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Liz Eisen - Sat 11 Oct 2008 10:12 AM CDT
Tojo8817 - Fri 03 Oct 2008 08:35 PM CDT
Marilyn Walker - Fri 03 Oct 2008 12:51 PM CDT
Brent - Mon 29 Sep 2008 02:55 PM CDT
audiored - Sat 27 Sep 2008 10:34 PM CDT
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Monday, October 17
Last Week in Media by Iowa's Arron Wings
by
Trish Nelson
on Mon 17 Oct 2005 11:00 AM CDT
 Last Week in Media
by Arron Wings
There are major issues surfacing in the regulation and future of media this fall.
The FCC is reviewing and rewriting the “ownership rules” they got wrong in 2003 and are now before them again.
Broadcast licenses for all TV and radio stations in Iowa
are up for renewal this winter. The deadline for stations to
request renewal is October 1, 2005, and the deadline for public comment
and participation is January 1, 2006.
But there are also other issues that will have long-term consequences for us the public.
The
Truth in Broadcasting Act of 2005 (S. 967) currently before the Senate
Commerce Committee
will mandate the identification of all pre-packaged “news releases”
(VNRs) created by the government and broadcast on our airwaves.
The need for this action arose when both the Justice Department and the
FCC failed to protect consumers from products that the Government
Accounting Office has said violate a prohibition on “covert
propaganda.” The Justice Department has said an unattributed VNR
is not covert propaganda as long as it is fact-based, and the FCC does
not require disclosure unless the VNR is on a political or
controversial topic.
The Act
attempts to eliminate the ambiguity created by those two departments
and mandates that all VNRs produced by or for a branch of government is
identified as such. It requires that “Produced by the U.S.
Government” or similar language is displayed on all VNRs regardless of
topic or content.
Click here for more information or to join the fight against government propaganda.
Arron Wings lives in Iowa City and is a member of Iowans for Better Local TV.
Unwatchable TV
by
Trish Nelson
on Mon 17 Oct 2005 04:00 AM CDT
 Unwatchable TV
The following appeared as a guest opinion in the Iowa City
Press-Citizen
By Charles Miller
“This is the single most important discussion any American
citizen can be a part of.” With those words media critic John Nichols began Iowa
City’s Wednesday meeting with FCC officials. In a
packed auditorium, Iowans expressed their concerns about the state of our
broadcast media. It was a triumph of direct citizen engagement with Washington,
the latter actually coming to listen to the former.
But it also was very troubling. We learned about a
critically sick media. Sick to the point that television news is packaged as
entertainment and entertainment is packaged as news. Sick to the point that the
most popular political affairs show for right-leaning people is one in which
the host bullies his guests, and the most popular political show for
left-leaning people is a comedy. Sick to the point that the third-largest
source of TV revenue is political commercials, so that only millionaires run
for office and use attack ads that “work” because they destroy their opponents.
We go to war, we waste resources, we lack basic health care,
we slouch to a “service” economy, while our media divide and trivialize.
The media’s demise did not occur overnight, but across 25
years of deregulation. Since the 1930s, the FCC saw a strong public good in
regulating radio and, later, TV. It established that, as users of a valuable
and limited public resource — the airwaves — stations may profit from them in
exchange for also serving “the public interest.”
At his inauguration, Ronald Reagan said, “government is not
the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” and his FCC
proclaimed, “the perception of broadcasters as community trustees should be
replaced by a view of broadcasters as marketplace participants.” Not only did [Reagan] veto the Fairness Doctrine, but he also abolished limits on commercials,
eliminated community-affairs program requirements and trivialized the renewal
of broadcast licenses.
Deregulators promised much: better shows, diversity, lower
cable prices, etc., as the free market would magically deliver a gem. But the
airwaves are anything but a free market and deregulation and mergers profit
only the extremely wealthy while returning unwatchable TV.
(click here to read the entire article)
Charles Miller is a research scientist at the University
of Iowa and a member of Iowans for
Better Local Television
Click here to learn more about:
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