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Obama Administration Embeds "Government Researchers" To Monitor Media Organizations
Submitted by Mike Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
Last week, I highlighted the fact that the latest Press Freedom Index showcased a 13 point plunge in America’s press freedom to an embarrassing #46 position in the global ranking. If the authoritarians in the Obama Administration have their way, this country is set to fall much further in next year’s index.
Incredibly, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is set to roll out something called the Critical Information Needs study, which will embed government “researchers” into media organizations around the nation to make sure they are doing their job properly.
No this isn’t “conspiracy theory.” It is so real, and represents such a threat to the First Amendment, that a current FCC commissioner, Ajit Pai, recently wrote an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal, warning Americans of this scheme. He writes:
News organizations often disagree about what Americans need to know. MSNBC, for example, apparently believes that traffic in Fort Lee, N.J., is the crisis of our time. Fox News, on the other hand, chooses to cover the September 2012 attacks on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi more heavily than other networks. The American people, for their part, disagree about what they want to watch.
But everyone should agree on this: The government has no place pressuring media organizations into covering certain stories.
Unfortunately, the Federal Communications Commission, where I am a commissioner, does not agree. Last May the FCC proposed an initiative to thrust the federal government into newsrooms across the country. With its “Multi-Market Study of Critical Information Needs,” or CIN, the agency plans to send researchers to grill reporters, editors and station owners about how they decide which stories to run. A field test in Columbia, S.C., is scheduled to begin this spring.
The purpose of the CIN, according to the FCC, is to ferret out information from television and radio broadcasters about “the process by which stories are selected” and how often stations cover “critical information needs,” along with “perceived station bias” and “perceived responsiveness to underserved populations.”
I have no idea what country I am living in at this point.
How does the FCC plan to dig up all that information? First, the agency selected eight categories of “critical information” such as the “environment” and “economic opportunities,” that it believes local newscasters should cover. It plans to ask station managers, news directors, journalists, television anchors and on-air reporters to tell the government about their “news philosophy” and how the station ensures that the community gets critical information.
Participation in the Critical Information Needs study is voluntary—in theory. Unlike the opinion surveys that Americans see on a daily basis and either answer or not, as they wish, the FCC’s queries may be hard for the broadcasters to ignore. They would be out of business without an FCC license, which must be renewed every eight years.
Should all stations follow MSNBC’s example and cut away from a discussion with a former congresswoman about the National Security Agency’s collection of phone records to offer live coverage of Justin Bieber‘s bond hearing? As a consumer of news, I have an opinion. But my opinion shouldn’t matter more than anyone else’s merely because I happen to work at the FCC.
I am simply speechless.
Read the full Op-Ed here.
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Just think how many Obamaphones or SNAP cards could have been funded with that $$.
Please Jesus let the system crash so that we can be free again.
"Government Researchers"... Don't make me laugh, my lips are chapped.
https://www.fcc.gov/leadership/ajit-pai
Ajit Pai was nominated to the Federal Communications Commission by President Barack Obama and on May 7, 2012 was confirmed unanimously by the United States Senate. On May 14, 2012, he was sworn in for a term that concludes on June 30, 2016.
Commissioner Pai's focus is on creating a regulatory environment in which competition and innovation will flourish, thus benefitting American consumers. He believes that it is vital for the FCC to adopt policies that will give private firms the strongest incentive to raise and invest capital; to develop new products and services; and to compete in established and new markets. Specifically, Commissioner Pai is working to remove uncertainty that can deter businesses and investors from taking risks, to revisit outdated regulations, and to set clear, modernized rules for the road. These steps will result in consumers enjoying better products at lower prices and the communications industry contributing to faster economic growth and more job creation.
Commissioner Pai also believes that the FCC must act with dispatch to reflect the pace of change in today's marketplace. Faced with an industry as vibrant and dynamic as today's communications sector, the Commission must be careful not to cling to twentieth century approaches in addressing the technological landscape of the twenty-first century. Thus, for example, it is a priority of Commissioner Pai to increase promptly the availability of spectrum for high-value uses.
Commissioner Pai's regulatory approach has been shaped by his decade and a half of experience in communications, law, and policy.
Between 2007 and 2011, Commissioner Pai held several positions in the FCC's Office of General Counsel, serving most prominently as Deputy General Counsel. In this role, he had supervisory responsibility over several dozen lawyers in the Administrative Law Division and worked on a wide variety of regulatory and transactional matters involving the wireless, wireline, cable, Internet, media, and satelliteindustries.
Commissioner Pai's career outside of the FCC has spanned the private and public sectors. With respect to the private sector, Pai worked in the Washington, DC office of Jenner & Block LLP, where he was a Partner in the Communications Practice until being sworn in as a Commissioner. Years earlier, he served as Associate General Counsel at Verizon Communications Inc., where he handled competition matters, regulatory issues, and counseling of business units on broadband initiatives.
Commissioner Pai also has served in all three branches of the federal government. After moving to Washington, DC in 1998, his first post was with the United States Department of Justice's Antitrust Division as an Honors Program trial attorney on the Telecommunications Task Force. There, he worked on proposed mergers and acquisitions and on novel requests for regulatory relief following the enactment of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. He later returned to the Department of Justice to serve as Senior Counsel in the Office of Legal Policy. Pai has worked on Capitol Hill as well, first as Deputy Chief Counsel to the United States Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts, and later as Chief Counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Property Rights. Immediately following law school, he clerked for the Honorable Martin L.C. Feldman of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana.
Commissioner Pai received a B.A. with honors from Harvard University in 1994 and a J.D. from the University of Chicago in 1997, where he was an editor of the University of Chicago Law Review and won the Thomas J. Mulroy Prize. In 2010, Pai was one of 55 individuals nationwide chosen for the 2011 Marshall Memorial Fellowship, a leadership development initiative of the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
Barry is going to be the "last President" alright... the last President to preside over the Era of Fraud.
I pity the poor bastard who gets the ZH assignment.
If you don't read newspapers, you are uninformed. If you read newspapers, you are misinformed. Mark Twain
…and if you watch tv you have no time left to do anything useful. Kill your tv. Limit your time on surveilled lines, but do script a few bots to keep the creeps busy and spoil their data. Engage in untaxable activities.
Brought to you from your next sack of shit president "We are losing the war on information".
Problem solved. At least for now until Feinstein outlaws alt media and McCain gets his way and is able to sue anyone 300k for each offensive comment.
"A field test in Columbia, S.C., is scheduled to begin this spring."
Alright Gov. Haley, this is your chance to issue an order declaring any FCC pesonnel attempting to enter any news establishment in SC will be arrested and charged with espionage. Assert your state's sovereignty.
"A field test in Columbia, S.C., is scheduled to begin this spring."
Alright Gov. Haley, this is your chance to issue an order declaring any FCC pesonnel attempting to enter any news establishment in SC will be arrested and charged with espionage. Assert your state's sovereignty.
"I am simply speechless."
That is what the FCC wants us to be.
Newsrooms?
While I agree that this is ripe for abuse, with creeping infection by unelected functionary tools doing their master's bidding, does anyone here really think The Media is a free market of idea to begin with? With Soros, Murdoch, and a handful I'll probably never hear of effectively controlling the message to the less equal animals, the "freedom" the author is horrified of losing has already left the barn, long ago. The blatant yellow journalism and crony capitalist slanting of the early Hearst papers et al has only gone deep with better control and obscurity, while broadening the scope to TV and web media.
On the surface, it does sound laudable, in an ideal world rooting out the subtle editorial direction and the puppeteers, providing a view into who is pulling the strings from where and why; but when has such a top-down plan ever worked as intended? Only by leaks from inside and the rise of a unified alternative media with professional level skills and credentials will the effective Propagandaministerium be brought to light. Not that such people don't exist ;-) but there aren't daily telcons and dedicated news feeds, not even a cable channel. The power to fragment the opposition is impressive.
1984 |Ministry of Truth movie scene <-- Watch
We need to start calling things Un-American again, except this time it's aimed the other way.
Are these the same people who argure over on Reddit that if you're for free speech you are pro-child porn? Trolling every subreddit I read with there stupid logic. Arghh too many idiots, so little time.
A "made in the USA" job for the political cronies.
This is the way the Stalinists ran the Soviet Union. The put 'Kommisars' in every business, factory, library, hospital, school,state
agricultural entity. That way they could 'spy' on every facet of life in the Soviet Union. The news orginization, would have to 'preview'
the nighly news script with the 'Kommisar' to get the party approval on that evenings news. This is exacly what the FCC pruposes to do. Welcome to the United States Soviet Republic, brought to you by Barak Obama. I saw the sign from the protestor in South Amrerica, "They talk like Marx, They Rule like Stalin, They live like they Rockefellers! Sound familiar, Comrade?
But shouldn't all news be Properly Accredited (tm)?
I hate to tell you guys but your FCC is simply playing catch up with what has been happening in the UK for many years. Eg: the BBC IS the principal Mouthpiece of The British Establishment.
Whereas the UK's printed media has some freedom of reporting and has fairly overt political bias, the broadcast media (BBC, ITV, Sky News and all the radio channels) operates under very different laws/regulations. Without exception, these organisations suck at the teet of the Establishment who control their operating licences and one-2-one interviews with anybody that matters. Unless they toe the official line, they simply will not get interviews etc. If they continue to disobey nanny, they might even get their press card revoked, meaning they won't get invited to press conferences etc etc.
One example:
A coupla years ago on Sky News on the day the latest CPI inflation figures were released and reported, I actually overheard the female news anchor saying to her economics colleague when talking about them:
"oh, we're not supposed to criticise government figures are we".
I've no doubt she got a verbal bollicking from the editor after "the show" for saying that on air.
In terms of recent coverage, I have not seen one single report on Sky News about the growing number of banker "suicides".
Arm yourselves.
Now.
Arm yourselves.
Pronto.