Now Playing at StopBigMedia.com Harry Potter and the Media Moguls
Free Press Teams Up with Harry Potter Alliance to Tweak FCC Chairman Kevin Martin
By John Eggerton -- Broadcasting & Cable, 12/12/2007 5:58:00 PM
The push-back on Federal Communications Commission chairman Kevin Martin's media-deregulation proposal has reached Hogwarts.
While the boyish and bespectacled Martin has been likened to Harry Potter by some, including on Capitol Hill, Free Press' StopBigMedia.com teamed up with the Harry Potter Alliance, a group of fans who said they're carrying the fight against the dark arts to the real world, to fight media consolidation.
They have created Potterwatch, with Martin now painted as the agent of "a Voldemedia, controlled by the few." The site urges Potter fans to contact their legislators and support a bill, being spearheaded by Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), which would block a Dec. 18 vote on Martin's media proposal to loosen the ban on newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership.
Alliance creator Andrew Slack framed the fight in purely Potter terms in announcing the new site: "The Harry Potter books offer a vivid example of what can happen when too much media rests in the hands of too few," said Slack, who was not cutting the media any. "In the series, wizarding newspapers like the Daily Prophet put the magical community in serious jeopardy by denying Voldemort's return, failing to cover abuses from the Ministry and ultimately becoming a mouthpiece for Voldemort."
