Month: May 2003
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Protesting the Most Evil Media Giant
People all around the country yesterday turned out to protest Clear Channel communications, the largest owner (and abuser) of radio stations in the US, in anticipation of further relaxation of media ownership rules this coming Monday, June 2. Lisa Rein has audio and video highlights of the San Francisco protest, Pittsburgh IMC has audio from…
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$3 Well Spent
Aj Michel, the “zine queen” (or, “zine lady, according to WEFT’s station manager) from the mediageek radioshow, has the newest edition of her ‘zine Low Hug assembled and ready for shipping: Castoff Culture: a guide to noteworthy books, films, LPs, musicians, television shows and more overlooked and ignored by the mainstream! Fifteen different contributors! Over…
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It Takes a Big Bed To Fit the FCC and Communications Industry
To nobody’s surprise, yesterday the Center for Public Integrity released a report saying that, according to the Washington Post, “Over the past eight years, Federal Communications Commission officials have taken 2,500 business trips to global tourist spots, most of which were paid for by the media and telecommunications companies the agency oversees.” Predictably, the FCC…
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An Alliance of Independent Media
If you can get free for the weekend of June 13-15, then you owe it to yourself to go to the Allied Media Conference, put on by the good folks over at Clamor Magazine, in Bowling Green, Ohio. The AMC is an expansion of the Underground Publishing Conference, which last year celebrated its fourth year.…
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McChesney Nails It: the Process, Deception and Stakes of Media “Deregulation”
Communications Scholar and Activist Robert McChesney has put forth an abosutely clear, complete and concise run-down of the history and stakes of the FCC’s current media ownership rules review. In just one article he knocks home many of the issues and ideas that I’ve been trying to get at here on mediageek for the last…
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St. Louis Gestapo… er, Cops, Make Pre-Emptive Raids on St. Louis Indymedia & Other Collective Spaces
Let me just preface this by saying that the incidents that happened in St. Louis this weekend are indefensible acts of repression on the part of the St. Louis cops and city government. These sorts of gestapo tactics will continue to take place until the cops and officials involved are made accountable for their actions…
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Urbana-Champaign Indymedia Center Mostly Open After City Overreacts
After a bit of a scare and quite a bit of wrangling, negotiating and meeting with Urbana city officials the Urbana-Champaign IMC remains mostly open after getting a notice of immediate closure last Thursday. However, the IMC’s all-ages performance venue, known as the “back room,” remains closed, as it was the target of most of…
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At the Eleventh Hour We Already Know We’re About To Be Screwed by a Bigger Media Monopoly
Coverage and activism on the FCC’s impending media ownership rules review are reaching a near fever pitch, many months late in the game. I find it both facinating and frustrating that issues like this one have to get down to the wire before arousing any real attention from the press and any kind of critical…
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Urbana Indymedia Center Shut Down by Local Officials Under Dubious Circumstances
Yesterday the performance space at the Urbana-Champaign IMC was shut down by the City of Urbana with no warning or notice, even though the fire inspector gave the IMC and its landlords until May 29 to clear up some small violations. I’m still gathering details, but according to my trusted associates at the IMC, attempts…
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A Free Corporate Media… Free To Serve Inverted Totalitarianism
Sheldon Wolin writes convincingly in the Nation that the Republican Bushist regime is effecting an “Inverted Totalitarianism”: “By inverted I mean that while the current system and its operatives share with Nazism the aspiration toward unlimited power and aggressive expansionism, their methods and actions seem upside down. For example, in Weimar Germany, before the Nazis…