It seems peculiar to me that some of the same individuals and groups who so vociferously opposed a “broadcast flag” technological mandate in past years are now in a mad rush to have federal policymakers mandate a “Do Not Track” regulatory regime for privacy purposes. The broadcast flag debate, you will recall, centered around the [...]
I sincerely hope it was a Washington Post editor, and not New America Foundation president Steve Coll, who picked the title for his editorial today, “Why Fox News Should Help Fund NPR.” After all, Coll certainly must be smart enough to know that there is no law or regulation on the books today that gives [...]
The always-excellent Wall Street Journal “Information Age” columnist L. Gordon Crovitz has another editorial worth reading today, which builds on the Second Circuit’s recent decision to reverse FCC content regulation for broadcasting. In “The Technology of Decency,” Crovitz explains “parents don’t need the FCC to protect their children.” “Technology makes it easier to block seven [...]
The Progress & Freedom Foundation today filed comments in the Federal Communication Commission’s (FCC) “Future of Media” proceeding. Berin Szoka, Ken Ferree, and I urged the FCC to “reject Chicken Little-esque calls for extreme media ‘reform’ solutions,” and counseled policymakers to move cautiously so that media reform can be “organic and bottom-up, not driven by [...]
I’ve just released a new PFF white paper looking at the hysteria that has often accompanied major media mergers and then taking a look at the marketplace reality years after the fact. Here‘s the PDF, but I have also pasted the entire thing down below. _____________________________ A Brief History of Media Merger Hysteria: From AOL-Time [...]
Along with my colleague Barbara Esbin, the Director of PFF’s Center for Communications and Competition Policy, I have just released a new paper on discussing the possibility of reallocating a portion of broadcast television spectrum for alternative purposes, namely, mobile broadband. As I discussed here before, Blair Levin, the Executive Director of the FCC’s Omnibus [...]
Matt Lasar of Ars tells us not to worry about the Fairness Doctrine being revived, only to go on and cite several lawmakers who have said they’d like to revive it. Meanwhile, over at the American Spectator, somebody called “The Prowler” seems to have all sorts of unnamed sources on the Hill telling him the [...]
In her latest column, Media Post media market guru Diane Mermigas wonders how long it will be before we see a traditional over-the-air (OTA) broadcast TV network (like ABC, NBC, CBS, or Fox) dump their old broadcast business altogether and just move all their properties to cable and satellite TV. And, in response to Mermigas, [...]
I’m fond of quoting Diane Mermigas, editor-at-large at MediaPost, who is one of the finest media market watchers in the journalism business today. Her latest MediaPost column offers another sobering look at the radical changing sweeping through the media marketplace today. In that article, she notes that even though we are in an era of [...]