Welcome to the Free Press blog! We post several times a week on everything from Internet access to free speech to media mergers, so check back often to see what we’re up to.
Here at Free Press we're celebrating the release of our colleague Joseph Torres' new book, News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media. This October the authors are taking their book on the road on a national tour that includes stops in New York, California, New Mexico, Texas, Colorado, and Washington, D.C.
On NPR’s Morning
Edition this Wednesday, reporter Elizabeth Blair took
a hard look at the ways in which advertisers are flooding our media and
having more and more of a say in the content we see between the commercial breaks. New tools and technology have given
consumers more options for skipping the ads that have quietly come to fill as
much as 10 to 15 minutes of a half-hour program. With TiVo and online
streaming, people can increasingly choose what commercials they see — or skip
the ads altogether.
Veteran
TV journalist David Marash knows the news.
Marash
is a former correspondent for ABC’s Nightline
and won Emmys for his reporting on the Oklahoma City bombing and the explosion
of TWA Flight 800. He was an anchor for Al Jazeera English from 2006–2008. He’s
spent a good 50 years in the business.
Which
also means Marash knows when the networks are trying to pass something off as
news that isn’t news. He calls it “news whiz”: Like Cheez Whiz, it’s an
embarrassing substitute for the real thing.
We’ve been saying it for years. Now a new report
from the nonpartisan Institute for Policy Integrity backs it up: The open
Internet — an even playing field on which all websites and applications are
treated equally — is an engine of innovation and investment.
Federal Communications Commissioner Michael Copps will be the first to tell you that his own agency needs to do more to improve the country’s media system. Last Monday, he told a room full of Pittsburgh residents that a key part of the remedy is citizen action.
“If we are to ever have media of the people, by the people and for the people, you need to take this fight on,” Copps told the crowd at a town hall-style dialogue sponsored by Free Press. “The stakes could not be higher ... If we are denied quality news and information, if we are denied in-depth investigative reporting and if we are denied a media environment wherein independent voices can speak and be heard, then we won’t be able to sustain an
informed electorate.”
At today’s FCC hearing on
the Information Needs of Communities, Free Press Policy Counsel Corie Wright made
the case for why we need a new era of broadcaster transparency. Through a few
simple changes, Wright argues, the FCC could make available vital information
about how the media serve local communities — and enable citizens, journalists
and public interest groups to hold media accountable.
The text of Corie Wright’s
speech, delivered at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass
Communications at Arizona State University, follows below.
Last Friday marked the launch of Black Voices for Internet Freedom, a new coalition of local, regional and national organizations, leaders and their allies joining together to keep the Internet open and free from discrimination.
This week Free
Press filed a legal challenge to the FCC’s Open Internet rules, which passed last December
and were just published in
the Federal Register.
As democracy movements worldwide struggle to speak out via the Internet, many here in the U.S. may have overlooked an effort in Congress to undermine this basic freedom.
