

Berry’s decision to offer compensation to Bennett comes after reports that Houston Police were re-examining the case in which they initially decided not to pursue further investigation or charges against Berry. Bennet identified Berry as the man who hit his car, and video surveillance footage confirmed that Berry was inside the bar that same night.

For his part Berry does not deny being at the bar, and on his program challenged the assertion that he is anti-gay, saying “I have never hated gay people; in fact, I’ve gone the exact opposite direction.” He also said that he went to the bar in question because “there was a cold beer waiting inside,” and it was somewhere he knew he wouldn’t be recognized.

Bennet told KPRC-TV that since receiving the check from Berry he is no longer interested in pressing charges. He says that, “I’m just going to tell them let’s let sleeping dogs lie.”

That probably means the end of this embarrassing ordeal for Berry. Though I wonder if the episode didn’t result in a brief ratings boost, as folks tuned in to see if he would address the charges on air. I think the lesson here is that it’s better to fess up right away to a hit-and-run, rather than try and dodge it, especially if you’re even minor radio celebrity.

The post Conservative talk host Michael Berry offers to pay for hit-and-run damages appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Both candidates have posted their radio spots as YouTube videos. Warren calls the bill “a dangerous measure.” Brown calls the legislation part of the “need to protect the right to basic values of religious tolerance.”

Here is Warren’s statement:

Here is Brown’s:

The post War over birth control coverage hits Boston radio appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Earlier this week we explored how left wing listener supported radio station KPFA in Berkeley is debating Republican libertarian candidate Ron Paul. Just to be bi-partisan, now let’s see how conservative talk radio guy Michael Savage is handling the Texas Congressional representative. Keep in mind that several months ago, Savage offered Newt Gingrich a million dollars to get out of the primary race, “for the sake of the nation.”

Savage: All right, let’s take the callers. Barbara in New York on WOR, go ahead please.

Barbara: Michael, it won’t make any difference if Obama wins or not, because all the Republican candidates are the same. And you know the only candidate, the “deranged” Ron Paul, is the only one who has spoken out against, not only NDAA, but SOPA, Stop Online Piracy Act . . . he spoke out against the Patriot Act years ago. He’s the only one warning about the fascism and oppression coming to America. And he’s been right.

Savage: Hold on. He is right, but he’s not electable.

Barbara: You supported John McCain four years ago, and who was the author of the . . .

Savage: Woah woah woah hold on a minute. Stop. You wanted me to support Obama?

Barbara: No. I want you to support the candidate that supports the constitution.

Savage: Wait. Don’t get hysterical. Please. It’s one thing to say the man has some good ideas and some crazy ideas. It’s another thing to be a realist and ask yourself ‘could he beat Obama.’ You don’t really believe that he could beat Obama, do you?

Barbara: That’s where you are wrong. You think nutcase Newt can beat Obama?

Savage: No. When did I say that? Ma’am. Ma’am. Stop. You sound like you are hysterical. You sound just like Ron Paul. Why are all the Ron Paul addicts so hysterical (I’d like to know)?

Barbara: Because they care about this country and they’re tired . . .

Savage: You mean only you care about the country? I don’t care about the country?

Barbara: Let me just say this: the Republicans are no different from the Democrats. Not one of them has spoken out against NDAA or SOPA or the Patriot Act; they’re all for going all over and bombing all over . . .

Savage: Well, you’re wrong. When you say ‘none of them have spoken out,’ you mean none of the Republican Senators?

Barbara: None of the Republican candidates have spoken out against NDAA, except for Ron Paul.

Savage: Ok. On this point you are correct. But this still does not make the crackpot electable.

Barbara: He’s not a crackpot, Michael. He’s been saying things that you agree with.

Savage: Really. He’s being saying things that I agree with? You mean I agree that Israel should be annihilated and disappeared off the planet like he does? . . . You want me to play the sound bite? . . . [a lengthy debate about Israel ensued; see update below]

Barbara: Michael, I’ve been voting since 1972. I voted for George McGovern because he was anti-war, so it’s not like I’m naive and—

Savage: So you’re confirming what I suspect. Most people who support Ron Paul are dyed-in-the-wool liberals.

Barbara: I’m not a liberal! . . . I’m an American!

[UPDATE – readers are complaining that I left out the part of the debate that focused on Israel. I just thought it was too long and involved, but due to popular demand, here goes]:

Savage: I will be happy to play the sound bit of Ron Paul basically calling for Israel’s non-existence.

Barbara: No he’s not. And he’s the only one, let me remind you, in 1980 or ’81, when Israel bombed the nuclear power plant in Iran [actually, it was Iraq], the only one who supported it was Ron Paul! Because Ron Paul believes that Israel should take care of herself, she should have the right to defend herself, without any kind of overseer by the United States.

Savage: That’s all well and good, but where is Israel supposed to get its arms from, since all of its weaponry is American. Other than the domestically manufactured material, where is Israel supposed to get its munitions from? The bunker busting bombs that it has come from the United States of America. So that’s a moot point to say that Israel should defend itself. Without weapons it can’t defend itself.

Barbara: It’s got plenty of weapons, Michael, and you know it. It’s got more weapons probably than we do by now. And they do a damn pretty good job of defending themselves. Remember the raid on Entebbe? They do very well.

Savage: Entebbe was a long time ago. That’s when they had real leadership in Israel, before the people with Saks Fifth Avenue charge accounts took over the country. That’s before the Russians came to Israel. That’s when Israel was still Israel. Israel is a shell of its former self.

Barbara: It’s up to Israel to get its own leadership, like its up to the United States to get its leadership that’s authorized by the constitution.

The post Michael Savage: Ron Paul supporters are hysterical, dyed-in-wool liberals appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Berkeley, California based listener supported station KPFA did an interesting and informative program on the candidacy of libertarian Republican Ron Paul on Tuesday. KFPA talk show host, Mitch Jeserich, hosted the discussion on his Letters and Politics show as Republicans (including Paul) compete for favor in the Iowa Caucuses. [UPDATE 10:41 PM CST: Paul comes in close third in Iowa race].

The program began with Nation magazine correspondent John Nichols, who characterized the Iowa event as “a sort of Kabuki theater, where most of the people who go don’t actually participate in the delegate selection process, they just go to participate in a glorified straw poll.” But that poll result, “doesn’t have anything to do with delegate selection. So while it is said that this is the beginning of the [Republican] nominating process, it’s really sort of a false construct.”

The real beginning of the process comes next week in New Hampshire, Nichols noted, where a more traditional primary will take place. And Nichols doubted that the Republican “party bosses” will let Paul get very far.

Nonetheless, much of the progressive blogosophere has been engaged in a fierce debate over Paul, who insists that he did not author various racist statements famously identified in his Reagan/Clinton era newsletter. Despite this, and Paul’s opposition to right of women to choose, Medicare, the Civil Rights Act, and other 20th-century reforms, bloggers who offer qualified defenses of his campaign note his opposition to the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the war on drugs, the Patriot Act, and Federal implementation of the death penalty.

“Ron Paul is the only major candidate from either party advocating crucial views on vital issues that need to be heard, and so his candidacy generates important benefits,” contends Salon writer Glen Greenwald. Ditto says Robert Scheer in The Nation, given Paul’s “devastating critique of crony capitalism and his equally trenchant challenge to imperial wars and the assault on our civil liberties that they engender.”

Other writers, such as Bill Weinberg of the World War 4 Report, don’t see it this way. “If we ever see a President Paul, he’ll be bringing the troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan, all right,” Weinberg warns “—to wage a race war in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Houston.”

Nichols told Jeserich that he thinks the Paul cause is “a very dangerous game.”

“I understand that there are people who are passionate supporters of civil rights, Medicare, and Medicaid, who simply want to send a message and this is a way to do it,” Nichols explained. “But Ron Paul is a pretty complex player, and he has a lot of history on these issues that is pretty unsettling—in some cases repulsive.”

The conversation then went to Glen Ford of the Black Agenda Report, who was asked for his opinion of Paul.

“I hope he does well,” Ford began. “I don’t like him, but it’s really a reflection on what’s happening in the Democratic Party, that the only conversation that the corporate media finds compelled to cover that has anything to do with empire . . . is coming from the Republican Party or from this libertarian within the Republican Party. So for those of us who would like to hear the term ’empire’ uttered, Ron Paul is the only show among the two parties. He’s the only game in town.”

Jeserich asked Ford about the more controversial comments coming out of Paul’s newsletter.

“Paul comes from a cultural, political milieu that is totally saturated with racism,” Ford observed. “He is a hyper-American nationalist. And many people say how could that be, he is talking about the end of American empire; that’s not what we associate with hyper-American nationalists. But there has always been an American nationalism that was isolationist.”

Ford noted that isolationists have for a century opposed the integration of forcibly acquired nations like the Philippines and Cuba on racial grounds, citing fears of “mongrelization.”

“These strains have always been among us, and I think that Ron Paul actually is part of that older strain, very strong, that just doesn’t get talked about in the American political conversation.”

Jeserich asked Ford what he thought about progressives who see Paul as someone who could potentially make President Obama address issues that otherwise won’t be raised?

“Obviously they’re looking for the magic wand and some kind of way to oppose these corporatist policies of Obama that he shares, in fact, with the Republicans,” Ford replied. “They’d like a magic wand; some kind of button to push in the electoral arena, that would allow them to avoid the hard, hard work of grassroots movement building that is necessary.”

An interesting show, definitely worth podcasting or downloading.

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The FCC is currently down one commissioner due to Republican Meredith Atwell Baker stepping aside last spring. Democrat Michael Copps is on an “extended term” that is set to end at the end of this Congressional term. So the FCC is due to be getting by on just three commissioners by the time the new year rolls around.

Surprising just about nobody inside the beltway, President Obama nominated two experienced policy wonks with prior commission experience to fill these vacancies, Democrat Jessica Rosenworcel and Republican Ajit Varadaraj Pai. Rosenworcel served for a time as an advisor to Copps, who has been the strongest advocate for the public interest on the FCC in the last decade.

Pai served as Deputy General Counsel to former FCC chairman Kevin Martin, who tried to balance out the boneheaded consolidation-happy tendencies of his predecessor, Michael Powell, but also exhibited his own brand of ham-handedness when it came to issues of ownership regulation and localism. That said, I don’t think we can necessarily use the positions of their former bosses to predict the likely stances of either of these nominees.

Putting aside Clear Channel’s recent begging to further erode ownership rules, I doubt that we’ll see much change in the FCC’s trajectory with regard to broadcast radio if they are both confirmed by the Senate. I’ll be surprised if we see much modification from the Commission’s current proceeding on balancing LPFM expansion with new translator licenses, and even more surprised if either new commission has much influence on the outcome. Provided Rosenworcel is confirmed, there will continue to be a Democratic majority, which will be friendly to LPFM.

The policies that will most affect radio and audio media have to do with the wired, wireless and mobile broadband. Our ability to listen to streaming online radio is utterly constrained by mobile broadband data limits, which in just the last couple of years have gone from unlimited to much more limited. Data caps also matter for home cable and DSL internet, although the smaller bitrates required for streaming audio aren’t as threatened as bandwidth-intensive streaming video.

This is all affected by network neutrality and whether or not broadband providers, wired or mobile, are permitted to determine how much data we use based upon what kind of data it is and who is providing it. Our ability to listen to hours of streaming radio might be encumbered if our broadband provider decides to impose stricter limits on stations or sites that it doesn’t have some kind of contract with.

These are the issues which the new FCC commissioners will have the most impact on. However, as Public Knowledge’s Harold Feld points out, neither Pai nor Rosenworcel have released much in the way of a public record indicating their stances on hot regulatory issues. Feld describes them as, “workhorse wonks – willing to put a lot of time and effort into understanding complex issued before making any kind of decision.”

However, Pai’s and Rosenworcel’s path to the FCC is already threatened, though not due to anything about the candidates themselves. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) says he will object to their confirmation over the fact that the Commission has yet to turn over documents related to the wireless company Lightsquared. The company plans to launch a wholesale mobile broadband service, but is dealing with data that indicates its service interferes with GPS signals. Republic lawmakers are concerned that the Obama administration may be intervening to help Lightsquared overcome these technical roadblocks.

Sen. Grassley requested documents back in April, and he plans to place a hold on the confirmations until the information is turned over. In a July 26 letter to Grassley, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said the Commission only responds to such requests coming from committee chairs.

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Lisa Simeone

The good news is that Occupy DC participant Lisa Simeone will retain her job as host of NPR World of Opera. The This is NPR blog has a brief notice mentioning that World of Opera sponsor WDAV will keep Simeone on. She came under fire yesterday for her participation in the Occupy Wall Street related protests.

Simeone fared less well, however, when it came to holding onto her position as host for Soundprint. Here’s that program’s statement about her:

Soundprint and Lisa Simeone have ended their work together after fifteen years. Soundprint is a journalistic program and Lisa’s leadership role as a member of the steering committee and a spokesperson for the October 2011 protest activities, associated with the Occupy DC movement, conflicts with her role as the host of a documentary series. Soundprint adheres to the highest standards of journalism which include maintaining appropriate distance from marches, demonstrations and other political activity. These are standards held by many other journalism organizations, including National Public Radio.

Lisa has been a dynamic and engaging host for Soundprint, and we wish her well for the future.

Simone has been less sanguine about the termination. Here are her reactions, made to David Swanson of the WarisaCrime blog:

I find it puzzling that NPR objects to my exercising my rights as an American citizen—the right to free speech, the right to peaceable assembly—on my own time in my own life.  I’m not an NPR employee.  I’m a freelancer.  NPR doesn’t pay me.  I’m also not a news reporter.  I don’t cover politics.  I’ve never brought a whiff of my political activities into the work I’ve done for NPR World of Opera.  What is NPR afraid I’ll do—insert a seditious comment into a synopsis of Madame Butterfly?

This sudden concern with my political activities is also surprising in light of the fact that Mara Liaason reports on politics for NPR yet appears as a commentator on FoxTV, Scott Simon hosts an NPR news show yet writes political op-eds for national newspapers, Cokie Roberts reports on politics for NPR yet accepts large speaking fees from businesses.  Does NPR also send out ‘Communications Alerts’ about their activities?

The post Lisa Simeone keeps job with World of Opera appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Lisa Simeone

This just in from the This is NPR blog.

We recently learned of World of Opera host Lisa Simeone’s participation in an Occupy DC group. World of Opera is produced by WDAV, a music and arts station based in Davidson, North Carolina. The program is distributed by NPR. Lisa is not an employee of NPR or of WDAV; she is a freelancer with the station.

We’re in conversations with WDAV about how they intend to handle this. We of course take this issue very seriously.

The right wing Daily Caller is making hay over the connection, insisting that Simeone “appears to be breaking the taxpayer-subsidized network’s ethics rules by acting as a spokeswoman for Occupy DC,” and calling it a “possible ethics violation.” Earlier this month the Xinhua news service did post an article identifying her as a “spokesperson” for the group, which is loosely affiliated with the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations happening around the country. But if you’ve followed these demos so far, you know that these OWS events have about as many spokespersons as they have participants.

That’s only one reason why the brouhaha seems like pretty weak tea. The Caller cites NPR rules forbidding journalists from “engag[ing] in public relations work, paid or unpaid.”

Here’s the rest of the section:

Exceptions may be made for certain volunteer nonprofit, nonpartisan activities, such as participating in the work of a church, synagogue or other institution of worship, or a charitable organization, so long as this would not conflict with the interests of NPR in reporting on activities related to that institution or organization. When in doubt, employees should consult their supervisor.

Given that Occupy Wall Street is about as non-partisan as it gets (talk to them and you’ll find out that the Democrats suck; the Republicans suck; maybe Ralph Nader and Ron Paul don’t suck but they’re not sure yet), and given that OWS is as non-profit as its gets (no money; grubby sleeping bags; donations for take-out pizza anyone?), and given that Simeone spends her on-air time talking about mostly dead composers (last shows about Wagner, Puccini, and Mozart), it’s pretty hard to see how anyone’s ethics are being harmed here.

NPR should let the nice opera lady do her thing in peace.

Update

Lisa Simeone has kept her job with World of Opera, but lost her host gig with Soundprint. All details here.

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It seems that NPR listeners are grumbling again about the network’s practice of calling President Obama “Mr. Obama,” rather than using “President” on a consistent basis.

“A number of listeners have written in recent weeks complaining that NPR reporters refer to President Obama as ‘Mr. Obama’,” notes NPR ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos. But “since the mid-1970s it has been NPR’s policy to refer to the president as ‘Mr.’ instead of ‘President’ on second reference.”

Actually, calling presidents “Mr.” is a good idea. The ordinary salutation removes the aura of royalty from our chief executive, which was sort of the point of the American Revolution, as I recall. Perhaps NPR could use both terms, as did  Marilyn Monroe on JFK’s 1962 birthday (“Happy birrrthday, Mr. President  . . . “)?

But all Camelot nostalgia aside, Schumacher-Matos cites NPR story instances of “Mr.” going back to “Mr.” Clinton and “Mr.” George H.W. Bush.

The post also notes that NPR listeners have been angry about this issue for several years, and some don’t care if the news service has always handled the matter this way.

“It has not been any more respectable to call Presidents Bush, Clinton, Ford, Carter or Reagan ‘Mr.’ than to call President Obama so,” wrote one listener back in 2009.

Then NPR senior vice president Ellen Weiss responded that the network maintains the practice to be consistent. “We think this policy is as appropriate for President Obama as it has been for previous presidents and don’t see any compelling reason to change it,” Weiss explained.

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This post by John Anderson originally appeared at DIYmedia.net and is republished here by permission.

The Medium is our Message at Occupy Wall Street. Photo by Dan Patterson

Today, more than 10 years on from LPFM’s inception, unlicensed broadcasting remains alive and well, although the act is not as explicitly politicized as it once was.

This could change.

Last week, the Occupy Wall Street encampment established a microradio station at 107.1 FM. The station simulcasts the 24/7 live stream which provides coverage of life inside Zuccotti Park, as well as street-level reportage of daily protest actions in New York City’s financial district. The growth of the occupation has been impressive, and the establishment of a microradio station is another step in the action’s evolution.

One idea that’s been batted around involves integrating broadcasting into the occupation’s General Assembly, which functions as its governing body. City ordinances forbid the use of amplified sound systems in the park, which has resulted in the development of a “human microphone” system – speakers talk in sentence-fragments, which are repeated by the crowd so all can hear the dialogue. While it’s a very participatory method of group communication, it’s slow going and not necessarily scalable as the Assemblies grow.

In this instance, microradio could be employed to provide a non-amplified public address system – simply plug the speaker’s mic into a transmitter. Radios are cheap, and many smartphones have built-in FM reception capability. Some involved in the NYC action are brainstorming along these lines.

As more occupations are launched around the nation, their organizers have taken notes on how Occupy Wall Street has grown. Adding microradio to the tactical media mix makes lots of sense.

Radio still remains one of the most powerful tools of mass media available; one need look no further than the right-wing bastion of talk radio which has done so much to sully political discourse in this country. Microradio is easily accessible to a large audience and relatively uncomplicated to deploy. Unlike most other tools of protest-media, the critical infrastructure that makes radio work is pretty much self-contained, which adds to its reliability.

Microradio is also extremely useful as an outreach tool. The station in Zuccotti Park broadcasts to the occupation and immediate neighbors, which can be useful in the maintenance of good community relations. Microradio stations have been deployed in similar situations, such as festivals, farmer’s markets and picket lines, to extend the reach and impact of such events beyond their physical presence. In addition, opening up access to the airwaves in such a public manner helps to demystify the act of broadcasting and introduce folks to the notion that the airwaves, too, are a public space.

This leads to the final rationale for incorporating microradio into occupations – it’s an occupation of its own kind. One of the grievances expressed by Occupy Wall Street directly addresses corporate control of the media. There is no better way to address that grievance than by becoming the media directly, and unlicensed broadcasting has a long and storied history in the United States. Nothing signifies independent media quite like a microradio station.

Microradio is no more or less civilly disobedient than taking over and transforming a public space. Considering that the airwaves are ostensibly public property, they should be no less off limits in this context than a park or public right-of-way. Provided they do not interfere with other broadcasters, the addition of new signals to a local radio dial is materially non disruptive; what’s more, the FCC does not have police powers (and they also abhor confrontation).

Occupy Wall Street’s media team has been integral to sustaining the encampment, spreading the word, and inspiring others. New and future occupations are learning much from what’s happening in New York, where they’re heavily engaged in multi-platform citizen journalism, utilizing everything from the newest of new media forms to publishing their own newspaper and, of course, the human microphone. Microradio falls comfortably within this continuum and can help bootstrap more intensive media efforts.

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The Future of Music Coalition is a more than decade-old organization that advocates for the interests of musicians and their livelihoods in the contemporary media and networked environment. At its upcoming annual policy summit the FMC will be honoring FCC Commissioner Michael Copps for his work on behalf of the music community. Commissioner Copps and the FMC have been generally united in their opposition to industry consolidation in radio as well as in their advocacy for network neutrality. Copps and the FMC have also been supporters of low-power FM radio.

The FMC Policy Summit runs Oct. 2 – 4 in Washington, D.C. In a stark indication of the times, there are no radio-specific sessions scheduled for the summit. However there are quite a few that take up issues related to online and mobile music services, as well as dealing with royalty collections agencies like SoundExchange and working with blanket licenses.

Note that while broadcast radio stations do not pay royalties to artists, all online and satellite services do, including broadcast stations that also have internet streams. So, it should be obvious why this issue would be of interest to artists hoping to be compensated for their work.

For those who can’t make it to DC for the summit, they have a “premium” live interactive webcast planned. I don’t know if “premium” means that it’s not free, but if you’re interested you can sign up and find out.

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“Terror did not attack us on September 11th, terrorists did,” she wrote to NPR.

Terror does not have hands with which to use box cutters. Terrorists do. Terror is a feeling. Terrorists are human beings who make choices to kill innocent people. The phrase “terror attacks” takes the responsibility off the men who committed premeditated murder and puts it on a feeling. Please, use the phrase “terrorist attacks” to describe what happened that day.

NPR’s Ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos thinks this is a valid criticism. “Do you think the phrase ‘terror attack’ diffuses personal responsibility into a generalized feeling?” he asks. “Are we sliding into a form of political correctness, or language that is so neutral that it smacks of the inability to look a terrorist in the eye and call her what she is?”

With all due respect to NPR, one comes away from this exchange sensing an inclination to replace big difficult questions with little manageable ones. That’s understandable. The problem with anniversary journalism is that there isn’t any meaningful reason for revisiting the moment in question, save that we’ve decided that birthdays have meaning.

But since the media event is upon us, I thought I’d tackle two big questions for a spell. What did September 11, 2001 mean for the United States of America, and what does it mean for radio?

Paralysis

There’s no question in my mind that the vicious Al Qaeda criminals who killed thousands of innocent people on September 11, 2001 (including a member of my family) helped push  this country into a long period of paralysis and decline. The United States responded to the attacks with two wars. The Afghanistan war made superficial sense at the time. The Iraq war made no sense. Both failed.

Worse than failing, they subsumed our nation into a unilateral “war on terror” that never really identified its target. Instead, it distracted us from the precarious health of the United States itself, verging on economic collapse after years of massive and unmonitored corruption in its financial sector. When that corruption took its devastating toll in 2008, the country briefly rallied around a new president, then sank into a morass of ideological posturing and paranoia.

Consolidation and change

Within this ten year context, the media landscape dramatically changed. By 2001 the Clear Channel consolidation was in full swing—the network gobbling up about nine percent of the nation’s radio stations, and far more of its aggregate advertising revenue. Conventional local deejays disappeared, replaced by digitized national ones, skilled in the art of sounding like they lived next door.

Meanwhile, the Pandora Music Genome project had just begun to take off in 2001. It was followed by a variety of online radio experiments that allowed users an unprecedented degree of individual choice in online music listening and production.

The consequence was a marvelous period of online creativity: podcasts, Live365-casts, and radio aggregation applications galore. But the locally based radio station that struggled to bring everyone into a real time dialogue about the nation’s future became lost in the upheaval—its project seen as almost irrelevant. Attacks on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting further threatened its prospects, especially in rural areas.

It would be naive to imagine that open public dialogue is the only solution to our national dilemma, but it is part of the solution. Today, I experience as a precious national commodity every public, college, community, and commercial radio program that attempts to bring different people together into a civil real-time discussion.

Authentic radio is live. It is local. It is about the real time sharing of music, talk, and ideas. Although I write with admiration and excitement about the latest technological developments in online radio and audio, they will mean little for us as a people if they only encourage users to listen to or produce music and talk in fragmented cubicles or tribes, cut off from others or other groups by digital space and time.

We have had enough of that in this country. We need more real radio. We need public and market based strategies that bring real radio to our ears. This is my hope on the 10th anniversary of September 11, 2001.

The post September 11 and the radio revolution appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Ira Glass of This American Life says he’s going to give his nephew’s high school class a seminar on podcasting. But he could use some advice, Glass writes:

Specifically: what topics seemed to work the best to energize the kids and to get nice stories? Should we go for personal stories? Stuff going on with their friends or families? Or turn them into reporters, interviewing interesting people around the neighborhood, doing oral history, stuff like that? What’s seemed to work best?

You can post your feedback over at the This American Life Facebook page or radio (at) thislife (dot) org.

The public stations that Glass broadcasts over are breathing a little easier today. The new Federal budget preserves funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting at $445 million for 2013.

But many programs that help public TV and public/community radio stations have been cut, among them most of the cash for a digital technologies fund and all of the Department of Commerce’s Public Telecommunications Facilities Program.

The latter fund has for years helped stations upgrade transmission towers, fund shelters for transmitters, and buy new control room equipment, console furniture, auxiliary power gear, and air conditioners to protect servers from hot weather.

Now it is gone, its entire budget zeroed out by Congress.

“The elimination of the Public Telecommunications Facilities Program (PTFP) presents real challenges to public broadcasting stations’ commitment to maintain reliable service to all Americans,” said the Association of Public Television Stations in a statement sent to Broadcasting and Cable.

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The NPR galaxy is in shock following the resignation of its CEO, Vivian Schiller. She received a vote of no-confidence from NPR’s board following the release her development director Ron [no relation] Schiller’s off-the-cuff remarks with a conservative group pretending to be the Muslim Brotherhood.

Among Schiller’s comments, that the Tea Party isn’t  “just Islamaphobic, but really xenophobic, I mean basically they are, they believe in sort of white, middle-America gun-toting. I mean, it’s scary. They’re seriously racist, racist people.”

And that NPR “would be better off in the long run without federal funding.” It’s unclear precisely what Schiller meant by that, but obviously the comment is at odds with NPR’s official position as the organization fights to stop Congress from defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The CPB funds NPR and NPR stations.

Then came this remark, which I found disappointing, but not surprising.

To me, this is representative of the thing that I guess I’m most disturbed by and disappointed by in this country which is that the educated, so-called elite in this country, is too small a percentage of the population. So you have this very large uneducated part of the population that carries these ideas. It’s much more about anti-intellectual than it is political.

One of my biggest concerns, not only with NPR execs who say things like this, but with a big chunk of university town/public media culture, is that it has really lost touch with ordinary people. I detected this in an interview that NPR station supported Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross did with the actor Will Ferrell. The latter described with great hilarity his going into a Marshalls-style store for clothes and a Supercuts to get a haircut—just so that he could look like a typical lower middle class person.

“I wanted to give myself a standard issue haircut,” Ferrell continued. “And I did go to a Supercuts in the San Fernando Valley and just walked in and got a standard haircut.”

“Did the hair cutter not know who you were?” Gross asked.

“She cut my hair for fifteen minutes,” Ferrell continued, “and then half way she didn’t say a word and then finally, towards the end of the hair cut she’s like ‘You’re one of the step-brothers, aren’t you’? [a reference to one of Ferrell’s recent movies] And I said ‘yes.’ And that’s all we mentioned. We didn’t talk any more. So, it was kind of funny.”

Gross thought this was really comical—the whole “just walked in” business, as if millions of ordinary Americans don’t just walk into haircut places like Supercuts every day.

The problem the college town/NPR world faces, of course, is not uneducated people, but a well-funded political movement that contradictorily defines “conservatism” as opposition to government—except when government furthers a narrow social agenda that includes support for abstinence only sex education, Christian fundamentalism, and the denial of a woman’s right to choose an abortion.

But none of that stems from uneducatedness. Indeed, the people who loudly proclaim these positions are usually just as educated as Ron Schiller. NPR makes real efforts to reach out to these folks, but it would help if its executives didn’t think they were stupid. In case you haven’t been watching Capitol Hill politics recently, they’re not.

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As everyone concerned about this issue knows, last week the Republican controlled House of Representatives voted to eliminate federal funding for public broadcasting. The move was approved in the context of the massive spending bill HR1, “Making appropriations for the Department of Defense and the other departments

and agencies of the Government for the fiscal year ending September

30, 2011, and for other purposes” (in case you needed to know the full title).

Here’s the exact language of the section pertaining to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds National Public Radio, and NPR/Public Broadcasting System stations.

SEC. 1838. (a) Of the funds made available for ‘Corporation for Public Broadcasting’ in title IV of division F of Public Law 111–8, the unobligated balance is rescinded.

(b) The amounts included under the heading ‘Corporation for Public Broadcasting’ in division D of Public Law 111–117 shall be applied to funds appropriated by this division as follows: by substituting ‘$0’ for ‘$86,000,000’; by substituting ‘$0’ for ‘$25,000,000’; by substituting ‘$0’ for ‘$36,000,000’; and by substituting ‘$0’ for ‘$25,000,000’.

Yeah, this looks pretty bad if you are an NPR supporter (like me). So go sign the Moveon.org petition. But the problem, for several generations of media advocates, is that they’ve been through this routine before.

“It is as predictable as can be,” writes Fairness and Accuracy in Media. “Invigorated Republican politicians announce their intention to kill public broadcasting, which they claim is a bastion of liberal bias. Defenders of NPR and PBS step in to defend the system. The Republicans, who were unlikely to win a vote on their plan, retreat for the moment. Public broadcasting is ‘saved’.”

“The public broadcasting fight of 2011 is playing out the same way,” FAIR adds. “A more productive discussion of public broadcasting is sorely needed—one that is not reduced to ‘save it’ or ‘kill it’.”

Time tested tricks

Indeed, it’s unlikely that this proposed budget is going to get past the Senate or President Obama’s desk. That’s why critics like Jesse Walker of Reason and Timothy Noah of Slate roll their eyes at both Republican claims they really want to dump public radio/TV and activist battle cries to “save public broadcasting!”

Noah outlines the nine stages of this phony kill/save public broadcasting cycle. Stage Five is particularly on-target.

Stage 5. Discover that CPB, in a time-tested Washington trick, gives most of its money to local stations, which in turn give money to the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio. This (legal) money-laundering scheme makes congressional districts around the country consciously dependent on and loyal to CPB.

In fact, the San Francisco Chronicle has a great article noting that the public radio/TV stations of many conservative rural districts depend on CPB money the most. Example: KIXE-TV in Redding, California, which gets 45 percent of its income from the federal government, and serves Shasta County, which favored John McCain over President Obama in 2008.

What’s the solution? For me, the best answer is taking the CPB off the hyper-politicized Congressional appropriations train, and creating an endowment for public media based on Federal Communications Commission spectrum auction proceedings and other sources of FCC and industry income.

The reform group Free Press has a bunch of creative solutions in this area, noting that if the FCC starts auctioning off lots of TV signals to the wireless sector, some of that cash could be siphoned into an endowment. Or a tax on advertising revenue could be considered. Or (calm down advertising industry) just a cut in the tax deduction that businesses can take on advertising expenses (it’s 100 percent right now), and that money moved to the public media fund. A combination of things like this could be enacted—plus help from the usual foundations, businesses, and Listeners/Viewers Like You.

But what’s the chance of any of this happening in the near future? Zero to nothing. And without it, I’m opposed to any federal cuts to the CPB. So expect this goofy ballet of false moves and false alarms to continue, no matter how tiring it becomes for its participants.

The post Public radio and TV supporters worry about ‘save public media’ fatigue appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Much of the news today from Libya is sad, with reports that as many as 200 protesters have been killed by government forces who are using live ammunition–some large caliber–on civilians trying to exercise their human rights to free speech and peaceful protest. However there are also signs that protestors are finding ways to break the information blockade the Qaddafi government has attempted to put in place. According to Foreign Policy’s Passport blog, on Friday protestors in Libya’s second largest city, Benghazi, site of the worst violence, took control of a radio station and have been broadcasting. The broadcast is available online, but it’s unclear if the station is also broadcasting terrestrially. Press reports being published as I write this indicate that protestors have taken over much or all of Benghazi.

Tuning in the broadcasts do sound amateur and rushed, with music and some reports being very distorted and overdriven–this does not sound like a commercial or state radio broadcast. As a dreadfully monolingual American I don’t speak Arabic, so unfortunately I can’t comment more on the content of the broadcast.

At this moment, 5:15 CST / 11:15 UTC, the station is rebroadcasting state television which is airing a live address by Muammar Qaddafi’s sun. The BBC’s Radio Five is broadcasting a live translation of the address.

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My apologies to Radio Survivor readers for my massive oversight on this story. Apparently I’m unable to either know what year it is now, or read the dates on the sources I’m using. The bill I cited in this post–AND the Oklahoma Watchdog article about it–is a year old, from January 2010, not January 2011. See John Anderson’s reportage and excellent analysis on it at DIYMedia.net… from February 2010.

If you’re interested in my stale take on old news, then read on….

The states’ rights argument supporting unlicensed broadcasting is one that bubbles to the surface every so often, typically coming from broadcasters associated with right-wing political stances. The line of reasoning goes that the federal government only has the power to regulate interstate commerce, and the 10th amendment to the Constitution guarantees to the states all other regulatory powers. Therefore, the states’ rights argument concludes the Federal Communications Commission may only regulate radio signals that cross state lines. To date, this argument has not been successful in any court challenges to the Commission’s authority.

Nevertheless, that doesn’t seem to be stopping Oklahoma state Representative Charles Key who is sponsoring House Bill 2812 (link to .rtf file of bill text) known as the “Communications Freedom Act.” If signed into law, the bill would declare noncommercial broadcasts originating within the state to be “not subject to federal law or federal regulation.” To qualify the transmissions would have to be “not intended to be involved in interstate commerce, nor to have any affect upon interstate commerce.”

The Oklahoma Watchdog contacted Rep. Key, a Republican, and reports that,

he suspects the federal government doesn’t like the “free speech aspect” of low-power FM radio and may view it as a threat.

“The federal government is out of control. It’s violated its role in regards to the Constitution. The government has become a predator of sorts and it’s become a law until itself.”

I do find it curious that the introduction of this bill comes after the passage of Local Community Radio Act, which significantly increases the opportunity for more low-power FM stations nationwide. Nevertheless, I guess if you’re suspicious of the FCC’s intentions and ability to regulate radio broadcasting, you’re not going to trust the agency in licensing new LPFM stations.

Rep. Key seems to have quite the infatuation with the 10th amendment and states’ rights. He garnered national attention in 2009 when he sponsored a bill that reasserted the sovereignty of the state of Oklahoma under the 10th amendment. That bill passed both the state House and Senate, but was vetoed by former Governor Brad Henry, a Democrat.

So it would seem that the Communications Freedom Act is an attempt to pick away at a particular federal power that Key might have expected to be abolished under his sovereignty bill. I don’t know nearly enough about Oklahoma politics to be able to guess if the Communications Freedom Act has any chance of passage. I suspect that it’s one thing to support a bill that purports to simply reaffirm the 10th amendment but it’s another thing altogether to vote for a bill that specifically targets the FCC’s authority.

It is probably a little early yet for would-be pirate broadcasters to start warming up their transmitters. And even if the bill passes I don’t expect the FCC will sit idly by. Stay tuned.

The post Old News — Lawmaker wants Oklahoma to be a haven for unlicensed radio appeared first on Radio Survivor.

If you’re looking for something fun to do this Saturday, and you live in or will be visiting the San Francisco Bay Area, there’s an upcoming Citizen Radio Live! sketchfest to consider. The time: three PM, Jan 22; the place: the Punch Line Comedy Club.

Citizen Radio is run by Jamie Kilstein and Allison Kilkenny, who look and act like they spend most of their time in south-of-whatever performance studio basements. One or the other (or both) are also susceptible to rather lengthy rants about who is or isn’t really a leftist on the blogosphere. The Daily Kos’s Markos Moulitsas, who will be appearing with them on Saturday, apparently is, as this Citizenradio approved blog post indicates.

Whatever. I should add that Kilstein and Kilkenny are quite funny, wonderfully raunchy, and their hearts are in exactly the right place as they wander up and down any given dark stage execrating the deservedly execrable.

Judge for yourself via the accompanying YouTube video. Also appearing will be the comedians Paul F. Tompkins and Maria Bamford.

The post Citizen Radio coming to San Francisco with Daily Kos founder appeared first on Radio Survivor.

The review of NPR’s firing of Juan Williams is out. The NPR executive who gave Williams the axe over the telephone has resigned. And NPR’s ombudsman Alicia Shepard warns that the brouhaha could prove “costly” for the radio service.

“The Williams firing was a very costly management mistake on many levels,” Shepard opines. The commentary comes as Representative Doug Lamborn (R-CO) says he’ll reintroduce his bill to defend NPR and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides support for NPR affiliates.

First, there was the expense of hiring a law firm to investigate the dismissal, Shepard notes. “Might NPR have hired one or two experienced and widely respected journalists or management gurus instead?”

Then “incident also challenged the faith and confidence the staff had in Weiss, and also in CEO Vivian Schiller’s judgment.”

Schiller joined NPR two years ago and up until the firing had done a remarkable job helping NPR regain solid financial footing, boosting morale, improving relations between stations and NPR, and moving the organization into the digital world.

And it may cost 900 public radio stations their Community Service Grants if Republicans succeed in eliminating, or sharply reducing federal funding for public media. In the case of Wisconsin Public Radio, for example, eliminating its funding would cost the station $1 million—7 percent of its budget—and require canceling some programming.  NPR, in turn, gets much of its revenue from the local stations, so cutting funds for them inevitably would damage NPR.

To recap, Williams said this to Bill O’Reilly on Fox News:

Look, Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous. Now, I remember also, that when the Time Square bomber was at in court, he said that, “The war with Muslims, America’s war with Muslims, is just beginning. The first drop of blood.” I don’t think there is any way to get away from these facts.

NPR’s board said this about Williams’ firing following its investigation, aided by the law firm:

— Williams’ contract was terminated in accordance with its terms.  The contract gave both parties the right to terminate on 30 days’ notice for any reason.  The facts gathered during the review revealed that the termination was not the result of special interest group or donor pressure.  However, because of concerns regarding the speed and handling of the termination process, the Board additionally recommended that certain actions be taken with regard to management involved in Williams’ contract termination.

These additional steps include updating the news service’s code for reporter appearances on other media venues.

Williams was clearly trying to get somewhere beyond  that sound bite in his interview with O’Reilly, emphasizing that the “War on Terror” was not a war against Islam. But the bottom line was that his statement came off as inflammatory and even a bit nutty.

Speaking personally, when I see “people are who in Muslim garb” at airports, I don’t feel afraid of them. I feel sympathy for them because I suspect that they’re afraid of me and everybody else around them.

Playing politics?

In any event, Williams’ comment put NPR in a very difficult situation. The service makes great and inevitably controversial efforts to steer clear of appearing to lean either too far left or right. In public media it’s always easy to say something like “I agree that there was a problem, I just don’t like how management solved it.” It’s much harder to sit in the drivers’ seat and make tough choices.

Fortunately, most NPR subscribers are continuing to support their local stations. Hopefully they’ll agree with this commentary by Craig Aaron of Free Press in response to Lamborn’s move.

Congress is playing politics with a public trust that hundreds of millions of Americans rely on for news, arts and entertainment, and for educational programming for our kids. It’s disgraceful that leaders of the ‘people’s House’ routinely threaten the nation’s most trusted and respected sources of news just to score a few partisan points. Whether you rely on public media for your morning news, music you won’t hear anywhere else, or Sesame Street, you should be outraged by these cynical attacks.

Local PBS and NPR stations reach more than 98 percent of American households, and for some communities, they are the only sources of serious local news and information. They also employ thousands of journalists—at a time when newsrooms around the country are shedding tens of thousands of jobs a year. Leaders in Washington must fight to improve and expand public broadcasting to counteract the collapse of so much commercial journalism and to serve the people corporate media have left behind.

Public media leaders need to take a stand, too. You don’t put a bully in his place by handing over your lunch money and hoping he’ll go away. You have to fight. And when you do, millions and millions of your viewers, listeners and fans will have your back.

The post Was firing Juan Williams a “costly mistake” for NPR? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Yes, the Local Community Radio Act of 2010finally passed both the House and Senate almost two weeks ago. But it’s not official until the president signs it. And that he did, today.

Today is just the start of the process to bring more community radio stations to the air. There is a lot of work yet to be done, not the least of which is on the part of the FCC, which will have to determine the rules of the next application window. Still, first that Commission has to resolve pending translator applications which could use up a lot of frequencies that otherwise are appropriate for LPFM stations under the provisions of this new law.

In the coming days and weeks we at Radio Survivor will bring you additional news and analysis on the rollout of this second phase of LPFM.

The post LPFM expansion: it’s official! appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Although the revised low-power FM bill contains some additional concessions to the NAB, it still provides the opportunity for many more community radio stations in the nation’s most crowded metropolitan radio markets.

Next the president has to sign the bill. Then the FCC has to go about determining the process for the next application filing window.

The post Breaking: The LPFM bill just passed the Senate appeared first on Radio Survivor.

It’s certainly easy to understand the sentiment expressed by a commenter to my last LPFM post:

If the NAB is for it, you can pretty much guarantee that it is to the detriment to LPFM.

And while the LPFM bill passed by the House yesterday, HR 6533, does contain compromises agreed to by the NAB, on balance it is far more positive for LPFM than negative. I’m certain we have Prometheus Radio Project and other LPFM groups to thank for the positives.

Michelle Eyre of REC Networks did us a favor by breaking down the details of the bill. The primary concession to the National Association of Broadcasters is that while LPFM stations will be permitted to be spaced closer on the dial to full power stations, the would have to obtain a “second adjacent waiver” in order to be positioned as close as two spaces (say at 100.1 when there’s a full-power station at 100.5). In order to obtain this waiver, an LPFM applicant will have to demonstrate through an engineering study that it will cause no interference. And if there is a complaint of interference the LPFM station will have to remediate it, by first suspending operations and then taking technical measures

Other concessions include making LPFM a secondary service to full-power radio, which means that a full-power station can bump a low-power one if a legitimate change to its license would require it. Furthermore, LPFM stations would be on equal footing with translator stations, meaning that an LPFM applicant could not bump a translator using a frequency qualified for LPFM.

Certainly, this is not quite a win for LPFM that a simple restoration of the FCC’s original 2000 specification would be. In particular, applying for LPFM stations in large metropolitan areas with crowded dials will be more complex than the LPFM process has been so far. Those LPFM applicants looking at second-adjacent channels will have to do more work ahead of time to prove they will not interfere with adjacent stations. Furthermore, they will be more prone to objections from those adjacent full-power stations, who may be able to delay or stymie their applications with objections about potential interference.

Now, these sorts of administrative hassles have always been a part of full-power station licensing. For instance, the community station I worked at in Champaign, IL had its application delayed for years due to objections filed by a station on the same frequency more than 120 miles away in Chicago. But these sorts of speedbumps have not existed for LPFM before, which was designed to have a relatively simple and inexpensive application process in order to greatly lower the barrier to entry.

The bill still has not yet come to a vote in the Senate, There could be changes made in the other house of Congress, but I’m doubting supporters would want to mess with things. At least the Senate is finally out of gridlock and bringing bills to a vote this weekend, so there is hope. I’ll be following LPFM’s progress this weekend and will certainly post if and when something happens.

The post Breaking down the House’s new LPFM bill appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Prometheus has posted photos and video from their hula hooping protest in front of NAB headquarters today in support of low-power FM. According to the group dozens of people showed up to ask NAB head and former senator Gordon Smith to stop blocking the Local Community Radio Act, SB 592.

It turns out that so many people have been calling the NAB about LPFM that the organization has added a menu option to its voicemail specifically for those folks.

While mainstream press coverage of the bill has been relatively scant, today NPR’s All Things Considered aired a story. The NPR piece uses the WGXC barnraising as a jumping off point to demonstrate the value of community radio, but the NAB refuses to comment on record about their disinformation campaign to encourage anonymous holds on the bill.

The post From hoops to NPR and voicemail – today’s action in LPFM appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Today the Prometheus Radio Project is leading a circus-themed protest in front of the National Association of Broadcasters. Urging supporters to “bring juggling pins, unicycles, tricks, and costumes,” participants will be celebrating low-power FM while chiding the NAB for its dishonest campaign to get Senate republicans to put holds on the Local Community Radio Act. Prometheus will provide hula hoops and training in their proper use.

These anonymous holds have been difficult to uncover and combat. It seems as though there’s some sort of tag-team arrangement where as soon as one holder is identified and called out, another one picks up the hold. It appears that nobody in the pro-LPFM camp knows who is holding the bill right now, keeping it from reaching a floor vote.

As I’m tired of mentioning, time is running out quickly in this session of Congress, and so is time to finally vote on the Local Community Radio Act in the Senate.

The post Hooping for LPFM appeared first on Radio Survivor.

The National Association of Broadcasters has never been a friend to low-power community radio. Back in 2000, when the FCC first created the service, the NAB did everything it could to try and keep it from becoming a reality. While the broadcast lobby failed to stop it outright, the NAB did succeed in getting Congress to significantly curtail LPFM with a last-minute attachment to an omnibus budget bill passed in December of that year. One of the weapons the NAB used was a bogus CD that purported to demonstrate harmful interference caused by low-power stations, that was later disproved by an independent report ordered by Congress.

While the NAB isn’t pushing the interference claim quite as hard this time around, the lobby hasn’t given up on using disinformation. Radio Survivor has obtained an email sent out to unnamed Senators by the NAB on November 30 in which the organization claims that the Local Community Radio Act (S.592) isn’t even necessary to put more LPFM stations on the air. Without explanation or evidence, in the email the NAB claims that,

Currently, thousands of slots are available across the country for new low power stations. The Federal Communications Commission could license these frequencies to any group or organization today, without any change in policy.

Quite simply, that contention is untrue. However, even if there are some unused LPFM-appropriate frequencies in sparsely populated areas, more important is the fact that the Local Community Radio Act aims to permit LPFM stations in cities where there are none, because they are not permitted under the existing, curtailed rules.

Apparently the NAB is using this claim as part of its campaign to get Republican senators to place anonymous holds on the bill, and it seems to be working. Four previously anonymous holders were identified so far this year, and once their names were out in the open, the holds disappeared. At least one good reason for this is that once the Senator placing the hold is known pro-LPFM groups can reach out to him and provide the whole story.

The last one outed was Wyoming Sen. Joe Barrasso, who released his hold a few weeks ago. But there are still more anonymous holds keeping the bill from moving forward for a proper vote by the full Senate.

With less than a month left in this session of Congress time is running out to pass the Local Community Radio Act. The Prometheus Radio Project is asking LPFM advocates to call the president of the NAB, Gordon Smith, and ask him to “please stop blocking LPFM.” His number is 202-429-5449. Prometheus is also asking anyone who calls to let them know how the call went by emailing them at info@prometheusradio.org.

The full text of the NAB email to senators is after the jump:

From: National Association of Broadcasters [mailto:gr@nab.org]

Sent: Tuesday, November 30, 2010 12:06 PM

To:

Subject: Broadcaster concerns with S.592

Your office may have heard recently from some organizations regarding S.592 – the Local Community Radio Act.

As currently drafted, S. 592 is of concern to your local broadcasters. In an effort to ensure reliable protections against signal interferences, the radio broadcasting industry has been working to ensure modest changes to the legislative language. Despite this, proponents are trying to push the bill through the Senate.

While supporters of S.592 may have expressed a desire for expanding low power radio licenses, please know that there are many other voices in this debate and an expansion of licenses needs to be balanced against existing low and full power operators. Currently, thousands of slots are available across the country for new low power stations. The Federal Communications Commission could license these frequencies to any group or organization today, without any change in policy.

We hope you will keep these facts in mind and the concerns of your local broadcasters as you review this legislation. For more information, feel free to contact the National Association of Broadcasters Government Relations department at (202) 429-7150.

The post NAB still using misinformation to defeat low-power radio expansion appeared first on Radio Survivor.

For example, on December 3, Limbaugh noted that hundreds of unemployed people stood in line for assistance at a community center in Atlanta, Georgia to apply for financial help with their heat and power bills. They’re having a bad cold snap in that city. Eventually officials let applicants come into the building, because the temperature outside that early morning was freezing.

“Standing in line for assistance,” Limbaugh repeated as he read the newspaper article on the story. “I just wonder if they would stand in line for jobs?”

Limbaugh didn’t bother to read the article one paragraph further.

“I’ve had three jobs this year, and I’ve been laid off from all three,” one applicant was quoted as saying. “I’m grateful just to get any type of help they’ll give me.”

Then the Rushbo offered this gem:

Here’s the media tweek of the day. We always announce these and it always works. This story raises very unpolitically correct questions. If people cannot even feed and clothe themselves, should they be allowed to vote? Should they be voting? If people who are receiving government assistance, that is, taxpayer assistance, if they weren’t allowed to vote, could you imagine the difference in the political makeup of this country? Can you imagine that?

This is just a think piece. I’m just putting this out there for you to ponder.

So let’s ponder the question. This would mean that a large percentage of the population on Wall Street would be disenfranchised, given the huge quantity of “taxpayer assistance” that a number of prominent financial firms recently received. It would mean that the parents of every county in the U.S. that receives federal aid for schools would lose their right to vote—not to mention the parents in states receiving federal aid for universities and colleges (and not to mention all the employees of these institutions).

It would mean that just about every veteran who takes advantage of VA benefits would lose their voting privileges. It would mean the same for Americans who are receiving extended unemployment benefits.

And, of course, something close to the entire agricultural industry would lose their right to the ballot, given the pervasiveness of agricultural subsidies—$20 billion per year to farmers in “farm income stabilization.” That would also go for the proprietors of the thousands of small and medium sized telephone companies that receive support from the Federal Communications Commission’s Universal Service Fund, and all the recipients of their services.

I could go on and on. Yes, Limbaugh’s proposal would eliminate the franchise for a huge portion of the population of the United States besides the poor whom he and his admirers obviously hate with a passion. And that would make quite a difference in politics. Sure thing. In fact, hardly anyone in this country would get to vote.

But rather than eliminating their right to the ballot, perhaps we should just take away Limbaugh’s and those of his fans, a not insignificant but smaller percentage of the populace whose evident moronic viciousness would not be missed in many quarters.

This is just a think piece, of course. I’m just saying. I’m just putting this out there for you to ponder. Have a nice day.

The post Media tweek: Should Rush Limbaugh’s supporters be allowed to vote? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Dean Wormer would call this double-secret probation.

On Friday word came down that Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso removed his hold on the Local Community Radio Act. If passed, this bill would restore low-power FM standards to FCC’s original specification, thereby allowing hundreds more stations to take to the air. And yet, still no action? That’s because there are still other holds on the bill, which also remain secret under the rules of the Senate until either someone cops to it, or the holders are identified through a process of elimination.

It’s as if Senate Republicans are playing tag-team on holding this bill, swapping it anonymously once one of the holders gets discovered. I keep thinking we’re going to uncover Dean Wormer working the Senate to keep the bill on double-secret probation.

So Prometheus Radio Project is asking low-power radio supporters to help identify which Senators are holding this bill now, by calling one’s local senator and asking if s/he’s blocking the Local Community Radio Act.

Time is running out on this session of Congress, and unfortunately Senate Republicans don’t seem to perceive much political risk in playing hide-and-seek with future of community radio.

The post LPFM still on double-secret probation in the Senate appeared first on Radio Survivor.

We’re now in the waning days of the lame duck Congress and due to backroom machinations of a few Senators the fate of low-power FM radio hangs in the balance. As I wrote in September, one lone Senator (that we know of) has a hold on the Local Community Radio Act, keeping it from moving to the floor for a vote. That Senator is Republican Joe Barrasso of Wyoming, who appears simply to be doing the bidding of the National Association of Broadcasters, which has opposed low power FM from the very beginning a decade ago.

Reason’s Jesse Walker recently analyzed the situation, but from a decidedly libertarian standpoint. He correctly observes that the Local Community Radio Act isn’t likely to have much of an affect in Barrasso’s home state, given that the legislation is intended to expand the number of stations in densely populated urban areas. Sparsely populated Wyoming is not home to any such cities in the first place.

Walker also argues that given the recent, cyclical conservative hubub about public radio funding,

it’s worth paying attention to the fact that a batch of would-be noncommercial broadcasters are itching to go on the air even though most of them won’t qualify for federal assistance.

As a result he sees the blockage or passage of the Act as “a sign of how serious the GOP will be about cutting back big government,” noting that every Senator who has placed a hold on the bill is a Republican.

Unfortunately the rules of the Senate permit this hold to continue indefinitely, as long as Barrasso is willing to stick to it, despite strong bipartisan support in the Senate, and a swift passage in the House earlier this session. I’m not sure if Barrasso can be given any incentive to release the hold. Though one would think Walker’s arguments would be more persuasive to him than many others. But then again, that assumes that Barrasso actually walks the walk of small government and competition, rather than just talking it when convenient.

Interested in urging the Senate to finally move this bill to a vote? Prometheus Radio Project has info and tools.

The post The small government argument for LPFM appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Last month’s attempted rapprochement with the music labels and performers seems to be behind the National Association of Broadcasters. The trade association warns that any attempt to revive the Performance Rights Act in the impending lame duck Congressional session (Nov. 15 through mid-December) will not be tolerated.

“NAB is unalterably opposed to this legislation, and has been very successful in preventing the Performance Rights Act from passing in the 11th Congress by executing a two-track strategy – utilizing the strength of our grassroots to oppose the Performance Rights Act while at the same time participating in good faith discussions with the recording industry to secure a positive outcome for radio.”

While the NAB has indeed been “unalterably” hostile to the PRA’s proposals for paying royalties to performers, it has also been talking to the advocacy group musicFIRST, and proposed a far milder version of the PRA.

musicFIRST rejected that package. So here we are again. Grrrr!

“Should there be a congressional effort to move the Performance Rights Act, NAB will aggressively fight it, and we will need your help – we may ask you to contact your representatives and take to the airwaves as you did successfully in February to keep this bill from becoming law and devastating the radio industry. We will also continue our good faith dialogue and ensure we keep the high ground with lawmakers during the lame duck session.”

The post Big radio vows no Performance Rights Act in lame duck Congress appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Like comedy, democracy ain’t pretty. It’s been more than a year since the House passed the Local Community Radio Act, but the companion bill in the Senate seems to be jammed up in the sausage grinder.

Although the expansion of LPFM apparently enjoys broad bipartisan support, according to Politico Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso has put a hold on the bill “because he wants to ensure it includes language that distinguishes full-power FM stations from low-power FM stations.”

Let me be entirely honest and clear: I have no idea what it means to “distinguish full-power FM stations from low-power FM stations.” My best guess is that Barrasso wants to be sure that LPFM stations are treated as a secondary service, which means they have to give way if a full-power station wants to move or increase. However, this is already true, baked into the LPFM service from the very start. In which case I can only conclude that Barraso is looking for any excuse–no matter how lame–to keep the bill from a vote until the end of this Congressional session. This is the third hold the bill has been subjected to.

The Prometheus Radio Project is doing its best to unjam things, urging Wyoming residents to give their senator a call to politely urge him to let the Local Community Radio Act have a fair and democratic hearing on the Senate floor.

The post Tick, tick, tick. LPFM expansion bill languishes due to Senatorial nonsense appeared first on Radio Survivor.

NPR News recently announced the termination of news analyst Juan Williams based on some comments made during his October 21st appearance on Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor. When asked to comment on the current situation between the United States and the Muslim community, Williams publicly stated,

Look, Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous. Now, I remember also, that when the Time Square bomber was at in court, he said that, ‘”The war with Muslims, America’s war with Muslims, is just beginning. The first drop of blood.”

In Williams’ defense, he also warned O’Reilly against blaming the Muslim community for the existence of extremists, but that hardly compensates for his offensive and thoughtless comment.

NPR justified its decision by stating that Williams’ comments undermined his credibility as a news analyst. As such, Williams was expected to remain unbiased in his reporting, regardless of his additional career ties to the Fox News Network.

The initial response

According to NPR ombudsman Alicia Shepard, the initial response from NPR viewers and listeners was overwhelming. The initial announcement has already received more than 8,500 comments, and input from the “Contact Us” portion of NPR’s website actually crashed the site by noon on the day of the announcement. According to Shepard, although input immediately following Williams’ comments seemed to mostly call for his termination, most of the feedback from after NPR’s decision seemed to call for his immediate rehiring.  A notable amount of feedback has also threatened to deprive the network of public funding and donations (which I personally think is too extreme and somewhat idiotic).

Was NPR’s reaction appropriate?

Williams’ comment was thoughtless and extremely inappropriate for such a prominent public figure, particularly for an individual attempting to work for both a news network praised for its accuracy and objective style of reporting and a news network known for its extreme, ideological views. Although Williams didn’t make his comment on NPR, as a public figure that has been under scrutiny for quite some time, he should have known that his comment still conflicted with NPR’s code of ethics, which attempts to uphold a certain level of journalistic standards, and that his actions would have some sort of consequences. By making such an inflammatory, prejudicial comment, Williams was clearly violating his obligation to NPR to publicly remain unbiased, thus undermining his credibility as an analyst and the network’s credibility by keeping him on their payroll. From a legal perspective, I think that NPR was entirely justified in their firing of Williams.

The issue is obviously a bit more complicated from an ethical perspective. Clearly Williams’ comment was extremely offensive and casts a negative image of both himself and the networks that he’s affiliated with, but was it negative enough to merit such a strong response from NPR? As a long-time, credible, African-American correspondent working for a well-respected network  in an industry in which racial and gender minorities have little to no voice, Williams represents an essential demographic, which makes this entire situation a lot more unfortunate. But does Williams’ place in broadcasting outweigh his offensive views and comment?  I’m inclined to think not.

Sure, NPR could have continued Williams’ contract with some form of limitation, or they could have continued his contract with an understanding that an additional response would result in his termination. However, the network chose to strongly enforce their journalistic standards, which is perfectly legitimate. Unfortunately, Williams’ sentiment reflects the views held by a significant percentage of Americans.

Regardless, although Williams is obviously entitled to his personal beliefs (free speech issue aside) he still shouldn’t have made his comment publicly. Yet Williams chose to make his comment on an extremely ideological television show on a borderline extremist news network, publicly proclaiming his (in the very least) prejudices against a group of people that, not coincidentally, have been the large focus of news in this country since 9/11. This sort of behavior is simply not acceptable for an objective network, and Williams, an individual with a large amount of experience in the industry, should have known that.

The post Firing Juan Williams: Did NPR act appropriately? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

wikimedia commons

It’s always a treat to check in with the House Office of the Clerk’s lobbying disclosure database and see what broadcast radio’s big boys are spending on Congress these days. Needless to say, the top roller is usually Clear Channel Communications, which forked over $1,370,000 in the second quarter of this year.

And what did that wascally wadio company use the money for? According to its disclosure form, Clear Channel educated our nation’s representatives on the Fairness Doctrine, “broadcast decency enforcement,” satellite stuff, various bills relating to the proposed Performance Rights Act, which would require radio stations to pay royalties to artists as well as copyright holders, the Radio Spectrum Inventory Act, and H.R. 5175/S. 3295, aka the (hold your breath) “Democracy is strengthened by casting light on spending in elections act.”

That last bill’s summary says it amends the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 to prohibit foreign entities and government contractors from “making expenditures with respect to such elections.” The bill treats payments of “coordinated communications” as “contributions.” And that includes

any communication that republishes, disseminates, or distributes, in whole or in part, any broadcast or any written, graphic, or other form of campaign material prepared by a candidate, an authorized committee of a candidate, or their agents. [italics added]

That’s probably what has Clear Channel’s attention in this bill.

According to the Open Secrets database, Clear Channel isn’t tossing out quite the level of moolah that it did back in 2008, when it spent over $4.0M on Congress. But $1.37 million in one quarter isn’t turkey feed.

CC’s nearest competitors don’t even come close to this figure. The runner up as far as I can tell is CBS Corporation, which has its hands in lots of broadcast and online radio ventures (eg, Last.fm). CBS spent $800,000 on Congress in Q2, mostly talking up the same issues. It doesn’t appear that Cumulus has done any lobbying in years.

This is all on a company level, of course. On a trade association level, nobody outdoes the National Association of Broadcasters when it comes to lobbying. Last quarter the organization spent $3,020,000 making sure its positions on Capitol Hill were perfectly clear.

The post Clear Channel spent almost $1.4 million in lobbying in Q2 appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Every year scores of community and public radio stations apply for funding from the Department of Commerce’s Public Telecommunications Facilities Program. The venue funds a host of capital expenses that many of these stations can’t afford otherwise. The cash goes to upgrading transmission towers, funding shelters for transmitters, and buying new control room equipment, console furniture, auxiliary power gear, air conditioners to protect servers from hot weather—all that good stuff and more.

So, of course, there’s got to be a politician somewhere who thinks this good deed ought not to go unpunished. His name is Representative Charlie Wilson (D-OH), and Wilson actually thinks he’s going to reduce the deficit by killing this fund.

No kidding. Yes way. He’s for real submitted a bill to kill PTFP. Here’s Wilson’s statement on the issue.

TRIMMING THE FAT

1. Wilson is the LEAD SPONSOR of an upcoming bill to eliminate the Public Telecommunications Facilities Grant Program. In FY 2010, this program received $18M in federal funds. Once all television signals were converted to digital in June 2009, this grant program was no longer needed as it pertained to analog service facilities. President Obama zeroed out this program in his FY2011 budget proposal, but it is unlikely that Congress will pass a budget resolution this year which could result in the program continuing to be funded. Congressman Wilson is proactively making sure that a defunct program will not receive funding or become a place holder for other funding.

Eighteen million whole bucks! Woah. There you go. That’s going to cut down the national debt, like, not at all.

Ending PTFP, however, will hurt a boatload of community stations that really need this money to keep up their infrastructures. It appears from Wilson’s statement that he hasn’t even actually looked at the program and noticed that it funds radio stations, which did not go through the government’s DTV transition program.

Apparently there’s talk that the radio end of PTFP could be funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Please. The CPB hasn’t got any money for this. It’s too busy helping fund the Public Broadcasting System so that PBS can distribute a three hour worshipful TV documentary about Ronald Reagan’s former Secretary of State George Schultz, funded by his pals.

The National Federation of Community Broadcasters is fighting to keep PTFP alive. Go to NFCB’s site and help them.

The post Save the funding for community radio infrastructure appeared first on Radio Survivor.

NPR's Howard Berkes

National Public Radio’s ombudsman Alicia Shephard pondered an interesting conundrum this week. What do you do when you are covering elections in a state like Utah, where just about everybody can be classified as a “conservative”? How do you grade the distinctions in conservatism?

The network’s Howard Berkes decided to roll out the term “ultra-conservative” in order to describe the two candidates who vied for now deposed Republican Senator Bob Bennett’s seat. But this provoked a mildly irate listener response, quoted by Shephard.

“You called the two Republican candidates in Utah ‘ultra-conservatives,'” he wrote. “Does NPR ever call a candidate an ‘ultra-liberal’? Barbara Lee? Dennis Kucinich? Bernie Sanders? Or are only conservatives ‘ultra’ in NPR’s world?”

Not true, Shephard pushed back. In fact, NPR does apply the u-word to liberals, and  she cited various reports to back her claim.

“Given the context of this particular story, it was reasonable for Berkes to call Bennett’s opponents ‘ultra-conservatives’,” she wrote, “if only to help listeners outside Utah understand why that state’s Republicans were choosing a replacement for a veteran senator.”

But I think I’ve got a better term to use in this instance. How about we revive the word “reactionary”? The concept is defined by Wikipedia as so:

“Viewpoints that seek to return to a previous state (the status quo ante ) in a society.”

Utah Senate seat contender Tim Bridgewater fit the reactionary description perfectly (he lost the nomination to his rival Mike Lee). Bridgewater’s issues page called for what I think would be the effective dismantling of Social Security and Medicare. Bridgewater is clever; he’s willing to keep both programs around for folks 55 and older, perhaps hoping that younger voters will be dumb enough to think that privatization will actually work.

But I’m left wondering what’s “conservative” about these positions? Medicare has been around for almost half a century; Social Security for three quarters. These are long established, decade old institutions. Why on earth is turning the security of Americans over to the same financial operations that give us sub-prime loans and derivative swaps a “conservative” stance? What’s being “conserved”?

Nothing, I think. Tim Bridgewater is really a reactionary—someone who wants to go back to the Las Vegas economic policies of long past times, like around 1928, or 1907, or 1893.

The truth is that it’s the “ultra-liberals” today who are really the conservatives, who want to conserve the welfare state concepts developed over the last fifty to 75 years.

So maybe NPR should start calling guys like Bridgewater “reactionaries,” and Congressional reps like Barbara Lee “conservatives.”

If that ever happens, I’ll start calling myself the Queen of England.

The post Hey NPR: bring back the word "reactionary" appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Free Press has a provocative new report on the state of public media and how to more adequately fund it. Many of the reform group’s proposals involve siphoning income from commercial station advertising revenue or Federal Communications Commission spectrum auctions. I’ve got an overview of the document up on Ars Technica, which has generated quite a few comments. They largely focus on the question of whether the government should get more involved in media—always a subject for heated debate.

I’m not inclined to hash that out here, but do wonder about one of the report’s smaller recommendations. A section of the piece titled “Restoring Public Media’s Heat Shield” focuses on the very legitimate concern that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting fails to protect public media from external political pressure.

“The current appointment process for leadership at the CPB is overly politicized. Presidential appointments govern the entire process — into which neither the public nor the core constituency of public media producers have any input. It also often leads to appointments as rewards for political support, rather than simple calls to service for qualified people, including those who have broadcasting or media experience.”

Part of the Free Press cure for this problem is restructuring the CPB—curtailing the President’s power to just make appointments out of his (and hopefully someday her) hat. Here’s another section, concerning governance at community or school/college public radio stations:

“These stations often lack a community advisory board. Of course, even at the community-licensed stations where these boards are required by law, they can be largely symbolic and have little power to weigh in on programming or station decision-making. Though community advisory boards should serve as a mechanism to increase community oversight and public participation in public broadcasting, this is unfortunately not always the case. The legal framework that established the boards is vague and lacks specific definitions for the precise role and responsibility for them. This means that while some boards are very active, others meet rarely. The successful examples could serve as a model for stations to be more engaged in their communities.”

My concern with this complaint is that it assumes that there is an almost Rousseauean entity out there called “the public” or “the community” that, when consulted, will always serve up selfless suggestions about how to make a community or public radio station better.

Admittedly, my experiences around this issue stem from my involvement with the Pacifica radio stations, but I don’t think I’m alone in my skepticism. Lots of people who attend public media board meetings go there for self-interested reasons. They want some portion of the stations resources. They want a show on the station. Or they want access to the station’s air time. Or they’re a programmer who has some dispute with station management. Or they’re friends or allies with that programmer. Or they’re partisans in some local political dispute, and want to pressure the station to change its coverage of that issue.

I agree with Kathy Merritt that

“At their best, community advisory boards can play an invaluable role for stations by acting as a conduit for information, bringing it from corners of the community staff members don’t normally access and taking it back to a network of friends, colleagues and co-workers who might not hear about public radio otherwise. By providing input on programming, CABs can enhance stations’ efforts to connect with listeners.”

But pumping up the programming-related authority of CABs also comes with risks. These sort of boards can pressure stations to disconnect from their listeners by capitulating to small factions who have little interest in anything besides their own narrow agenda.

Free Press’s recommendation assumes that unhealthy “heat” can only come from top down. But it can also come from the bottom up. Let’s keep that in mind as we ponder giving community boards the “power to weigh in on programming or station decision-making.” How much power and weigh-in are we talking about here?

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A gaggle of major Internet content companies say they support the Federal Communications Commission’s proposed new net neutrality rules, and the signers of their letter include Sony Electronics.

“This framework will ensure that consumers have access to an open Internet, one that would preserve a level playing field for all participants,” they write. “And it does so without regulating the Internet but only applying basic rules of the road to the transmission services that provide access to the Internet.”

Other backers include Amazon.com, eBay, and Skype, all directly or indirectly involved in online audio, streaming radio, or the retailing of radio gear. I am betraying my age when I note that when I think about Sony, it’s not the PS3 that first comes to my mind, but the transistor radio revolution of the 1960s. That’s what put Sony on the international map, of course.

The FCC’s proposed new open Internet rules come in the wake of the agency’s recent legal defeat by Comcast. A DC appeals court rules that the Commission didn’t have the authority under Title I of the Communications Act’s “ancillary” powers to sanction the ISP for P2P throttling. So FCC Chair Julius Genachowski says he’s going to go with a “third way” approach— something between trying to squeak by on other sections of Title I or just declaring ISPs to be Title II common carriers, like telephone companies, thus subject to telecommunications services anti-discrimination rules.

So, in Genachowski’s words, the FCC will

“Recognize the transmission component of broadband access service—and only this component—as a telecommunications service; [italics ours]
· Apply only a handful of provisions of Title II (Sections 201, 202, 208, 222, 254, and 255) that, prior to the Comcast decision, were widely believed to be within the Commission’s purview for broadband;
· Simultaneously renounce—that is, forbear from—application of the many sections of the Communications Act that are unnecessary and inappropriate for broadband access service; and
· Put in place up-front forbearance and meaningful boundaries to guard against regulatory
overreach”

Here’s a piece of Section 202 and you get the idea:

“It shall be unlawful for any common carrier to make any unjust or unreasonable discrimination in charges, practices, classifications, regulations, facilities, or services for or in connection with like communication service, directly or indirectly, by any means or device, or to make or give any undue or unreasonable preference or advantage to any particular person, class of persons, or locality, or to subject any particular person, class of persons, or locality to any undue or unreasonable prejudice or disadvantage.”

As FCC attorney Austin Schlick puts it, sections 201, 202, and 208 “collectively forbid unreasonable denials of service and other unjust or unreasonable practices, and allow the Commission to enforce the prohibition. Long before the Comcast decision, access providers supporting an information service classification made clear that they did not seek to avoid enforcement of these fair-dealing principles:”

So basically it will be that ISP last mile “on ramp” to the Internet that will be regulated, not the content on the ‘Net itself. I’m unclear that it was ever the intention of the FCC to regulate content making its way across the backbone or third mile lines, but apparently this is what the Commission thinks it needs to do to go forward on a solid legal footing.

Anyway, there’s a long way to go, procedurally speaking, before this gets in cement, but  kudos for Sony and the rest of the gang for giving the approach a thumbs up.

The post Top radio device maker backs net neutrality appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Dr. Michael LeNoir tries to have an intelligent discussion of Health Reform on the KPFA airwaves, and is mercilessly pummeled: A Case Study of the Left’s vilification of Obama and its dismissal of Partial Reforms

Last week, respected San Francisco Bay Area physician Dr. Michael LeNoir devoted his weekly “About Health” program to the just passed health care reform bill and the political debate around it. LeNoir is a pioneer in treating asthma in inner city children, and has a regular show on listener sponsored FM station KPFA in Berkeley. After saying that the bill is much less than he wanted, being an advocate of single payer, he said that it was important to understand what is in the bill, the good and bad of it, and to think about how we can use it as a foot in the door to widen and deepen the reform. He also said that he was disturbed that the Right seemed to dominate public debate about the bill, and he challenged his listeners to think about how we – those who want real reform – can have more of a voice in the debate.

LeNoir also expressed fear that unless we do that, the bill could be blocked, crippled and even repealed. The possibility that the Right could unseat those who had voted for the bill should be taken seriously, he warned.

This was clearly an attempt to engage in an intelligent and rational discussion of the bill and the political debate around it, but he got anything but that. Instead, a barrage of negative, polemical, incurious and dismissive attitudes were expressed by the eleven callers heard during the hour long program. Here is a summary of what LeNoir was told:

. A Single Payer plan is the only valuable option. Otherwise, all we’re doing is just making “them” richer. What we’ve got is just band aids “that will all fall down”.
. Only medicare for all will work. They tried twice (in California), only to have it vetoed. The reform bill is a debacle. Marches and things like that will not help, we’re going to have to sit-in at the congressional offices and demand single payer. Even that probably won’t help because they are all beholden to moneyed interests.
. Only when we ‘get the money out of politics’ will we be able to get health reform.
. The insurance companies will be able to raise rates as they like, so reform won’t work. Only the State Insurance Commissioners, like the right wing Republican we have in California, could stop them, and that’s a laughable prospect.
. Even if we had a million people marching, it wouldn’t help, because the media is so biased that they wouldn’t cover it.
. You’re wrong, there are lots of people out on the streets, for example the Peace and Freedom party, and if we elected a Peace and Freedom governor we would get single payer. That’s what people should be working for. By saying we’re not out there in the public dialog you are undermining us.
. We should take away everybody’s insurance so that they will see that they need it.
. People who voted for Obama are dupes, and this is an example of why.
. If Jerry Brown would run on single payer, he would win easily and that’s how we could get something worthwhile.
. The bill won’t work because the insurance companies will be allowed to charge 4 times as much as they do now. Whether or not the bill will be implemented or overturned will be determined in the courts and in the bureaucracies, and that’s not something that public advocacy can change.

Every one of the italicized claims above are either factually wrong (often egregiously), or are politically simple-minded. Over and over again, LeNoir politely challenged both the inaccuracies of these statements (for example, the bill provides for several mechanism for regulating rates, none of them being the whim of the State Insurance Commissioners), and kept asking people to see that the good of this bill could easily disappear if the Right’s superior position in the national debate is not challenged. No one would respond to these corrections honestly, no one would acknowledge that the Left has been missing in action (in fact, present only to express outright hostility to the bill). Everyone knew better than LeNoir that the bill was worthless (yet they had no interest in its contents), and everyone thought LeNoir was nave if not stupid in not recognizing that working with and within the bill was a waste of time.

Perhaps the most interesting case was the last caller, a member of a national reform group who probably had more practical political experience than the rest. His claim that public advocacy does not affect court rulings, the actions of attorneys general, or the decisions of government bureaucracies, could not be more false. It is the very sum and substance of real-world advocacy to do exactly these things. Yet here he was ignoring the implementation of the real bill just passed, in favor of the comparatively diffuse possibility of getting single payer legislation enacted and implemented in California (the most bankrupt state in the nation, as LeNoir reminded his audience).

This is a pathological political situation, I think. In all important respects, the reality is emphatically the opposite of the one posited by KPFA callers. LeNoir knows more about this bill, and about medicine, and about politics, than all these callers put together. Their condescension to him illustrates that the Left is no more civil or educated than the Right it mocks. The silliness of some of the statements – like the idea that there’s no hope until we elect a Far Left Governor from a fringe party largely populated by senior citizens from Berkeley, or until we eliminate the influence of wealth in politics – is only the most obvious piece of the problem. Worse is the lack of interest in the real world – in this case, the many interesting and complex provisions of the bill, and how they might or might not work. And of course the roots of all this is the need for a justification to do nothing. If the political system is rigged, if only single payer is acceptable and we’ll never get it because of (fill in the blank), then no action is required.

A word on single payer: The Left seems to believe that we must destroy the private insurance companies to have real reform. They seem not to understand that this is somewhere between impossible and fantastical within our particular capitalist system. So, in effect, there are saying that only fully socialized medical care – ‘socialized’, as in socialism – is acceptable.

Strikingly, this is the mirror image of the Right’s fantasies: that ‘Obama-care’ is socialism, and therefore the beginning of dictatorship. The idea that the reform bill just passed is socialism, or that only socialism can bring meaningful reform, are mutually reinforcing political fantasies. The armies of the Left that have recently written endless screeds denouncing Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) often express themselves more intelligently than these KPFA callers. But their message is, overall, similarly useless and self serving. If the Left had thought like this in the thirties, we’d have never have gotten the New Deal. If it had acted this way in the sixties, Medicare would have never been implemented. And if it continues this know-nothing-ism in the next few years, it may well doom the only chance we will have for useful reform for the foreseeable future.

The post Trying to have an intelligent discussion about health care on KPFA (and not succeeding) appeared first on Radio Survivor.

The Kronos Quartet says yes to net neutrality (source: kronosquartet.org)

The Future of Music Coalition has a small boatload of classy crossover music groups sending letters to the Federal Communications Commission in support of tougher net neutrality rules. They include R.E.M., the woodwind quintet Imani Winds, and the Kronos Quartet. Here’s an excerpt from Kronos Artistic Administrator Sidney Chen’s letter to the FCC:

“From the time the group was founded, Kronos has championed important, yet unsung, voicesthat have deserve broad attention. David Harrington formed the group after hearing Black Angels, a work by the now iconic American composer George Crumb inspired by the Vietnam War. The quartet’s most recent recording project, Floodplain, features collaborations with and composers and performers from parts of the world with which most Americans do not have direct engagement, including Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Ethiopia. Kronos strongly believes that, through direct artistic engagement with musicians working in different artistic traditions, the process of finding common ground and of resolving conflicts provides rewards that extend beyond the immediate interaction. This has, in fact, become a central focus of Kronos’ work. The open internet allows for and facilitates such interaction. We strongly encourage you to preserve its openness.”

The Commission is currently proposing an expansion of its Internet Policy Statement, which commits the agency to making sure that consumers can access the legal device of their choice on the ‘Net. The FCC wants to add an enforcement provision to the statement making it clear what kind of consequences content or application blocking ISPs  face, and a transparency provision requiring them to disclose their network management practices up front.

Future of Music has a whole web page dedicated to  helping musicians file comments with the  agency on the issue. The guide comes complete with the  do’s and don’ts of FCC feedback.  “Comments like ‘Comcast sux!’ may be funny but are not helpful in the FCC crafting better policy, so try to make your critiques productive,” FOM warns.

Diminishing control

Kronos’ commentary makes it clear, however, that not everything about the open Internet pleases the band. “One such challenge is the diminishing control we have over the dissemination of intellectual property, such as recorded performances that are under copyright protection,” Chen’s letter continues. “Too often, artistic material is used without authorization, on occasion to the distinct detriment and frustration of the artist.” The Kronos letter cites various political campaigns that produced YouTube commercials with Kronos soundtracks without getting the groups’ permission.

But this doesn’t mean Kronos wants to put ISPs in charge of copyright policing. “In theory, having ISPs monitor and control file-sharing is attractive, but in practice, it quickly becomes problematic,” Chen notes.  “One significant problem is that no technology currently exists that can determine what is and what is not a legal data transfer; all the ISPs can do is monitor the size of data transfers.”

Other musicians filing with the FCC include songwriter Erin McKeown, instrumentalist Martin Perna, and classical composer Alex Shapiro.

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As everybody in the radio world knows, conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh is in a Honolulu hospital, recovering from chest pains. Meanwhile, something of a referendum on his fate is being conducted on Twitter.

“Please, Rush Limbaugh, DIE NOW!” tweeted Chuck69dotcom not too long ago.

“oh pleez oh pleez oh pleez let Rush Limbaugh die . In a year of many dead celebs, let’s end 2009 on a good note,” chimed in The Angry Bacon. ”

Did Rush Limbaugh die yet? Oh, not yet.LMAO,” laments NOVACHANEL. “if there’s any justice in the world… Rush Limbaugh will die before the year is out,” insists Shellistoast.

Other Rush haters are a bit more circumspect about the matter. “Rush Limbaugh has heart attack; fails to die thusfar,” notes Corp8myBaby.

These outbursts, of course, have displeased Mr. Limbaugh’s supporters, who are anxious to derive lessons from the moment. “So Rush Limbaugh can’t say that he wants Obama to fail, but liberals can say that they want Rush Limbaugh to die?” retorts SonSound. Or:  “The people calling for Rush Limbaugh to die are the same people who ask to control your healthcare,” shoots back natatomic.

More draconianly: “DO YOU GET IT NOW? People want Rush Limbaugh to die aresame people who R to control healthcare DEATH PANELS.”

But many self-described leftys insist that they wish Rush well. “As a Liberal I hope Rush Limbaugh recovers quickly,” declares DEMOCRATZxORG. “Because I strongly disagree with someone doesn’t mean I want them to die.” Ditto says zorylynx. “I don’t want Rush Limbaugh to die . I disagree vehemently with him, but that’s no excuse.”

In fact, some say they very much want Limbaugh to live, such as 3rdcoast318: “actually I don’t want dis clown to die .Almost forgot MY PRESIDENT IS BLACK and Rush need to b around for all 8 years.”

Others just wish the matter would go away. “I hope Rush Limbaugh doesn’t die yet, because it will only make us hear about him even more,” laments betaken. Still others are looking to the future. “I guess when Rush Limbaugh does finally die , his peons will blame Obama,” notes jawoodward.

And of course, there are many twitterers praying for Limbaugh’s good health.

“If you haven’t lit a candle for RUSH @ limbaugh , you can at http://bit.ly/4obL5f Very cool site too! I love it! #TCOT # PRAY,” notes CheriDouglas.

Except for the ones who are meditating for something else. “Pray for Rush Limbaugh …to be swallowed by the Earth and his flesh to melt in lava while his screams are recorded,” tweets DrusillaBloeme.

Thus do radio listeners celebrate the conclusion of 2009. We here at Radio Survivor wish all of you a very happy, healthy, and safe new year.

The post Twitterers call and pray for Rush Limbaugh to die, live, not die, or all of the above appeared first on Radio Survivor.

#8 in our series on radio trends of the decade

It was the summer of 2007. Not moments after the Republican far right triumphed over President Bush’s hated immigration reform law than Representative Mike Pence, Republican of Indiana, introduced a rider to a budgetary bill in the House that would forbid funding for the Federal Communications Commission to enforce the Fairness Doctrine.

The bill overwhelmingly passed the House on Thursday, June 26. This was odd, because the FCC hadn’t enforced the policy in 20 years.

Broadcaster freedom

The Fairness Doctrine was a regulation tailored to the mid-20th century’s Internetless, cable TV-less, three network video broadcasting world. It required license owners to present opposing viewpoints on issues of public importance. In the 1980s the FCC began to pull back from the rule, issuing a “Fairness Doctrine Report” in 1985 that suggested that the policy inhibited rather than encouraged controversial dialog over the air waves.

Two years later an appeals court ruled that since Congress had never actually passed legislation authorizing the Fairness Doctrine, the FCC did not have to enforce it. In response, the House and Senate passed a Fairness Law, but the Senate could not override President Reagan’s veto, or the subsequent veto of President Bush I. The FCC abandoned the practice.

Yet absurdly, two decades later conservatives couldn’t scream loudly enough about the policy. John McCain, who had taken a beating for his support of the Bush administrations immigration proposals, quickly chimed in with a Broadcaster Freedom Act that went beyond Pence’s largely symbolic one year budget rider. It would just by plain old Act of Congress prevent the FCC from enforcing the concept, once and for all.

McCain’s sudden passion for the cause  can be read as an attempt to get right again with the Right. But from whence came this terror over a decades dead policy? Oklahoma Republican Senator and noted global warming denialist James Inhofe declared that he overheard California Senator Barbara Boxer and New York’s Hillary Clinton plotting something against talk radio in a Capitol Hill elevator. Various statements sympathetic to the Fairness Doctrine made by John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, and Diane Feinstein were paraded out for all to see and dread.

And so the red state blogo-punditocracy went completely beer nuts over the issue, ranting that if the Doctrine was restored, Al-qaeda might be able to demand equal time over the airwaves. Bloggers promised that those sneaky Dems were just watching and waiting, biding their time regarding the Fairness Doctrine, plotting to retake the White House. And then . . . gotcha!

“The bottom line is that, without a massive public outpouring in favor of the First Amendment, comparable to the opposition to the immigration bill, the Broadcaster Freedom Act will die,” one warned. “And that means that with a Democrat in the White House, the Fairness Doctrine, as well as limits on conservative ownership of media properties, will be passed into law.”

Bwahaha!

The problem, of course, was that the ultimately successful Democratic contender, Barack Obama, announced that he opposed the Fairness Doctrine. Ditto, declared his FCC Chair pick, Julius Genachowski. So too did Washington, D.C.s leading reform group, Free Press. But the Fearness Doctrine crowd found a precious artifact that allowed them to keep the crusade going, a study published by The Center for American Progress and Free Press titled “The Structural Imbalance of Talk Radio.”

“[T]he Fairness Doctrine was never, by itself, an effective tool to ensure the fair discussion of important issues,” the paper argued . . . .

“Simply reinstating the Fairness Doctrine will do little to address the gap between conservative and progressive talk unless the underlying elements of the public trustee doctrine are enforced, in particular, the requirements of local accountability and the reasonable airing of important matters. The key principle here is not shutting down one perspective or another—it is making sure that communities are informed about a range of local and national public affairs.”

Aha! They now declared. The Obama Nazis are going to push the Fairness Doctrine through the back door via regulations requiring more localism and diversity, and rules limiting the percentage of broadcast stations any entity can own!

It’s all coming together now

Sorry, Fearness Doctrine mongers. To this day, there is no Fairness Doctrine at the FCC. And so preoccupied is the agency with broadband and wireless issues, that it has left those diversity and localism proposals in a box way up in the attic. In the end, The Great Fairness Doctrine Panic was about a weakened and internally divided Republican party, circling the wagons around its most crucial resource—conservative talk radio and TV—and desperately glomming onto any cause to maintain unity with its base.

The main casualty of this hysteria been constructive and practical discussion about what the FCC can do, not to monitor the politics of radio via the back door, but to encourage more localism and connections to communities through the front.

The post The decade's most important radio trends: #8 The Great Fairness Doctrine Panic appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Josef Stalin: how "balanced" do you want your past? (source: Wikipedia Commons)

RIA Novosti reports that the grandson of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin is suing a Russian radio station for broadcasting “offensive disrespect” against his infamous ancestor. Yevgeny Dzhugashvili is demanding the equivalent of $326,500USD from station Ekho Moskvy. Of late one of the frequency’s hosts, Matvei Ganapolsky, quoted a line from a book titled Staliniada:

“Stalin signed an order that children may be shot from the age of 12,” Ganapolsky read. Then he opined the following: “What kind of bastard would be brave enough to say one word in his [the dictator’s] defense?”

This was no doubt intended as a rhetorical question. But there appear to be a lot of bastards in post-Soviet Russia, among them Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Mr. Putin recently called for a more “balanced assessment” of Stalin, according to Associated Press. Putin conceded Stalin’s “unacceptable” crimes, but:

“If you say you are positive (about Stalin’s rule), some will be discontented. If you say you are negative, others will grumble,” AP quotes him as saying. “It is impossible to make a general judgment. It is evident that, from 1924 to 1953, the country that Stalin ruled changed from an agrarian to an industrial society.”

Plus Stalin defended the Soviet Union from Hitler, Putin noted (after signing a peace treaty with Hitler that allowed the former USSR to gobble up half of Poland. Putin didn’t mention that part).

I just don’t get this “balanced assessment” business. One of the most bone chilling historical debates of our time is how many people Stalin killed. It all depends on what monstrous things you include in your formula besides plain old mass murders and executions. If your equation includes starvation from the forced collectivizations and deportations, the number could go to 20 million or higher.

So how do you “balance” that with modernization? “Stalin killed 20 million people, but now we’ve got electricity and vaccinations, so it all worked out.” [?] Or Hitler? “Stalin killed 20 million Russians, but at least he defended us from Hitler, who would have killed millions of Russians.” [??]

It doesn’t make a lot of sense. But if there’s one thing that nations like to do, it’s to tidy up their pasts—either with obfuscating speeches or lawsuits against radio stations.

Stalin’s real last name, by the way, was Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili. “Stalin” was a monicker he created for himself. It means “of steel.”

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It’s a day that thousands of low-power FM and community radio activists have been awaiting for just about nine years. This evening, at 7:06 pm the House of Representatives, with a minimum of drama, passed H.R. 1147, the Local Community Radio Act of 2009 by voice vote. Little drama for the House nevertheless meant nearly two days of sitting on the edge of the seat for LPFM advocates as they waited for the House to move through its usual machinations and other business. Regardless of how much we might wish LPFM was at the top of the legislative agenda, instead it seemed more like an afterthought. At least it was enough of a no-brainer for the House that they didn’t even need a roll call vote. I’ll take it.

The bill restores the original technical specifications for LPFM which the FCC instituted in 2000. These specs allow a low-power station to be placed as close as the third adjacent channel on the dial. In practice that means if a full-power station broadcasts on 100.1 FM then a LPFM may be placed at 100.7 FM, provided that the frequency is otherwise available.

On Dec. 18, 2000 a provision limiting LPFM stations to obeying the spacing requirements of full-power stations was slipped into an omnibus budget bill and signed into law by President Clinton after a long series of back-room horsetrading. Under these still-current rules, a LPFM station may only be spaced as close as 100.9 FM next to that hypothetical full power station at 100.1 FM.

.2 MHz may not seem like a big difference, but when it comes to spacing stations on the FM dial, it is a game fought and won by tenths of a megahertz. This difference is of particular importance in the nation’s largest radio markets which already have very full dials that will not permit the addition of another full-power station or LPFM that has to obey full-power spacing rules. LPFM proponents estimate that passage of the Local Community Radio Act will create the potential for at least a hundred new stations nationwide.

Now the focus moves to the Senate, where the Commerce Committee has already approved the Senate version of the bill. If it goes to a floor vote and is passed then it is likely to be signed by President Obama.

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