Search Results for: Jeff Chester

Feb

2013

FAIR REPORT: 13th Annual Fear & Favor Review

Revealing the hidden influence behind the news

It’s a fair indication of the current state of play in U.S. media that, in 2012, TV newscasts were acknowledged to be “increasingly seeded with corporate advertising masquerading as news” (Washington Post, 1/3/12)—and the regulatory response was to call, not for an end to the practice of deceiving audiences, but for broadcasters to make note of such arrangements in an online file. While we work on creating the sort of unfettered news media that democracy requires, calling out compromised reporting as we do each year in Fear & Favor is just another way to note where and why the current [...]

Mar

2007

Net Neutrality and the Supermedia Monopolies

Deregulation’s history of empty promises

By Jeff Chester

The leaders of the nation’s largest cable and telephone companies are telling lawmakers something familiar: New national policies are required to connect everyone to what they call a “superbroadband” Internet highway. If Washington supports their political agenda, the companies vow that the nation will benefit from advances in healthcare, improvements in the quality of life for senior citizens, and major boosts for jobs and the economy. But, say corporate executives, we are stymied by rules, regulations and local and state policies. Congress, the FCC and the White House must get government out of the way. They claim that the emergence [...]

Apr

2006

Jeff Chester on COPE Act, Ann-Louise Colgan on World Bank

Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: Articles and posts are flying around the web with headlines like 'The End of the Internet'. How serious is the threat of the disturbingly named "Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act" and what can you do about it? And, how does it connect to the threat currently facing public access TV? We'll talk about both issues with Jeff Chester, of the Center for Digital Democracy. Also on the show: when activists used to protest the World Bank and IMF, many in the mainstream media took the lazy way out, pointing and laughing at the [...]

Nov

2005

'Saying What They've Been Thinking'

Racial stereotypes in Katrina commentary

By Jacqueline Bacon

As columnist Dawn Turner Trice remarked (Chicago Tribune, 9/12/05), Hurricane Katrina “shed a light” on the often unspoken racist assumptions of many Americans. In particular, she noted, many of the elite have, through their comments about the tragedy, “unwittingly reveal[ed] themselves” and their fundamental prejudices. Of course, many pundits attacked the idea that racism had anything to do with Katrina at all. To suggest race affected the response to the hurricane, Reason magazine’s Cathy Young (Boston Globe, 9/12/05) charged, was “irresponsible.” Jeff Jacoby decried in the Boston Globe (9/14/05) the invocation after Katrina of the “America-as-lethally-racist theme” that “is as [...]

Apr

2005

Sam Zia-Zarifi on Marla Ruzicka & Jeff Chester on CPB

Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: Marla Ruzicka, whose mission was documenting and securing compensation for civilian victims of U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, was honored in the U.S. press this week after she was killed by a car bomb in Baghdad. But will the same press corps that didn't raise a peep when a military leader declared that the US army "don't do body counts," now honor Ruzicka's work as well? We'll talk with Sam Zia-Zarifi of Human Rights Watch, the group for whom Ruzicka prepared her last report. Also on the show: There are big changes at [...]

Jul

2002

Recasting the Web

Information commons to cash cow

By Karen Charman

If the Bush administration lets large media conglomerates and local telephone companies have their way, the Internet as we know it—that free-flowing, democratic, uncensored information superhighway—could soon be a thing of the past. The Internet itself is not going away. Rather, technological advances, changes to the rules governing its use and the continued consolidation of media empires are combining to turn it into a conduit of commerce, booby-trapped with barriers and incentives designed to keep users where dollars can be wrung from them. As a result, a lot of freely accessible information and websites may become difficult or impossible to [...]

Mar

2002

Fear & Favor 2001 -- The Second Annual Report

How Power Shapes the News

By Janine Jackson and Peter Hart

Fear & Favor is FAIR’s annual review of incidents that reflect the range of pressures on reporters to use something other than journalistic judgment in deciding what goes in the news and what gets left out. The year 2001 presented special challenges in this regard. The horrific September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the ensuing declaration by the Bush administration of an open-ended "war on terrorism," meant incredible pressure on the press corps to present U.S. actions and policy in the best light; incidents of outright censorship occurred, and even more self-censorship, as many [...]

Dec

2001

FCC Moves to Eliminate Cable Ownership Cap; Move Would Also Impact Internet

The Federal Communications Commission is moving to eliminate one of the few remaining vestiges of public interest regulation on media concentration-- the rules that limit the percentage of the national audience that a single cable company can reach. If existing rules limiting a single company to 30 percent of the national market are abandoned, the country’s cable TV industry, now dominated by just eight companies, could be controlled by as few as two. Such consolidation threatens the diversity not just of cable TV but also of the Internet, since cable is likely to eventually be the way most people get [...]