I am working on the first draft of the Fair Media Act but I still would like others to contribute their ideas about what they would like these new TV channels to be.

As my web site explains: Fair Media is a grassroots media reform organization which advocates for a public media system established by a Fair Media Act. I had the opportunity to talk with FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein and found that he is of the opinion that establishing new TV channels is still possible but we have to move fast because this summer the government will start to make decisions about what the spectrum will be used for.

“Establishing a Fair Media is powerful media reform, creating a true public forum on publicly owned airwaves. Offer this Fair Media solution to other media activists so they can contribute to it and help make the vision a reality.” FairMedia.org If anyone wants to help with these efforts please contact me.

Generally I do not watch PBS for any sort of news or public affairs. First it is very insular and myopic. Or dated.

Second, being Canadian I have the CBC, BBC, and the internet for news from around the world, without the American media bias and filters.

PBS does need to reivent itself, and stop chasing the same public affairs and commentary that the big three, CNN and Fox do.

That is why your viewership is dropping in the key demographic, and it is why the American and Canadian political system and scene has lost the generations under 35.

Chase the other stories.

When the scrums are here, go there for the story.

While taking my Journalism 101, some 34 years ago, the teached always told us to go for the story that lies beneath the surface, because that is where you will find the truth.

Why PBS is as connected as it is to the White House for its funding, could be why it is a dying presence in the lives of those under 35.

Why not lose that old man that reports on business, and put in someone who is young, and knows where the real growth in business is. Not on Wall Street, but in the ethernet.

The world is our oyster, and being as insular as the PBS is, is only feeding the all too familiar American view of the world. There is more to the world that the USA.

Maybe if you did this, your president would not have made his error, when boasting being the first to march into the Second World War shoulder to shoulder with the British.

Start exposing the Americans to the world.

There is more in the world than the way the White House looks at it.

I fully agree with the needed solution to problem. But the “poetic justice” pipe-dream that we can legislate such evils away is too misleading. Just look at the “rape” of the american public by HMO’s. Our earstwhile Legistlators described the governmental immunity given the HMO’s
as a “patients’ rights bill” for promoting the “flim-flam” they were perpertrating on the public. Surely, there is another, more ingenious, way that responds more to “grass roots” desires and interests.

I’ve argued on the Kos blog that mass media are essentially ungoverned spaces that lie outside the conception of our Constitutional system.

Mass media bring us much of our common social experience; they host a great deal of commercial activity, and they are our primary venues for political discourse.

But our system gives society and citizens very few of the rights in the mass media spaces that we’ve evolved over millennia for physical spaces. Worse, media owners are protected from society and the citizens by our parchment-era rights of free “speech” and “press” that logically should apply to only a tiny fraction of mass media activity.

Absent the traditions of custom and law we’ve evolved for physical spaces, the mass-media function as vast private offshore territories where much of America goes every minute, every day to be free from our system. It should be no surprise that activity in such uncivilized spaces should go by jungle law.

So I argue that we need more than an act.

We need to recognize that information generally, and mass media particularly, are so fundamental to modern and future society and government that they must be addressed at the Constitution level.

I don’t have any simple prescriptions, but I feel comfortable arguing that we won’t make much progress until we begin to recognize the scope of the problem.

My 2 cents,

Sue

The 60% who don’t vote because they feel no one represents them have no voice. They are completely ignored like they belong to those in power, when they do not.

So…we might say, the media ignores the political opinion of the majority. The Fourth Estate ignores most the country for their few elite.

This violates their FCC contracts as well as the very concept of democracy and free speech. Without a voice or information we can not make thoughtful decisions and even if we do…we aren’t consulted as to what should be done. We are even silenced and accused of being “unpatriotic” when we disagree with the agenda of the few in power.

They feed us lies and manipulate the facts to divide us. The Fouth Estate is now a propaganda machine for the few elite in power.

They use our money and power to do so. How dare they!!