mediageek

Author: Paul

  • Dutch Radio Pirates Converging on Amsterdam To Protest Crackdown and the Auctioning of Dutch Airwaves

    The title pretty much sums it up. It goes down on Saturday in an event called 100,000 ANTENNAS – FREE RADIO MANIFESTATION. Here’s some background from Indymedia: The Dutch government’s recently implemented Zerobase Radio Frequency Policy is designed to control and regulate free use of the ether by commercial radio stations. On May 23 this…

  • A Minor Rollback – Just for Show?

    Sen. McCain, the chair of the Senate’s Commerce Committee, said he’ll let the committee go forward in considering a piece of legislation that would rollback the FCC’s June 2 decisions on media ownership. Of course, he says he opposes it and wonders if it’ll hold up in the courts. Ya know, he might be right…

  • Indy Journalism Via Blog

    Wired News has a story on a French blogger who posted updated reports about what was really going on in the streets around the G-8, as prostestors and police clashed throughout the weekend. However, I must point out that this is exactly the sort of thing Indymedia has been doing for over three years now…

  • Hear the Sound of Sucking for Yourself

    John at DIYmedia spent the morning recording the audio from the FCC’s fateful media rules meeting and editing it down into choice chunks for our (dis)pleasure. He notes that the debate lasted only about 90 minutes, with the voting taking just a few more. Of course, no amount of debate was going to change the…

  • The New Radio Rules – A Slight Taming

    The FCC just released a rundown of today’s decision. The radio rules have not been subject to the same amount of publicity and public discussion, and have emerged only slightly changed. All the current limits, which allow one company to own up to 8 stations in a large market, with no nationwide limit, remain as…

  • FCC Makes Expected Vote — the Big Media Get Bigger

    I just tuned in to CSPAN, too late to watch the FCC’s fateful meeting, but just after the Commissioners made their expected party-line vote, 3 to 2, to relax most of the media ownership rules in front of them. The national TV ownership cap was raised from 35% to 45%, and the cross-ownership rule, that…

  • 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…

  • $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…

  • 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…

  • 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.…