WTO and Indymedia in Qatar

This weekend the World Trade Organization is holding its ministerial meetings in Doha, Qatar. These meetings come two years after the so-called battle of Seattle, when a broad coalition of activists effectively shut down Seattle and helped derail the WTO meetings being held there.

The meetings in Qatar are much more insulated from public scrutiny, input and protestors because of that desert state’s repressive government that suppresses dissent. Holding the meetings Qatar of course helps the WTO avoid the incidents and embarrassment it faced in Seattle, but also further demonstrates the disconnect between the architects of world trade and the people who are affected by their work.

In order to provide unfiltered grassroots coverage of the ministerial in Doha, Indymedia and Greenpeace have joined together to dock Greenpeace’s ship, the Rainbow Warrior, of the coast of Doha. The Rainbow Warrior is hosting “No New Round Radio,” which is being broadcast on the Internet and on micropower radio stations around the US via the MicroRadio.net and around the world.

You can tune into broadcasts on the Internet by going to the Global Indymedia site at http://www.indymedia.org. I will have a couple of segments from the first day’s broadcast on Friday a little later in the program.

Indymedia and microradio.net are planning to provide streaming audio and other grassroots coverage of upcoming protests at the US Military’s School of Americas at Ft. Benning GA on Nov. 17-18 and at the national protest to take back Pacifica, which will be taking place during the Pacifica National Board Meeting in Washington DC that same weekend. A group of local activists and citizen journalists is planning a trip to the annual protest against the School of Americas, which trains Latin American soldiers in combat and counter-insurgency. For more information about joining this protest, e-mail dakogan (at) uiuc.edu or koonsman (at) uiuc.edu -- you can also find out more info at the urbana-champaign imc site at www.ucimc.org.

Pacifica Update

Things have continued to be up and down in the continuing battle over the future of the progressive Pacifica radio network, home of Pacifica Network News, and former home to journalist Amy Goodman and her program Democracy Now. Currently there are four lawsuits filed against the Pacifica National Board alleging procedural misconduct that resulted in the packing of the Board’s membership and disenfranchisement of the local advisory boards at the five network-owned stations. Last week a deal was announced between the plaintiffs in these suits and the Pacifica National Board, all of whom had been engaged in mediation. At first details about the deal were unavailable due to a gag order, but were slowly leaked. The deal would have restored a level of local control over the Pacifica Board via each station’s local advisory board. A snag was hit when these details were read on air by Larry Bensky, who does a show on Pacifica’ Berkeley, CA station, KPFA. Afterwards the Pacifica Board notified the lawsuit plaintiffs that it was rejecting certain terms of the deal and ending mediation.

An article in the San Francisco Examiner attributed Pacifica’s pull-out from the deal to Bensky’s leaking it on air, but the lawsuit plaintiffs have argued that Pacifica is merely using the leak as an excuse, and that Pacifica had no intention of sticking with the deal in the first place.

News of the deal, and the deal’s failure, followed on the heals of the resignation of the Pacifica National Board’s vice-chair Ken Ford and Bessie Wash, Pacifica’s Executive Director. Ford was widely seen by Pacifica reformists as a leader of the movement to corporatize Pacifica and possibly sell off some of the network’s stations. He was also the target of a coordinated campaign to get him off the Pacifica National Board, which included a mass e-mail campaign of Ford’s employer, the National Association of Home Builders. Before becoming executive director, Bessie Wash had been manager of Pacifica’s Washington DC station WPFW. As executive director of Pacifica, Wash oversaw mass firings at Pacifica’s New York station WBAI, including the firings of the station’s station manager and program director last December in an action that came to be called the “Christmas Coup.”

The Pacifica Campaign, which aims to take back and democratize the embattled network, plans to go forward with a mass protest at the Pacifica National Board’s upcoming meeting in Washington on Nov. 17 and 18.

Radio Free Afghanistan

In an effort to further ramp up US government propaganda efforts, on last Wednesday the House voted to create Radio Free Afghanistan. The House vote was 405 to 2, with roughly equal support from Republicans and Democrats. Our local Rep. Tim Johnson voted in favor of the measure. Radio Free Afghanistan would follow in the pattern of Radio Free Europe, which broadcast anti-communist messages to the continent after World War II. The new station would broadcast in local languages in an effort to polarize the Afghani people against the Taliban and to foster alignment with the US. There is resistance in the State Department to creating radio Free Afghanistan due to a desire to rely instead on current Voice of America broadcasts in the region, while taking a wait and see approach on the situation in Afghanistan. As yet, the Radio Free Afghanistan bill has no sponsor in the Senate, but is believed to have wide support there. The bill would authorize $27.5 million for the next two years to establish 12 hours per day of broadcasting, entailing $10 million for relocating three transmitters from Spain to Kuwait.

The psychological operations arm of the US Army Special Operations Command military has already been broadcasting pro-US anti-Taliban radio signals into Afghanistan from the air for about a month now. As I reported earlier, there have been reports that along with aid packages the US military has been dropping wind-up radios to the ground in Afghanistan. These radios are said to be fixed to only receive the frequency of the US propaganda broadcasts.

Rep. Tom Lantos of California, the top Democrat on the House International Relations Committee, told the AP that the Afghan broadcasts are essential to ``present the case of freedom and truth'' to the people of Afghanistan.

CNN Chief Enforces Patriotism

Meanwhile, according to the Washington Post, in a memo to CNN International reporters, the company’s chair, Walter Isaacson, "has ordered his staff to balance images of civilian devastation in Afghan cities with reminders that the Taliban harbors murderous terrorists, saying it 'seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan.'" The memo went on to admonish reporters covering civilian deaths not to "forget it is that country's leaders who are responsible for the situation Afghanistan is now in," suggesting that journalists should lay responsibility for civilian casualties at the Taliban's door, not the U.S. military's.” The New York Times reported that these policies were already being implemented at CNN and that other TV networks seem to be following suit.

Now, after showing footage of bombed-out civilian buildings in Afghanistan, CNN reporters and anchors are adding disclaimers stating that by showing these images CNN is not siding with the Taliban.

CNN Protest Ends with 4 Arrested

Yesterday afternoon about 100 people took part in a march to the CNN building in Atlanta to to call attention to the inaccuracies of the corporate owned media. According to the Atlanta IMC four march participants were arrested. One indymedia journalist was arrested for failing to produce identification, and another marcher was arrested on a mask ordinance. There are also reports that one arrested marcher was brutalized by police during the peaceful protest. A total bail for all arrested adds up to $5009 and release is anticipated as bail is made. For further coverage on this story, look to the Atlanta Indymedia site at Atlanta.indymedia.org. Efforts to turn up any mention of this march in the mainstream media, including local Atlanta news outlets and AP wires were fruitless.

FCC Forming Media Ownership Group

On Oct. 29 the FCC also announced that Commission Chairman Michael Powell has created a Media Ownership Working Group. About the Group, Powell said, "Rebuilding the factual foundation of the Commission's media ownership regulations is one of my top priorities. For too long, the Commission has made sweeping media policy decisions without a contemporaneous picture of the media market. We need to rigorously examine whether current forms of media regulation are achieving the Commission's policy objectives, and how changes in regulations would affect the policy goals of competition, diversity, and localism. I am creating the Media Ownership Working Group to bring a sharp focus to these tasks."

While it would appear a generally positive thing that the FCC is formally researching media ownership, I am suspicious of Powell's objectives. In this statement he also says that a goal is to conduct an "empirical examination" of media ownership, with the implication that the FCC has not before made such a thorough investigation. It is unclear what an "empirical examination" might be. At least to me, on its face an "empirical examination" is simple and clear: very few media companies own virtually all the broadcast media production and distribution outlets in the US. What else is he looking for? I think maybe he's looking to show that it's OK to have so few owners because otherwise everything else is just dandy.

Powell says some of the key questions the Group is to answer revolve around issues of "consumer choice" and how "innovation in media technology affected by FCC regulation." The framing of media ownership issues in this way already indicates the bent of this Group is not to critically examine the media ownership situation in the US.

For example, focusing on "consumer choice" is different than focusing on "diversity of choices"-- in the former the fact that digitial cable subscribers can have 100+ TV channels can be construed as a wide range of choices, but be ignorant of the fact that much of the programming is repeated on multiple channels and that nearly all of it is produced by the same three companies and is overwhelmingly commercial in nature, which is something an analysis of diversity would flesh out. In looking at the issue of "innovation" I also wonder if Powell isn't looking to pin the failure of HDTV to roll out on regulation rather than broadcasters' foot-dragging and reticence to give up their analog spectrum space. Looking for "empirical evidence" is really just a smoke screen for taking focus away from the qualitative issues like diversity in programming and reporting while giving the appearance of being scientific in approach. What is the Group going to count? How many TV stations have yet to go digital? How many network TV shows still don't use digital TV technology? The numbers don't mean much without critical analysis.

In short, I suspect that the agenda of the FCC's new Working Group on Media Ownership is to affirm the status quo and provide supposed evidence for further deregulation rather than to provide actual critical analysis.

Satellite TV Consolidation

After much hemming and hawing it looks like EchoStar communications, which owns the Dish Network, will be buying Direct TV parent Hughes Electronics from GM. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. had tendered an offer for the network but pulled it after GM failed to make a decision at its last board meeting. Had News Corp. been successful the company would have succeeded in creating vertical integration in the direct-broadcast satellite (DBS) arena, adding US distribution to its stable of TV production houses, film studios and cable networks. News Corp. already operates DBS systems in Asia and Europe.

Instead, what we'll see is the consolidation of the DBS duopoly into a monopoly. The total DBS market in the US is 16 million subscribers, with Echostar being the smaller at 6 million. It's unclear what competition there ever really was in this market, given that their offering tend to be pretty similar. One significant difference for independent media is that Echostar carries FreeSpeech TV , a grassroots progressive TV network, as part of its public service obligation, making the network's programming far more available to homes and to public access TV. Amongst many excellent independently produced programs, FreeSpeech TV carries the IMC Newsreel and the TV version of Democracy Now in Exile. One would hope that one possible good outcome of this merger will meant that this carriage will continue, and that perhaps FreeSpeech TV will become available to DirecTV subscribers.

It is expected that the corporate-merger friendly FCC will raise no major objections to the Echostar / Direct TV combination, although there is likely to be greater scrutiny from federal anti-trust regulators. In trying avert anti-trust problems, Echostar is trying to make the argument that DBS is a competitor within the larger cable and subscription television market, and so the monopoly really isn’t a monopoly, since in areas with cable TV the little satellite dish competes with local cable companies.

But this does not take into account rural areas which are typically unserved by cable television. In these areas satellite TV is the only choice to receive anything besides conventional broadcast signals, and in the most remote areas DBS is the only choice for receiving any television at all. These rural customers stand to lose what little choice they had in choosing subscription television service if the Direct TV / Echostar deal goes through.