BC/DC: Eggerton on Washington
BC/DC is the media executives\' must-see view from Washington, delivered by yours truly without the aid of rose-colored glasses and without the need, quite yet, of bifocals.
Sex and the Capitol City
Sex and the City star Sarah Jessica Parker was among those named to the Washington-based President’s Committee on the Arts & Humanities, along with a number of other actresses, actors, dancers and creative types. Among the other familiar names announced Monday were Alfred Woodard, Academy Award-winner Forest Whitaker, Edward Norton, and cellist Yo-Yo Ma. In September, the president name ...... Read More
Comments (0)Guest Blog: NAB's Second Chance on Public-Service Programming
In this guest blog, Henry Geller, former General Counsel of the FCC in 1964-1970 and Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information (NTIA) in the Carter Administration, says it is time to consider a new form of pay-for-(public service) play. In the late 1970’s, I, as head of NTIA, proposed to Congress and the NAB that commercial broadcast radio be relieved of its public ...... Read More
Comments (0)Fox vs. White House
The economy was the biggest news story for the week ending Oct. 25 (15% of the newshole). But coming in at number five was a story about news coverage itself: Fox vs. the White House. According to the Project for Excellence In Journalism’s latest News Coverage Index, the story of the Obama administration’s labeling of Fox News as a Republican waterboy occupied 5% of the newshole of t ...... Read More
Comments (0)Guest Blog: Net Neutrality Is a Good Investment
Craig Aaron is the senior program director at Free Press. S. Derek Turner is the organization’s research director. They argue that net neutrality is a good investment and say phone and cable lobbyists are hawking unsubstantiated claims about the consequences of FCC action. There guest blog follows: With the Federal Communications Commission poised to propose new rules on N ...... Read More
Comments (0)Guest Blog: FCC Should Heed Danger Signs on Road to Net Neutrality
Michael McCurry and Mark McKinnon, co-chairs of Arts+Labs, weigh in on network neutrality in a guest blog. They warn that soon-to-be proposed FCC network neutrality rules target unproven harms, could choke off the flow of creative content and work against broadband deployment. Don’t look now, but later this week, the Federal Communications Commission is expected to propose new Int ...... Read More
Comments (3)The Knight Commission...or the Benighted Commission?
Guest blog from Patrick Maines, president of The Media Institute, a nonprofit think tank specializing in First Amendment and communications policy issues. The Knight Commission: Much Ado About Nothing As in the title of the book about Southern belles, We’re Just Like You, Only Prettier, the report of the Knight Commission, released last week, is in some ways amusing and in other ways a ...... Read More
Comments (1)The ABCs of FTC Marketing
The FTC provided a series of instructive hypotheticals as part of the guideline revisions it published in the Federal Register. Below are several examples of the FTC’s wit and wisdom: An advertisement for a housewares store features a well-known female comedian and a well-known male baseball player engaging in lighthearted banter about products each one intends to purchase for the other. T ...... Read More
Comments (0)Shield Law Revisions Endanger Free Press, Public
With the Senate preparing this week to take up a federal shield law with holes punched in that protection by the Obama administration, Kevin Smith, President of the Society of Professional Journalists, weighs in in the following editorial. On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to vote on legislation that would grant federal protection to journalists and, more importantly, th ...... Read More
Comments (1)Comcast/NBCU: D.C. Hurdles, But No Roadblocks
With Comcast and GE said to be in talk to to join forces in a new company pooling GE’s NBC Universal assets and controlled (51%) by Comcast, a long-form review of the deal would have to take place at the FCC. The FCC must approve any transfer of TV licenses, as well as an antitrust review at the Justice Department. There are no FCC regulatory roadblocks to such a deal–the FCC repeale ...... Read More
Comments (2)Box Score: Cable One, Disclosure 0
As far as I can tell (which meant going to the company’s web site, The Washington Post still owns Cable One. And according to the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, Cable One is the tenth-largest cable operator in the country. According to a big graphic on Cable One’s Web home page, it offers a bundle of cable, Internet and phone service. If it is like every other c ...... Read More
Comments (0)Safely In the Harbor
Time for indecency 101 primer. I was reading some of the coverage of the f-bomb dropped, obviously accidentally, on Saturday Night Live. You can’t say it wasn’t foreseeable, since the script for cast newbie Jenny Slate was filled with “frickin’s.” Even a more seasoned not-ready-for-time-player might have had trouble keeping to the script. One Web site asked porte ...... Read More
Comments (1)Welcome Back, Mr. Chairman
I was pleased to hear, and from an unimpeachable source, that former FCC Chairman James Quello is on the mend after too close an association with the healthcare system. Chairman/Commissioner Quello has been out of commission for a few months, but hardly out of mind. At 95, Quello continues to run rampant over the actuarial tables on his way to a 100th birthday party he has been planning for a whil ...... Read More
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