Our good buddies at Chicago Media Action have put the entire Chicago FCC hearing (first discussed in a previous blog post) online here. Do not miss the comments of a KRS-1, who skipped a soundcheck and sped over to address the Commission (found in the section "first panel").
Also, skip not the public comments themselves, in all their violent and angry but still brief glory.
From the THIS JUST IN department:
I've become a bit obsessed with Cambodia lately—more to follow on that, I'm sure—and it's incredibly wonky press. So this caught my eye. Please send a letter: I'm going there this winter and don't want to get beat up too.
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13 August 2007
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UA-252-2007: CAMBODIA: An alleged assault of a journalist by the military police officer in Posat Province
CAMBODIA: Assault to journalist; freedom of expression; illegal shooting
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Dear friends,
The Chicago Underground Library is pleased to announce Orphan Works, a new reinterpretation series. Unlike traditional reading series, our performers are not reading from their own work. Some of them won’t even be reading. We’re calling upon a variety of the most creative minds in Chicago to burrow deep into our collection of anonymous works or ones for which no further information on the author can be found. Commonly referred to as “Orphan Works,” these lost publications will be brought back to life: read, reinterpreted, and reunited with the audience they’ve been missing. There is an ongoing debate on the status of works like these, and a number of groups and individuals are fighting to keep them free for creative reuse and artistic exploration.
The future of the Internet, cable TV and local media is threatened in Illinois.
Large phone companies faced a massive public outcry in 2006 when they attempted to pass a terrible telecommunications bill in Washington. Now they're pushing a law in Springfield that would undercut local authority, threaten public access channels and cut off many communities in Illinois from accessing new technologies.
You can help stop this bad bill by taking action today. The Illinois House Telecommunications Committee is holding a hearing on House Bill 1500 on Wednesday. Call Rep. John Fritchey and urge him to oppose the bill.
FCC Commissioner Michael J. Copps unveiled a New American Media Contract over the weekend at the National Conference for Media Reform, proposing the following tennets:
1. A right to media that strengthens our democracy
2. A right to local stations that are actually local
3. A right to media that looks and sounds like America
4. A right to news that isn’t canned and radio playlists that aren’t for sale
5. A right to programming that isn’t so damned bad so damned often
He further proposed that, because we've actually already paid half a trillion dollars for our currently existing services, that these should be delivered immediately and for free, via televion and radio.
ADVERTISING AGE reports today on an upcoming study by Julia R. Fox at Indiana University called "No Joke: A Comparison of Substance in The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Broadcast Network Television Coverage of the 2004 Presidential Election Campaign."
Fearing the hip masses would remain disenfranchised from the political system because they're getting all their news from THE DAILY SHOW, the study did side-by-side comparisons between humor and real news shows and, guess what, found them to be practically equivalent in their presentation of substantial news items.
"Interestingly, the average amounts of [what the report called non-hype] video and audio substance in the broadcast network news stories were not significantly different than the average amounts of visual and audio substance in 'The Daily Show with Jon Stewart' stories about the presidential election," the study found. "It should be noted that the broadcast-network-news stories about the presidential election were significantly shorter, on average, than were 'The Daily Show with Jon Stewart' stories," Ms. Fox added. "The argument could be made that while the amount of substance per story was not significantly different, the proportion of each story devoted to substance was greater in the network-news stories. ... On the other hand, the proportion of stories per half-hour program devoted to the election campaign was greater in 'The Daily Show.'"
out now