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NERW: The FCC in Authoritarian Times
- Thread starter fybush
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We most certainly do. Your attempts to belittle the knowledge of others is tedious.
And now we have a new one.
And? We know this. Not once did we say it came in only one variety.
And there it is
Great, so don't state it. No one expects you to. The rest of us who can see the parallels and understand what's happening, including to all forms of media who haven't yet caved to the demands, know damn well what we're talking about and where this is headed at a dizzying pace.
Even for the sane washing and minimizing of what's going on, this is a contorted stretch and utter bull---p. The whole country suddenly said diversity is bad. That we should not acknowledge Black History Month, Pride Month, Women's History Month and the multitude of others? You know damn well that didn't happen. There was no landslide, no mass mandate. The results were fractions of a percentage apart. We didn't all suddenly wake up one day yearning for the days of Jim Crow and the KKK.
You know damn well the broadcasters and others are being openly threatened. The FCC chair isn't even hiding it. Investigations not into actual violations of any technical or content requirements. And threatening to ensure they can't conduct entirely unrelated business transactions. Remember when the party in power supposedly stood for less government interference? Let people do what they want? Let the market decide? Yeah, that's the party now saying to remove programs we don't like or else. It's mafia-level tactics (hardly surprising given the source). Where does it end? A local station acknowledges Black History Month so they get their license denied? Fined if they acknowledge Pride Month? Sanctioned for airing a report that factually states vaccines do not cause autism? For questioning the conflicts of interest of someone with tens of billions of dollars in government contracts and plans to launch a financial services unit dismantling whatever agencies he has an issue with? Investigated if they report on serious illnesses not being reported by the government?
Don't try to pretend that's not precisely where this will lead. They banned the freaking Associated Press over their use of the actual international name Gulf of Mexico. They are applying every lever of pressure to make businesses comply with inane dictates; they're sure as heck going to do the exact same with their bigger pet projects. State-mandated media is functionally no different than state-owned media when the result is unquestioning propaganda and punishment for anyone who doesn't obey.
Maybe they're not coming for you. Great. Enjoy that. But too many people are going to suffer, and they'll have no champion in a free press that is no longer free.
I take issue with the concept that the "changed mood" in the country is all there is to it. They didn't do it in the first Trump term. They haven't done this under other administrations. They didn't seem to think the national mood was different before, even though Trump got elected, even though the country has been statistically pretty much evenly split for years. There has absolutely been pressure.
There is a definite move to bow and kiss the ring on the part of major companies including media in this Trump term that hasn't been seen in recent history, and it's not a positive regardless of what side one identifies with. Carr has made it clear that he's willing to use the FCC to have a chilling effect on broadcasters.
Yet the broadcasters that supported the furthest of the right-wing have, for years, both on air and in social media, been allowed to say things that walk right up to the line of insurrection, sedition, and baiting violence and hatred towards other races, orientations and genders with zero repercussions other than the occasional ban from social media, which also offended Carr's side.
We have an unstable, unpredictable man at the top, assisted by very powerful and wealthy people with at the mildest, a wink-wink nudge-nudge towards extremism (Elon, with his flirtatious trolling surrounding nationalism, his bizarre views on the reproduction of the "intelligent", ownership of a very large social media platform, recreational drug use and fascination with transhumanism (not transgender, it's a different thing) and blatant self interest in government contracts, hiring young inexperienced staff to access government computer systems (one nicknamed "Big Balls" who had blatant racist views.)
If you aren't bothered by this, but would be bothered if it were George Soros, Bill Gates, people connected to the Obama Foundation, etc...then that's a clear double standard. This is not how a free, mature country should be governed regardless of one's partisan label. And it is clear from their actions that the media IS feeling pressure from the administration, specifically Chairman Carr, and ironically, under the Obama administration, which did far less to even come near that line, conservatives (using their free speech on their dominant medium, talk radio) were howling like he was the second coming of Mao.
What we're seeing here is the same mentality of the likes of Putin. Shut down what challenges you, or at the least, make it a liability to be in opposition. Which is not surprising. Call it what you want, I call it wanting to be a dictator and reshape a country in the image of ogliarchs. And it's against everything my father and grandfather (a POW in WW2) fought for and stood for - even as lifelong Republicans.
There is a definite move to bow and kiss the ring on the part of major companies including media in this Trump term that hasn't been seen in recent history, and it's not a positive regardless of what side one identifies with. Carr has made it clear that he's willing to use the FCC to have a chilling effect on broadcasters.
Yet the broadcasters that supported the furthest of the right-wing have, for years, both on air and in social media, been allowed to say things that walk right up to the line of insurrection, sedition, and baiting violence and hatred towards other races, orientations and genders with zero repercussions other than the occasional ban from social media, which also offended Carr's side.
We have an unstable, unpredictable man at the top, assisted by very powerful and wealthy people with at the mildest, a wink-wink nudge-nudge towards extremism (Elon, with his flirtatious trolling surrounding nationalism, his bizarre views on the reproduction of the "intelligent", ownership of a very large social media platform, recreational drug use and fascination with transhumanism (not transgender, it's a different thing) and blatant self interest in government contracts, hiring young inexperienced staff to access government computer systems (one nicknamed "Big Balls" who had blatant racist views.)
If you aren't bothered by this, but would be bothered if it were George Soros, Bill Gates, people connected to the Obama Foundation, etc...then that's a clear double standard. This is not how a free, mature country should be governed regardless of one's partisan label. And it is clear from their actions that the media IS feeling pressure from the administration, specifically Chairman Carr, and ironically, under the Obama administration, which did far less to even come near that line, conservatives (using their free speech on their dominant medium, talk radio) were howling like he was the second coming of Mao.
What we're seeing here is the same mentality of the likes of Putin. Shut down what challenges you, or at the least, make it a liability to be in opposition. Which is not surprising. Call it what you want, I call it wanting to be a dictator and reshape a country in the image of ogliarchs. And it's against everything my father and grandfather (a POW in WW2) fought for and stood for - even as lifelong Republicans.
Here's today's moment of (at least) irony, as the Commission dismisses an objection to the sale of WDAY(AM) in North Dakota that hinged on social-media comments made by one of the principals of the proposed buyer of the station regarding the state of journalism (those comments weren't characterized in this document):
I hope some lawyers are paying attention to this document: https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-25-127A1.pdf
Couple of things:
There's a lot of chatter in the cybersecurity community about this at the moment, with the conclusion generally being that Musk's minions are essentially conducting a multipronged cyberattack on federal government systems, with basic, time-tested protocols regarding access and change management being thrown out the window. Your data is probably on a government system somewhere, and it's now much less secure than it was before. In addition, the CISA (Critical Infrastructure Security Agency) is being gutted. That agency has been coordinating public and private efforts to protect critical infrastructure, which means electric utilities, gas utilities, water utilities, financial services, etc. CISA has done valuable work. Wrecking it undermines services every single one of us depends on.
Then there are the government systems themselves. Many of them are mainframes, running older code. The script kiddies following Musk as their Pied Piper haven't a single clue about how the programs for those mainframes were coded. Those of us who have coded for mainframes learned techniques to manage the limited memory and storage that was available at the time. There are a lot of tricks embedded in that code, which is why it's hard to modify. The neophytes are simply not going to know about them. Whatever changes they're recklessly making could shut down things like Social Security and Medicare and farm aid payments. A failure of those systems is going to be far, far more serious than X/Twitter being down for a few hours.
Musk and company are playing with fire while holding gasoline cans.
It's an interesting case because as I said in another thread, the commission wants to protect individual speech, as opposed to the power of media companies. That's what this case is about. Carr is taking that point of view in terms of social media posters vs. social media companies. So individuals who use social media are the ones protected, not the platforms they use. In fact, Carr wants to remove the Section 230 protections social media companies have now. The government has a long history of seeking to control the power of media companies. They now include tech companies in that group, at least in terms of how those companies interfere in the rights of individuals.
The Y2K bug brought a lot of COBOL programmers out of retirement to fix old code. I wonder how many will be left to fix what DOGE breaks? I still see a lot of accounting systems that are running on a mainframe system, even if the server is modern hardware emulating it, and the dumb terminals are now PCs.
Of course. If you want to actually examine the spending you would use....what's that word....oh yeah, accountants. Forensic accountants.
But Hillary used a private server for email. And that's bad dontcha know.
What could go wrong?
Oh. That could go wrong.
By design.
Arsonists deliberately burning us all to the ground. They won't hit up the FCC right away, because that was easy to turn into another attack dog to go after perceived enemies in media. But anything that provides for aid, health, welfare, education or basically anything decent, he wants gone.
Oh, that just touches the surface. There's stuff out there that was written in mainframe assembly language. Though I'm sure IBM will be glad to help with that...for a price.
There's no equivalent to the mainframe packed decimal numeric format on PCs; packed decimal is perfect for accounting and bookkeeping uses and avoids rounding errors.
No, many said that advancing and promoting and graduating people because of race or ethnicity rather than on qualifications is wrong. That is not saying that "diversity" is bad. It is saying that giving some people and advantage over others despite having lesser abilities or skills is just not fair.
The point seems to be that spending large amounts of government tax revenue on the plethora of such celebrations is an excess.
What I see is an interest in finding if mass media "edits" news to favorably show some parties, people or movements while ignoring or using biased reporting in respect to others.
You are projecting possible.... maybe impossible... acts into the present. Nobody has suggested that private businesses shouldn't or can't celebrate any such events. But we live in such a contentious and polarized society that there is even a movement to eliminate the celebration of the groundhog in Punxatawny because it is "cruelty to animals".
You are "awfulizing" based on zero evidence.
"They" did not ban the AP. They did not admit them to one press conference, likely to make a point.
Name some.
You have no evidence. And it appears from all the polls that large majorities of Americans favor what is being done.
(Yes, I fully expect you to counter by saying that Hitler had immense support. Doing so would, of course, be pure ignorance of the state of Germany after The Great War and the extreme poverty and deprivation being suffered by a large percentage of Germans. Sidebar: My two cousins, Petr and Liesel, were born in Germany in that era and had to escape with my aunt and her husband)
Again, you are projecting in extreme. And today, broadcast media has such a small share of voice that it really does not matter. Interestingly, when they reassigned the little offices for the press in the Pentagon they gave one to Breitbart... but at the same time they gave one for the first time ever to the HuffPost. What appears to be happening is that "old media" is being readjusted in favor of new media in proportion to the viewership/readership of each.
If "they" closed both the NYT and WaPo today, nearly nobody would care. You are way to focused on the way things were... "Happy Days" was canceled about a half a century ago.
Boy, the way Glenn Miller played
songs that made the hit parade
Guys like me we had it made
Those were the days
Didn't need no welfare state
ev'rybody pulled his weight
gee our old LaSalle ran great
Those were the days
And you knew who you were then
girls were girls and men were men
Mister we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again
People seemed to be content
fifty dollars paid the rent
freaks were in a circus tent
Those were the days
Take a little Sunday spin
go to watch the Dodgers win
Have yourself a dandy day
that cost you under a fin
Hair was short and skirts were long
Kate Smith really sold a song
I don't know just what went wrong
those were the days
(Google Search)
Huh? They didn't spend "large amounts of money" on those things. Spending money isn't the issue. They are seeking right now to increase the debt limit by another $4 trillion. The president wants to eliminate the debt. limit. These things were not cut to save money. They were cut because they were viewed as "woke." They said so.
If they want to investigate ALL media on that topic, that would be fine. This is what is called selective enforcement.
The fact of the matter is the plaintiff wasn't hurt by the editing. The public saw the interview and voted for him anyway. He's a sore winner.
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"What I see is an interest in finding if mass media "edits" news to favorably show some parties, people or movements while ignoring or using biased reporting in respect to others."
Allow me to introduce you to....
en.wikipedia.org
What if the Obama FCC had investigated them?
Allow me to introduce you to....
Fox News - Wikipedia
What if the Obama FCC had investigated them?
I think people are completely underestimating how much the left has been turning on the media. It's not just Chuck Todd or Kristen Welker who have been slammed on social media for "going easy" on republicans, there are non-insignificant pockets that pillory the NYT, the WaPo and the LAT (especially over the past few months) and urge subscription cancellations. Or to boycott the media in general.
The future of the media, if you want to call it that, will merely be segregated on political lines, and it won't be reliable or trustworthy. Already there's an emerging ecosystem of grifters, pundits and others posing as "media" on the left through incredibly dubious avenues like Meidas Touch or substack blogs or along the lines of Palmer Report (the left's version of Gateway Pundit, basically). Grifters, con men and influencers.
Then you have social media fragmenting and segregating itself on political lines. Twitter and FB now cater mostly to the right-wing (aside from those on FB who still have family on that platform) and Bluesky caters mostly to the left-wing. Both are cultivating ideological bubbles and that is not good.
And to be honest... I don't know what part of the current ecosystem is going to be remotely viable in the coming years. The cynic in me thinks that a lot of the media caving to these people is strictly out of hope for a bailout in the end when everything just comes apart. Cause it's not just AM radio that's in trouble... it's everything.
The irony is a lot of this was already taking place, and put linear media in a precarious position to begin with. If anything, Carr stands to preside over that final nudge.
The future of the media, if you want to call it that, will merely be segregated on political lines, and it won't be reliable or trustworthy. Already there's an emerging ecosystem of grifters, pundits and others posing as "media" on the left through incredibly dubious avenues like Meidas Touch or substack blogs or along the lines of Palmer Report (the left's version of Gateway Pundit, basically). Grifters, con men and influencers.
Then you have social media fragmenting and segregating itself on political lines. Twitter and FB now cater mostly to the right-wing (aside from those on FB who still have family on that platform) and Bluesky caters mostly to the left-wing. Both are cultivating ideological bubbles and that is not good.
And to be honest... I don't know what part of the current ecosystem is going to be remotely viable in the coming years. The cynic in me thinks that a lot of the media caving to these people is strictly out of hope for a bailout in the end when everything just comes apart. Cause it's not just AM radio that's in trouble... it's everything.
The irony is a lot of this was already taking place, and put linear media in a precarious position to begin with. If anything, Carr stands to preside over that final nudge.
Oh, to use your own point, prove that’s what happened. Because that’s not remotely accurate and you know it.
Again, that doesn’t happen. What did happen for far too long was people did not have the opportunities. Standards were not lowered despite right-wing talking points. Nice to see you abruptly think “fair” matters however. At least in some areas.
That never happened. There was no mass spending. Notice they didn’t single out ALL events and recognition. Just certain ones. Will the White House get in on the savings and cancel the Christmas celebrations? Of course not. You know what is excessive? Fifty million bucks to take the egomaniac and his entourage to the Super Bowl.
Even for a defender of fascism this is ludicrous. Threatening license renewals and the ability to do business because someone didn’t fawn over the king? Guess what, not everything is equal. Some things are bad. And they’re not going after the outlets favorable to them. Spare us the idea this is somehow about favoritism. It’s about the right kind of favoritism in the media.
That is literally what is being investigated.
And? It hasn’t happened has it? People can protest whatever they want. At least they used to be able to.
Except every single thing this administration is doing.
They did. You don’t just not bring in the leading wire service and pretend that’s normal protocol for a press avail. And the point was to beat others into obedience.
It doesn’t appear that way at all.
Oh so now it’s cousins that mean your view is the only one to be valid. That’s a nice change. It doesn’t change that most fascists came to power with that support. History is what it is. And the suffering here will be following just as it did in those other countries.
Everything being done is in the extreme.
Is that the new defense? The media can be stifled into obeying his edicts because it doesn’t matter? Quite the leap.
It’s almost funny that is the argument here. They’re rotating in quasi-state media as punishment for not slobbering on his behalf. Newsmax and OneAmerica? This can’t be more transparent.
Gee, maybe because the likes of Bezos already bent the knee? Pulled endorsements and overrode their once independent editorial boards? We care that media is being turned into a state mouthpiece.
Wait, wait…you try to pretend your amazing and vast experience elsewhere in the past means no one else who doesn’t think this flavor of fascism is awesome ate ignorant, but then dismiss history. That’s rich. Expected, but rich.
Once more, they may not be coming for you and yours. You can enjoy that position. Millions of us have dear loved ones who aren’t nearly so fortunate or aren’t so fortunate ourselves. The ramifications of the actions, both in terms of the bullying of the press and in all other ways, will destroy lives. Good for you not having to watch that happen.
After article upon article (and TV report upon TV report) about Biden’s gaffes, his age, the concerns about acuity and all that, while doing not a thing about the oft incoherent and inane ramblings from the other candidate, and the jumping in to meddle with editorial boards, it’s no wonder.
Ironic since the owner of Twitter pretended to be in favor of free speech but has demonstrated he is nothing of the sort.
Probably not much.
The needs when this all goes to h—l in a handbasket will be epic. Bailing out those who willingly aided in it will be low on the list of priorities, one can hope.
Is it a nudge when he’s wielding a figurative sledgehammer on anybody who won’t come to heel?
Pilot Flying J Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Skyline Chili Ohio River, Calhouns Tennessee River
So you want something like the Fairness doctrine?
I was wondering earlier today if the toxicity in the talk radio sphere would be a little less, if the Fairness Doctrine still existed. It just seems that most talk radio is an echo chamber, these days.
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