FCC Changes Could Impact Minority Ownership of Radio & Television Stations

Monitoring the way the media reports on issues related to race and culture is one of the main reasons I started this blog. With so many Americans logging on, tuning in, downloading, uploading and sharing content these days - the media plays a pivotal role in how our collective culturegeist, the very nature of our cultural and racial identity is shaped.

Last night I stayed up to watch some of the testimony of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Commissioners (Commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate pictured above)as they were grilled on C-SPan in front of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee in preparation for a scheduled December 18th vote on proposed rule changes to the cross-ownership ban the commissioners argue Congress grants them the right to alter in light of the evolution of today's media environment.

Making it easier for large media organizations to own more media outlets isn't exactly looking to the interest of diversity of ownership in media and a number of people feel the FCC is rushing to vote on this before getting feedback from those who would be most impacted.

If you're not familiar with the FCC and what they do, take some time to get at least a cursory understanding of their role and oversight responsibilities. It's important that all Americans do.

Who was at the table testifying? FCC Chairman Kevin Martin; FCC Commissioners Michael Copps, Jonathan Adelstein and Robert McDowell; and Deborah Taylor Tate, FCC commissioner and chairman of the Federal-State Joint Board on Universal Service.

I watched the prepared statements delivered by Deborah Taylor Tate and and Robert McDowell. Both Republican Commissioners also got teary-eyed and nostalgic as they thanked outgoing US Senator Trent Lott for his years of service in a gush of emotion. My take was that they both spent an exceedingly long time waxing philosophic about how much media has changed, repeating themselves with lists of iPods, podcasts, digital cable, network television etc.

Each of us knows about the plethora of choices we all have in the way we consume media - my sense is they came off as trying to side-step the big issues. Essentially and I'm not an expert, the FCC is granted the authority to make adjustments in rules that govern who can own media outlets.

So if, for example there are too few companies controlling the majority of media outlets, the FCC can make it more difficult for a company to own newspapers, radio stations and television stations in the same city or market. But they can also do the opposite.

The FCC flat out refused to delay the vote scheduled for next week when Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) asked them to do so.

Many public advocate and media watchdog groups are concerned that relaxing the restrictions imposed by the FCC on companies wanting to own different media outlets in a given city, region or market is going to hurt the chances for companies primarily controlled or owned by minorities or women to bid for, or obtain licenses to operate television and radio stations in the US.

I'm not suggesting that Tribune or Fox doesn't have a right to own a variety of stations and cable channels, but there is also an inherent and compelling interest in making sure that there is some degree of diversity amongst the make up of the executives who own and control the companies that create and distribute the content that Americans access.

You can check out the videotaped testimony of the FCC Commissioners and the Q&A by the members of the Senate Committee on C-Span for yourself and form your own conclusion.

Ma$$ Incarceration in the American Gulag: Ugly Truths in Caddo Parish

Caddo Parish (Louisiana) Sheriff Steve Prator

The news story that surfaced last week about Caddo Parish, Louisiana Sheriff Steve Prator's comments about incarcerated prisoners performing manual labor was a troubling reminder of one of the most insidious aspects of mass incarceration in America.

Namely the profit motive that channels people into the justice system on the front end, then moves them through an overburdened municipal, state and federal prison pipeline that extracts financial gain in a variety of ways.

Profit realized not from rehabilitating those found guilty in courts of law, but from keeping those individuals incarcerated for as long as possible, irrespective of flawed sentencing laws, overt bias on the part of some members of local law enforcement, or sometimes even a suspect's guilt or innocence - as in the tragic case of Glenn Ford.

As Jonah Engel Bromwich reported in a New York Times article last Thursday, it was almost three weeks ago back on Thursday October 5th that the sheriff of Caddo Parish Louisiana, Steve Prator, held a lengthy press conference in which he railed against a series of substantive prison and sentencing reforms passed with overwhelming bipartisan support by both Democratic and Republican members of the Louisiana state legislature.

Whether Sheriff Prator harbors personal political ambitions isn't really clear.

But his alarming suggestion that the 1,400 low-level offenders convicted of non-violent offenses scheduled to be released from various Louisiana prisons (under the terms of the bipartisan prison reform bills) would have negative economic consequences because they perform a variety of manual labor services for the state's prison system, seemed close to justifying slave labor.

Incarcerated Americans sewing military fatigues

Consider a Prison Policy Initiative report by Wendy Sawyer last April that noted that there's been a decline in the average of the already-meager prison wage nationwide - which can be as low as 50 cents an hour in some states.

In some southern states, including Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia and (Surprise!) Texas, do not pay inmates for regular work in prison at all.

My sense is that part of the reason Sheriff Prator's comments drew such widespread criticism was that he shed an unsettling light on some of the numerous ways that prison labor is used in the Caddo Parish jail - including cooking and washing and performing mechanical work on cars and vehicles.

But more troubling was that he was arguing that low-level offenders jailed for non-violent offenses should STAY in prison because local state municipalities need the revenue - that's frightening.

And to many it seemed to reek of the undisguised authoritarian stench of Trumpian policy; undermine the free press, label anyone who disagrees with him an "enemy of the people", encourage law enforcement to use excessive force against suspects, lie at will, support for-profit prisons and back off of prison reforms that would keep more people out of the mass incarceration pipeline.

As Bromwich noted the story really didn't blow up nationally until journalist and criminal justice activist Shaun King posted a link to Sheriff Prator's comments on his Twitter feed early last Thursday morning.

Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards

In the wake of the utter devastation wreaked upon the state of Louisiana's economy after the disastrous economic policies of former Republican Governor-turned failed 2016 presidential candidate Bobby Jindal, one of the core campaign promises of current Democratic Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards was to reform the state's notoriously broken prison system.

A system that, like in other states, costs taxpayers hundreds of millions a year to operate.

Back in June, as Rebekah Allen reported for the Advocate, when Edwards signed the ten separate bills into law with a large group of Republican and Democratic supporters looking on (Republicans drafted seven of the bills), the scope and depth of the reforms was hailed as an "historic achievement" - click the link above and read some of the details outlines of the bills that were passed.

It's literally a progressive roadmap-template for sensible national criminal justice reforms, and as Bel Edwards successfully argued, those reforms would save the state of Louisiana over $260 million a year by keeping non-violent low-level offenders out of prison and out of the justice system.

For men like Sheriff Prator to argue against that kind of common sense change reflects the deep systematic challenges to meaningful prison reform in America.

For years, writers, historians, advocates of prison reform and criminal justice reform have presented data and made the case that mass incarceration in America and other countries is used as a means to warehouse a massive pool of readily cheap labor.

Not just for states and local municipalities either - we're not just talking about some guys hoeing fields or cutting grass.

A small sample of companies that use American prison
labor in some capacity

Prisoners do everything from logging, to road resurfacing to working in call centers for major retailers - yes, some of those people you speak to in customer service when you call to place an order, book an airline ticket or return an item are prisoners.

There's a long list of companies like Walmart, McDonald's and Victoria's Secret that benefit from prison labor.

When you consider the immense lobbying power that these companies wield on Capitol Hill, and the influence they wield on Congressman, Senators and Governors (and Fake President), the pushback against prison reform, which has bipartisan support in the Senate, starts to become more clear.

Sheriff Prator isn't alone in his opposition to releasing non-violent offenders because it will make labor costs rise, many U.S. corporations feel the same way.

Of course you'll never see THAT in a television commercial for McDonald's or AT&T, but they do.

Remember the efforts to untangle the prison phone rate scam a couple years ago?

If you recall, the Democratic-majority Federal Communications Commission, in conjunction with wider prison reform efforts by the Obama administration, passed a rule capping the outrageous rates that major phone companies charge prison inmates.

Trump's FCC head Ajit Pai

But a federal court shot that down earlier this summer, and the conservative right-wing puppet that Fake President tapped to head the FCC, Ajit Pai, refused to pursue the fight.

Ajit Pai basically sided with the large telecommunications carriers that lobbied Republicans to be able to freely charge wildly excessive phone rates to incarcerated inmates - making it even more difficult for them to maintain some kind of emotional bond with family and friends on the outside.

Think about that.

But it's not surprising, like a young Dinesh D'Souza, Pai is one of those Ivy League-educated sons of hard working Indian immigrants who seem to revel in prostrating themselves before the alter of right-wing conservative American ideology - gleefully pushing all the buttons that make the corporate establishment squirm and giggle with pleasure.

If there's any issue on which the FCC could rule to stick it to consumers and make it easier for large telecommunications and internet companies to consolidate their power and rack up profits, you can be sure Ajit Pai will be on the front line making it happen - after using his law degree to work for the Justice Department's Anti-Trust Division, he took a job as Verizon's Associate General Counsel where he (surprise!) specialized in among other things, regulatory issues.

Now he does the bidding of a president who holds dark-skinned people in total contempt - MAGA!

Sadly, all this corporate ass-holery is not new in America as illustrated in disturbing detail in Douglas A. Blackmon's Pulitzer-Prize wining book, "Slavery by Another Name", which explores the disturbing truth that slavery in this country continued up into the 20th century in the form of forced human bondage based on arcane local laws, corrupt local courts and greedy businessmen who conspired to target, imprison and torture thousands of African-Americans in flagrant violation of the Constitution to quench a thirst for free labor that grew exponentially after the end of the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation in 1865.

African-American prisoners laboring on a railway
in the late 19th or early 20th century 

These weren't just farmers using wrongly-incarcerated prison labor to clear fields or harvest crops; in some cases corporations like U.S. Steel and Standard Oil dipped into that ill-gotten labor pool too.

Slavery By Another Name is also a brilliant PBS documentary if you've never seen it; albeit a disturbing one that will alter one's perspective on the U.S. justice system and corporate America.


Michelle Alexander's 2010 nonfiction book "The New Jim Crow" is also an essential tool to understand the dynamics of mass incarceration in America and it's relation to a justice system warped by bias and internal dysfunction.

If there were some kind of a litmus test to measure the federal government's response to the urgent need for prison reform in the U.S., where would the score be on the spectrum?

The rigidly conservative, yet remarkably uncurious Attorney General Jeff Sessions is an ideologue whose quasi-religious adherence to his narrow concept of the "rule of law" could be seen as conditional and uneven with regards to the role the Department of Justice should play in such efforts.

While he's stated publicly that he would prosecute members of law enforcement who cross the line, there's little indication that he will - especially considering that he's already gone on record as saying that the Department of Justice under his leadership will steer clear of efforts to monitor local police departments who engage in systematic biased policing based on race.

Sessions also steered the DOJ back to approving the use of for-profit prison companies to manage some federal institutions - despite those companies having a sketchy track record in such areas as safety and cost-effectiveness.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions 

Part of what's troubling about the hands-off approach to bipartisan criminal justice reform under Sessions' DOJ is the simple stubborn refusal to recognize the dehumanizing and alienating effects that flawed sentencing laws and biased court systems have on the men, women and children who populate America's prisons.

It's like his adherence to an ideology blinds him to virtually anything else.

Nothing else exists - reality, facts and common sense are secondary to his entrenched belief system.

The narrow-minded, simplistic ideological rhetoric of men like Sessions, Fake President and Sheriff Prator often obscures the simple fact that prisons house real human beings - sure some have committed violent crimes and deserve to be in jail for their crimes, but they're still people.

Did you see the New York Times article last week that quoted the Texas Criminal Department of Justice as saying that some 6,663 inmates housed in correctional facilities across the state of Texas collectively donated some $53,863 to Hurricane Harvey relief charities?

This despite the fact that most only keep on average about $5 in their prison commissary accounts; much of which goes to telecom companies so they can make phone calls.

Prisoner fire fighters in California 

Recently the news has been full of the devastation and loss of life and property in parts of California in some of the worst fires seen in years - but as MotherJones reported recently, a remarkable 30% of California's forest firefighters are made up of state prisoners.

When you consider that California's forest fire fighting budget in 2014 was about $209 million, 30% of the thousands of forest fire fighters coming from prison labor is not small change.

Despite that devastation Trump has called for a $300 million dollar cut in the US Forest Service's wild fire prevention budget for fiscal 2018 (again, ideology uber alles), who knows, maybe he plans to plug those gaps with even more prisoner labor?

So in retrospect, Sheriff Steve Prator's griping about loosing a few inmates from the Caddo Parish prison cafeteria staff and motor pool seems like chump change in comparison with the wider use of prison labor in America by both the military, private corporations and state governments.

Given all that, it's interesting how much time Trump spends talking about how immigrants are taking away American jobs in this country.

Why read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's massive three-volume work on the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system when we've got an American Gulag going on right here at home?

Analog Television Demise Signals No Reception for Millions of Poor Consumers

Both cable and network television have their hands full trying to remain on the radar of the millions of consumers who now gravitate to the Web for news, communication, information, shopping, travel-planning, entertainment and increasingly content that was once the exclusive domain of television.

On February 17, 2009 the entire television broadcast industry is going fully digital. It's hard to miss the commercials warning of the impending switch. Cable companies around the country have committed $1 billion to educating consumers about the switch, and offering information about how to apply for government subsidized coupons from the Department of Commerce (wouldn't want anyone missing all that commercial advertising...) to offset the purchase price of a new digital converter.

But what exactly does this "switch" mean?

For one it means the tried and true analog signal that broadcasts over the 700 megahertz band, the same one that's brought us countless hours of television programming for decades, will simply no longer work; if you don't have cable that is.

The Digital Television Transition and Public Safety Act of 2005 makes it law with the stamp of the United States Congress. In a page ripped right out of the "Large Cable Company Wish List", Congress has made the purchase of new digital televisions and digital cable boxes mandatory if you want to watch TV.

In a secret bidding process that most Americans don't even really know about, the FCC auctioned off the 700 megahertz band for an eye-opening $19.6 billion in early 2008.

700 MHz penetrates walls and large telecommunications companies like AT&T and Verizon will now use a portion of it to handle the massive bandwidth needs of consumers using mobile phones, PDA's, Blackberry's, iPhones and laptop computers to download and share content over the Internet. The government will also turn some space over to emergency channels for firemen and police.

One thing that concerns me is that there are millions of low-income people in America who currently still use the old "rabbit-ears" or rooftop TV receptors to watch television. A disproportionate number of those people are Hispanic and African-Americans. Some can't afford a new digital-ready television, some just can't afford the high monthly fees to get cable.
Some just have no desire to get cable. Regardless, by February 10, 2008 they won't be able to watch TV.

There's something inherently unfair about that to me and it comes with a lot of ethical questions; and some environmental ones too. Senior editor Kenneth Hein explored some of these questions in the June 30, 2008 issue of Brandweek.

The digital transition has an array of permutations, more content, more bandwidth, more devices interconnected to the Internet - but it also means millions of Americans living on the fringes of the economy being totally cut off from television broadcast content, including news and public television, because they simply cannot afford the connection.

That's a lot of people left out of the digital equation.

Left Out of the Digital Switchover

February 17, 2009. That's really not that far off when you stop and think about it.

That's the date of the nation's impending digital switchover from the analog television broadcast signal. Put simply, if you don't have a digital-ready television, or cable box capable of receiving the digital signal, by next February 17th, you will no longer have access to television broadcasts. Period.

Because the activities of the FCC are often layered in term-laden, technical complexity, many people don't realize that the 700MHz frequency spectrum on which television signals have been broadcast for years, was auctioned off by the government for $19.6 billion earlier this year; a consortium of large carriers and hi-tech companies bought it. It will be used in part to handle the massive increase in mobile bandwidth needs.

I blogged about the digital switch here on culturegeist back on July 10th.

I certainly see numerous television commercials and informational Websites sponsored by the cable companies to advertise government-backed coupons that offset consumer's purchases of the now-necessary digital converter boxes. The animated figure (pictured above) is part of the United Kingdom's ad campaign for their switchover.

What I don't see is a whole lot of mainstream media examination of this fractionally small, but none the less important omission from the digital switchover. It's not going to come as a shocker but the numbers of people who will be without television access are poor and I'd guess slanted towards the more rural areas of the country. They'll come from all races and nationalities.

For me the potential cultural concern is that Hispanics and African-Americans will be left out of the television equation in disproportionate numbers.

What's that going to mean to people? Can sociologists gauge the impact of people in the US with little or no access to TV?

Some might argue they'll be better off but Sesame Street, The Electric Company, Mr. Rodgers Neighborhood - these public television programs were very important to me as a Gen X kid raised in the burbs in the 70's and 80's. Should you have to pay each month to see TV?

Our desire and need to consume larger amounts of data and media content how, when and where we want and over multiple devices is one of the major drivers of the digital switchover.

But for all the 'enlightened' ways in which we consume media, don't we collectively have some degree of moral obligation to ensure that the information and educational gaps that underline the wealth disparities in the US not divide free access to local news and entertainment along the lines of the ability to purchase new technology and pay high monthly cable fees?

Don't the people of all races and backgrounds living on the fringes of the US economic spectrum deserve to plug in their old rabbit ear black and white and be able to watch something?

After February 17, 2009 not so much.