Free Republic

Judge explains where it came from the white house- instructions to FCC. Freedom of the press is guaranteed in first amendment. Radical new era of tyranny in the white house Currently it is voluntary – Judge Nap says it would eventually change

A plan by the Federal Communications Commission to study how news organizations select stories has prompted about 10,000 people to sign a petition saying “no government monitors in newsrooms.” That’s according to the American Center for Law and Justice, which announced the petition Wednesday and said it reached that number within the first two hours. The agency announced a Multi-Market Study of Critical Information Needs last year, explaining that it wanted to understand the process of which stories are selected, station priorities, content production, populations served, perceived station bias, and perceived percent of news dedicated to each of the “critical...

The Obama Administration’s Federal Communication Commission (FCC) is poised to place government monitors in newsrooms across the country in an absurdly draconian attempt to intimidate and control the media. Before you dismiss this assertion as utterly preposterous (we all know how that turned out when the Tea Party complained that it was being targeted by the IRS), this bombshell of an accusation comes from an actual FCC Commissioner. FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai reveals a brand new Obama Administration program that he fears could be used in “pressuring media organizations into covering certain stories.” As Commissioner Pai explains in the Wall...

“Everyone talks about the weather,” Mark Twain (apocryphally) observed, “but nobody does anything about it.” To some extent, the same is true about editorial bias. People have complained about bias in news coverage for decades, but only recently have the barriers to market entry been so low as to allow critics to build their own platforms to do anything about it. That frustration with editorial bias led in large part to the explosion of the blogosphere, which forced news outlets to deal substantively with the criticisms they created with their editorial biases.That is the free-market approach. Should there be a...

The Sudden Disappearance of The Popular Quinn and Rose Morning Talk show from Clean Channel's lineup this morning is troubling!!

In a continuing crackdown on the federal government's Lifeline program, sometimes known as "Obama phones," the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has revealed that fraud and abuse in the program exceeded two million subscribers. New rules were established after it became clear that subscribers and providers were taking advantage of the system:

The Federal Communications Commission is planning a broad probe of political speech across media platforms, an unprecedented move that raises serious First Amendment concerns. The FCC’s proposed “Multi-Market Study of Critical Information Needs,” which is set to begin a field test in a single market with an eye toward a comprehensive study in 2014, would collect a remarkably wide range of information on demographics, point of view, news topic selection, management style and other factors in news organizations both in and out of the FCC’s traditional purview. The airwaves regulator would also subject news producers in all media to invasive...

Stardate 20021005.2128 (On Screen): As I think many of my readers know, I used to work for Qualcomm designing cell phones. Qualcomm is the company which invented CDMA, and made it practical, and made it into a market success, and it now dominates the American market, where Verizon and Sprint both use it. There are two other nationwide cellular systems: AT&T currently uses IS-136 TDMA, which is obsolete and has no upgrade path. Cingular uses GSM, a more sophisticated form of TDMA from Europe. And right now I'm basking in the evil glow of a major case of schadenfreude. The...

Demanding a change to the way business is done in Washington, President Barack Obama on Thursday urged lawmakers to ignore lobbyists, bloggers, "talking heads on radio" and "the professional activists who profit from conflict."

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) lost his battle against the new health-care law but he already has a new target in sight: the Federal Communications Commission. The tea party member late Wednesday blocked the confirmation of Tom Wheeler as chairman of the FCC, saying he wanted greater assurance from President Obama’s nominee that the agency wouldn’t require more funding disclosures for political TV ads. Cruz has said that such free speech should be protected. When asked about the issue in a June confirmation hearing, Wheeler demurred, saying he would study the issue.

President Obama hopes to fill his 2012 campaign scorecard this fall by focusing on executive actions and smaller-bore legislative items. Progress on the president’s big-ticket agenda of gun control, immigration reform and the budget has been stymied by a gridlocked Congress, but the White House thinks Obama can still score several political victories. “We’ll continue to work with folks on both sides of the aisle to find common ground around common-sense ideas that’ll help middle class families. In the meantime, the president has also taken a series of executive actions,” said White House spokesman Bobby Whithorne. “These steps aren’t a...

...at least one man in Washington is tuning in. Ajit Pai, the lone Republican on the Federal Communications Commission, is on a personal if quixotic quest to save AM. After a little more than a year in the job, he is urging the F.C.C. to undertake an overhaul of AM radio, which he calls “the audible core of our national culture.” He sees AM — largely the realm of local news, sports, conservative talk and religious broadcasters — as vital in emergencies and in rural areas. “AM radio is localism, it is community,” Mr. Pai, 40, said in an interview....

President Obama liked the idea laid out in a memo from his staff: an ambitious plan to expand high-speed Internet access in schools that would allow students to use digital notebooks and teachers to customize lessons like never before. Better yet, the president would not need Congress to approve it. White House senior advisers have described the little-known proposal, announced earlier this summer under the name ConnectEd, as one of the biggest potential achievements of Obama’s second term. There’s just one little catch — the proposal costs billions of dollars, and Obama wants to pay for it by raising fees...

Customers have been calling on Time Warner Cable and CBS Corp. to resolve their ongoing carriage dispute that has resulted in channels going dark in several markets including Los Angeles and New York. Now politicians are demanding an end to the blackout. Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), who recently won John F. Kerry's Senate seat, on Tuesday asked the Federal Communications Commission to step in and restart negotiations.

It seems that most of the television media is owned by liberals. Is this a coincidence or can it be that Democrats have controlled the FCC for years and have given licenses to liberals while rejecting conservatives?

Regulators are extending the comment period on a controversial proposal to ease restrictions on cursing and “nonsexual nudity” over public airwaves. The action drew fire Monday from opponents of the idea, who have called upon the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to scrap the plan and salvage the final vestiges of family-friendly broadcasting. Back in April, the FCC put out a call for feedback on a plan to focus on the most egregious cases of indecency. If adopted, the less stringent regulations would reflect a shift from George W. Bush-era policies of pursuing penalties for isolated infractions on broadcast television. The...

The Obama administration is urging companies to thoroughly check a person's eligibility before providing cellphone service that is subsidized by the government.

The news of the past week has rightly been dominated by allegations of abuse in the Exempt Office (EO) of the Internal Revenue Service. The EO is in charge of processing applications for tax-exempt status under Section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code, which authorizes these exemptions for “civic leagues or organizations not organized for profit but operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare.” Some 3,357 applications for tax-exempt status were filed in 2012, an election year, which was a 50 percent increase from the 2,265 applications filed in w 2011. The criteria for Section 501(c)(4) organizations are open-ended....

In 2008, Julius Genachowski served as candidate Barack Obama’s Chairperson of the Technology. Upon winning the Presidency, Obama thanked the lawyer by appointing him to serve as Chairman of the nation’s Federal Communications Commission. In September 2012, Genachowski instructed Commission staff to begin reviewing the Commission’s broadcast indecency policies and enforcement, arguing that present day indecency laws may not be in step with “First Amendment principles.”.....

April 23, 2013 New Congressional Quest: End Prison Phone Call Price Gouging Bridget Johnson The Congressional Black Caucus Working Group on Prison Telecomm Reform is protesting high call costs for phone-homers behind bars. The CBC group will hold a press conference with former inmates and family members “to expose the often exorbitant rates that prisoners and their families are being charged for telephone calls and to announce the CBC response to the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) to resolve the issue after more than a decade of delay,” according to D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton’s (D)...