Adam Berenzweig

California bound

"Don't worry, hey, don't get yourself down,
God willing we are California bound."
-Frank Black

Actually I have already bounded, and here I am in San Francisco for the summer. I'll probably be getting a place near Google in Mountain View, where I'm interning for the summer. yay!

Some pix are up from the trip. Anya's are still to come. My favorite so far:

Politics of the airwaves

This is not a very sexy issue, but I believe it is extremely important. Basically, the FCC is on the verge of changing media ownership laws that will allow giant media companies to get even bigger. Explicit censorship is not the only threat to a free press, which is the backbone of democracy. Just as surely, unchecked media consolidation can silence the diversity of voices that comprise this backbone. The big media outlets are being very quiet about this, so it's important to get the word out otherwise. Send a note to your representatives about it:
http://www.moveon.org/stopthefcc/

Some scary examples of how media consolidation already affects us:

• Radio giant Clear Channel, which owns 60% of all radio stations in the country, sponsored 18 pro-war "Rally for America!" events and many of its stations pulled the Dixie Chicks from their lineups after the band spoke out against the President. Thomas Hicks, the investment banker primarily responsible for Clear Channel's rapid growth over the past 5 years, has close ties to President Bush.
• Members of Congress say that they aren't hearing their constituents speak up on this issue - they're only hearing the lobbyists paid by the media companies. This is chilling, but not surprising, since the big media companies have provided little coverage of this issue, which affects their own bottom line. 72% of respondents in a recent poll said they had "heard nothing at all" about the new ownership proposals. (http://journalism.org/resources/research/reports/fccsurvey/default.asp)
• In 1998, ABC News pulled the plug on an investigative piece that contended its parent company, Disney had failed to thoroughly check the backgrounds of employees at its theme parks, which resulted in the hiring of alleged paedophiles. A few days before, Michael Eisner told NPR that ABC news should not report on its parent company. (http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_bigmedia.html)
• Conflicts of interest between journalism and the financial interests of conglomerates will continue. Check out this chart of media conglomerates and what else they own: http://www.thenation.com/special/bigten.html

If you're interested, read the excellent coverage of this issue by Bill Moyers and the staff of NOW on PBS at: http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/bigmedia.html This is the kind of reporting - deep, unsensationalized, and sensitive to the public interest - that could be further pushed out of the mainstream press under the new FCC rules.

What to do? MoveOn.org has a nice system to send mail to your representatives about the issue: http://www.moveon.org/stopthefcc/ or file a public comment directly with the FCC (its also easy) at: http://www.fcc.gov/ownership/

My blog is dead. long live my blog!

After a typing accident that wiped out /var, I lost the blog database a few weeks ago. i still had the html, but i couldnt make any changes or rebuild. finally I got it together to reconstruct the entries from the html (yay perl).