Featured Project:
Northeast Citizens for Responsible Media with Congressman Maurice Hinchey are
organizing our own Public Hearing so that the FCC and Congress can hear from
the public, how to serve the public’s interest. Join Us.
The FCC is once again taking up the issue of media ownership rules and intends,
as it tried unsuccessfully in 2003, to ignore its responsibility to the public.
If the FCC has its way it will hand over our airwaves to an ever shrinking group
of media moguls, who will be the sole determiners (along with their partner
in crime, otherwise known as “The Decider”) of all that the American
people get to see and hear and read– everything that passes for information
in the United States.
How does the FCC fulfill its intended role to protect the public interest? Well,
in 2003 FCC Commissioners and staffers took more than 2,500 junkets at a cost
of $2.8 million- paid for by those very corporations they’re supposed
to be regulating. Owners and lobbyists for the country’s largest broadcasting
conglomerates meet regularly, behind closed doors, with FCC officials (71 times
at least in 2003). How many times did the public get to meet with the FCC in
2003? Answer: there was one public hearing held.
This year, the FCC will magnanimously hold six public hearings while it prepares
to ignore the public once again. As Congressman Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) has told
us:
Chairman Kevin Martin has made it quite clear that he intends to overturn the
existing rules, which are our last backstop against the concentration of print
and broadcast media into the hands of a few major corporations.
Media consolidation is one of the most dangerous issues confronting our democracy.
As control of the media is concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer conglomerates,
local reporting disappears, the diversity both of viewpoints and ownership disintegrates,
the marketplace of ideas shrinks and, as a result, the media will cease to be
the crucial check on the power of the federal government that the founding fathers
intended.
Those are our airwaves and the Constitution protects the people’s right
to information, not media corporations’ right to realize obscene profits
while it usurps the public interest.
Congress also has the power to intervene and protect the public interest. The
public has the right to be heard by the FCC and by the Congress. And so we will
take that right ourselves. Join us in planning our own Public Hearing. Northeast
Citizens for Responsible Media in partnership with Congressman Maurice Hinchey
is organizing this Town Meeting in which your public testimony will be recorded,
transcribed and heard by the FCC and Congress. To be held this fall while the
public comment period is still open. It is a privilege to be able to participate
in democracy. We urge and invite you to exercise that privilege: Join us in
planning this Town Meeting.
THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE.
Recent Events:
Sounding the Alarm for Freedom: Media Responsibility in Time of War
Listen to the program (takes some time to load if you have dial-up)
Alan Chartock hosted the panel
Amy Goodman
Jeff Cohen
An overflow croud of 600
Danny Schechter
Congressman Maurice Hinchey