mediageek

Month: November 2002

  • Hey Look! Zines are Cool! (Slow News Day in DC?)

    The Washington Post’s Magazine Reader stumbles upon Zine Guide and gets all aflutter about ‘zines: “Zine Guide makes my heart swell with patriotic pride. It makes me want to wave the flag. It gives me warm, fuzzy feelings about my fellow Americans, who are, it reveals, a delightfully diverse, eccentric, quirky, cranky, compulsive, obsessive and…

  • Activists Picket Minnesota Public Radio Over Pro-War Slant

    From the Twin Cities IMC– The Flying Pickets group continued to protest the continual Pro-war, Corporatization and corporate control of the media [by picketing Minnesota Public Radio in St. Paul]. … Even more telling however, was the reaction of workers, reporters and volunteers of MPR to the protest. Many agreed that the media in general,…

  • Next 2 mediageek radio shows / Nov. 15 show on-line

    Friday’s program is now available for listening on-line. The feature is an interview with Don Schellhardt of the Amherst Alliance, along with the usual news headlines. The Amherst Alliance filed a motion with the FCC asking the commission to take a second harder look at IBOC digital radio. I will not be producing the next…

  • Conflict Over Israel @ Chicago Media Watch Conference

    The Chicago Reader reports on a controversy that broke out at the Chicago Media Watch’s recent conference, “Propaganda: War, Terror and the U.S. Empire.” According to the article, Sut Jhally, a communications prof at UMass, was invited to speak on how “the Israeli government is brilliantly manipulating American public opinion against the Palestinians.” But apparently…

  • Anti-WTO Pirates Jam Commercial Radio in Australia

    This takes some major balls — the Institute for Applied Piracy reports on Sydney Indymedia that they jammed commercial stations in that city for 10 minutes this morning with an anti-World Trade Organization report. A “mini-ministerial” of the World Trade Organization is meeting in that city this weekend. Recall that the anti-corporate-globablization movement really came…

  • FCC Approves Big Ass Cable Merger

    As expected, the FCC said “yeah, baby” to a deal between Comcast and AT&T Broadband, wherein the former will acquire the latter. This creates the largest cable company in the US, with twice as many customers as the #2 company, Time-Warner cable. Any cable subscriber with a brain (and who isn’t a major stockholder) has…

  • NBC TV Reporter Says Remain Critical of Media

    I guess mainstream TV news journalists are sometimes allowed to speak their mind. The Daily Northwestern reports on an appearance by Dateline NBC correspondent John Hockenberry at the McCormick Tribune Forum: He said viewers should be particularly critical of broadcast media after the Sept. 11 attacks. “In light of the paralysis of the government and…

  • news headlines from 11-08-02 mediageek radio show

    These are the news headlines as read on the Nov. 8 edition of the mediageek radio show. Stories include: FCC Extends Ownership Rule Comment Deadline; Digital TV Causing Analog TV Interference; Aussies To Block “Protest Websites”; Freak Radio Reporter Arrested by City Council Member; The Microsoft/ DOJ settlement

  • TelCos Lie

    MediaSavvy notes a new report that enumerates the many ways that our local telephone companies (or “Regional Bell Operating Companies” aka RBOCs) are lying to us and picking our pockets. And my local telco, SBC/Ameritech, has got to be one of the worst. I’m still reeling from the fact that the Illinois regulators approved the…

  • How the FCC Might Affect Newspapers

    Although the FCC has no direct regulatory power over newspapers, if the bureau goes ahead with loosening or tossing out the cross-ownership ban, this would like have effects on the nation’s newspapers, nonetheless. In the American Journalism Review John Morton analyzes some of the ways in which newspapers might be impacted.