Free Republic

(The following is the third of three excerpts from The Right Frequency: The Story of the Talk Radio Giants Who Shook Up the Political and Media Establishment, by Fred Lucas; History Publishing Company. The adapted excerpt looks at the Fairness Doctrine.) The Democratic National Committee, with the approval of President Lyndon B. Johnson engaged in an effort that eventually led to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the Fairness Doctrine. What would have been a major scandal had it been discovered, was revealed years later in former CBS News president Fred Friendly’s book “The Good Guys, the Bad Guys and...

FCC eyes tax on Internet service By Brendan Sasso - 08/26/12 06:00 AM ET The Federal Communications Commission is eyeing a proposal to tax broadband Internet service. The move would funnel money to the Connect America Fund, a subsidy the agency created last year to expand Internet access. The FCC issued a request for comments on the proposal in April. Dozens of companies and trade associations have weighed in, but the issue has largely flown under the public's radar. "If members of Congress understood that the FCC is contemplating a broadband tax, they'd sit up and take notice," said Derek...

[Last week,] a deal between Verizon and a consortium of cable companies to free more spectrum for mobile broadband gained significant traction with the Department of Justice (DOJ) conditionally signing off on the deal and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announcing a vote of approval will come in short order. The agreement is an innovative move without much precedent. Verizon will purchase a significant chuck of spectrum from SpectrumCo, a group of cable companies including Comcast and Time Warner Cable, that covers 80 percent of Americans and is ideal for 4G mobile broadband. Moving forward, those cable companies can purchase...

The recent U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning enforcement of the Federal Communications Commission's indecency regulation reaches beyond the broadcast industry into the telecom sector.

US regulators sued hedge fund billionaire Philip Falcone for fraud Wednesday, accusing him of taking $113 million from a fund to pay his taxes. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said Falcone, who raked in billions betting against packaged mortgage securities ahead of the US real-estate crash, took clients' money from funds run by his Harbinger Capital Partners to pay his personal taxes.It also said Falcone illegally manipulated bond prices, traded preferential treatment to investors who backed a controversial board initiative, and broke restricted period trading rules in three initial public offerings to make money on short sales.

What some of us -- well, anyway I do -- refer to as the Slobbification of America made a good showing the other day on the front page of The Wall Street Journal: the tale of a town talking up a ban on public profanity of the grosser sort. Which ban is up for consideration by the assembled citizenry of Middleborough, Mass. The local police chief, the Journal reported, wanted to fine anyone $20 who "accosts or addresses another person with profane or obscene language in a street." I write before the actual vote. I think I know the outcome...

... As access to devices has spread, children in poorer families are spending considerably more time than children from more well-off families using their television and gadgets to watch shows and videos, play games and connect on social networking sites, studies show. This growing time-wasting gap, policy makers and researchers say, is more a reflection of the ability of parents to monitor and limit how children use technology than of access to it. “I’m not antitechnology at home, but it’s not a savior,” said Laura Robell, the principal at Elmhurst Community Prep, a public middle school in East Oakland, Calif.,...

<p>For anyone who's ever been bothered by the loud ring of a cellphone, or a loud-mouth on a cell phone . . . there's an island of tranquility, if you will, in the West Virginia mountains.</p> <p>Here, most gadgets that transmit aren't just unwelcome, they're BANNED by the federal government.</p>

A top official at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) told a Republican congressman that the agency is still considering ways to save LightSquared's plan for a high-speed wireless network. The company invested billions of dollars in plans for a nationwide 4G network, but the FCC moved to block the network earlier this year over concerns it would interfere with GPS devices. In a letter sent last month that was obtained by The Hill, Mindel De La Torre, the chief of the FCC's International Bureau, told Rep. John Duncan (R-Tenn.) the agency is "continuing to consider all options for addressing this...

Decrying the "exorbitant rates" for telephone calls placed from most state prisons and correctional institutions, a broad coalition of civil-rights groups and conservative leaders called Friday on the Federal Communications Commission to examine the harm caused by interstate prison phone call rates. Pressing the FCC to protect prisoners and their families from "predatory" fees is an unlikely coalition that includes progressive groups--the ACLU, NAACP, The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights--and national conservative leaders, including American Values president Gary Bauer, the Rev. Lou Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition, and Galen Carey of the National Association of Evangelicals.

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Julius Genachowski testified Wednesday that his agency takes calls to cancel Fox's broadcast licenses "very seriously." Groups, including Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), have urged the FCC to pull Fox's licenses because of evidence that its parent company News Corp. hacked people's phones in the United Kingdom to get stories. During a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing on Wednesday, Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) pressed Genachowski on whether he plans to do anything about the allegations. Genachowski said it wouldn't be appropriate to comment on a specific case, but that the commission is "certainly...

Amid antitrust complaints to federal regulators, a leading U.S. senator this week pressed the Federal Communications Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate whether Comcast Corp. (Nasdaq: CMCSA), the nation's largest cable operator, is leveraging its market power to hinder competition.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) this week unveiled a $300 million fund to extend broadband to as many as 400,000 previously unserved homes, businesses and anchor institutions. Created by the regulator last October, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said the Connect America Fund (CAF) was a "once-in-a-generation reform of the Universal Service Fund" that will connect all Americans with broadband Internet by the end of the decade.

The Obama Administration is unusually adept at regulating its political agenda. When Congress declined to pass cap and trade laws, Pres. Obama's EPA issued two new rules outlawing coal electricity – really. When Congress declined to pass card check legislation to ease union drives, the NLRB responded by cutting the debate that should precede a union vote. Most recently, the Supreme Court decided that corporations had a right to political speech. Pres. Obama responded by calling out Romney donors to silence them. Further, the FCC has issued a new rule requiring the disclosure of any organization that engages in political...

The principles of openness and universal access that underpinned the creation of the internet three decades ago are under greater threat than ever, according to Google co-founder Sergey Brin. In an interview with the Guardian, Brin warned there were "very powerful forces that have lined up against the open internet on all sides and around the world". "I am more worried than I have been in the past," he said. "It's scary." The threat to the freedom of the internet comes, he claims, from a combination of governments increasingly trying to control access and communication by their citizens, the entertainment...

Today there is no American news outlet factually covering the illegal actions of the sitting President of the United States in context. Nor is there one consistently exposing the laws his administration has flagrantly broken, though this corruption now demonstrably permeates every level of the federal system. Attorneys General Tom Horne, Arizona; Pam Bondi, Florida; Sam Olens, Georgia; Bill Schuette, Michigan; Scott Pruitt, Oklahoma; Marty Jackley, South Dakota; Alan Wilson, South Carolina; Greg Abbott, Texas; and Ken Cuccinelli of Virginia produced a joint memo on March 5th, 2012 detailing 21 blatant violations of law committed by the Obama administration. By...

For many months, Republicans have fought the Obama-directed attempt by the FCC to expand it's control over the internet. Many pundits argue that the FCC has no compelling interest in the internet, and that the FCC has a long history of chilling debate in the various media venues it has asserted control over.In November of 2010, the FCC and their accomplices in Congress again tried to let 'the camel's nose in the tent', by allowing the FCC to regulate the internet in the guise of 'Net Neutrality'. This effort was defeated.Obviously, the Democrats will not be allowed to squelch the...

Over the past few years the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has hardened its deleterious track record of trading in cost-benefit analyses and objective policymaking for sheer political gain. The Commission completely ignored a lack of market failure or consumer harm in enacting Net Neutrality rules. They demanded politically motivated, unrelated, and extraneous regulatory conditions for every merger under their review - including those they eventually crushed. And their timetable for many proceedings progresses like a senior citizen behind the wheel: painfully slow with unpredictable starts and stops. Today, the U.S. House of Representatives is taking steps to depoliticize and streamline...

AT&T is using T-Mobile's recent layoffs as an excuse to bash the Federal Communications Commission, and the agency's rejection of its proposed $39 billion acquisition of T-Mobile USA. On Friday AT&T's head of legislative affairs Jim Cicconi issued a statement offering a big fat "I told you so," to the FCC. T-Mobile recently announced it was laying off 1,900 workers in seven call centers around the country. Cicconi said in his statement that AT&T had planned to keep those very same call centers open if it had been allowed to merge with T-Mobile. Part of AT&T's argument for the merger...

Individuals and member organizations of the American media were threatened with FTC and FCC investigation if information gathered by Sheriff Arpaio’s Cold Case Posse concerning the forgery of Barack Obama’s long form birth certificate were passed on to the American public. It was Posse lead investigator Mike Zullo who made this stunning revelation, stating “During our investigation, we actually were told [that media] had been threatened with FTC investigations. Commentators [had been] threatened with their jobs.” And Jerome Corsi, author of “Where’s the birth certificate,” the book whose imminent publication was responsible for forcing Barack Obama to quickly create and...