This is from 2007

Laura Flanders
http://lauraflanders.firedoglake.com/

Chriss Rabb
http://www.afro-netizen.com/

Big Business’s hidden hand in the smear job on Van Jones

http://www.afro-netizen.com/2009/09/big-businesss-hidden-hand-in-the-smear-job-on-van-jones.html

It’s hard for people to realize their freedom is really threatened – especially as most don’t want to believe it and especially when supposed civil liberty organizations like the ACLU are heavily partisan and not alerting them to the threat. Thank God for Beck, Malkin, Levin, Hannity, Rush ( I don’t know who Wilkow is) and for sights like RedState who are getting the message out there. And thank you izone, for writing this diary – which I will be linking to my facebook page.

As a tangent: Is there a right wing answer or (even better) a genuinely non-partisan answer to the ACLU? Or have efforts been made (on any large scale) to press them to deal with freedom of speech issues and other breeches of the Constitution perpetrated by the left? As obvious as it should be – some folks don’t realize the blatantly partisan nature of the American Civil Liberties Union and probably expect they would alert them to any serious threats to their freedom.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0909/26809.html

http://www.comtechreview.org/winter-spring-1998/r981lloy.htm

Communications Policy is a Civil Rights Issue
by Mark Lloyd

“The historical relationship between the civil rights movement and communications policy provides a useful perspective to present and future challenges. Indeed, it is those challenges which make the ideas and passions of the civil rights movement so necessary in the debate over communications policy today, for this is the arena in which so many of our basic rights appear and are given meaning—the right to speak, the right to know, the right to information, the right to privacy, the right to equal economic opportunity, the right to equal educational opportunity, and the right to meaningful participation in the political process. The historic struggle to preserve and defend these rights is the prelude to our future.”

Here’s the interesting parts……….Go to the following links……….

http://www.comtechreview.org/winter-spring-1998

Scroll down towards the bottom and look through the links at what’s what with this lovely little community organizing body and who their corporate and other friends happen to be.

For even more, the main page is actually a 2005 review with even more names……. http://www.comtechreview.org

I’m delving into who these people are, what they’re doing now, plus what is happening with (or happened to) the Community Technology Review itself and the other entities and people they associate themselves with and work through.

I have a sneaking suspicion that these folks are either somewhere within the administration, or working with Mr. Lloyd and/or other administration staff/Czars on behalf of other “community organizations”.

Cheers !

BTW, who is Wilkow? I am not familiar with him. And I have been amazed at Beck, what a job he has done.

Keep supporting people like Beck, Malkin, Levin, Hannity, Rush & Wilkow…..

They are the generals we are the infantry….

Glenn Beck Targets Pro-Marxist at FCC

http://www.aim.org/aim-column/glenn-beck-targets-pro-marxist-at-fcc/

VIDEO: MARK LLOYD PRAISES CPUSA MEMBER

While Robeson deserved praise for his artistic talents, there is no excuse at this late date for ignorance about Robeson’s real record not only as a secret member of the Communist Party USA but as an apologist for communist tyranny. Lloyd’s comments suggest that he would have preferred that the media not make an issue of Robeson’s involvement in an international movement that has cost the lives of more than 100 million people.

Statement of Mark Lloyd
Senior Fellow Center for American Progress
May 24, 2005
[Congressional] Forum on “Media Bias and the Future of the Freedom of the Press”

I am former broadcast journalist. I worked at local stations and national networks, including NBC and CNN and then represented all sorts of communications companies as an attorney here in Washington. I spent two years teaching at MIT and am now teaching at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute. I am a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

I want to thank the people’s congressman John Conyers and the rest of the public servants joining us today for holding this forum. The problem of media bias is not simply a matter of taste, it is a problem of life or death, of peace or war, of solving our problems or descending into confusion. There is no greater or more urgent problem facing America. So thank you again.

What is media bias? Bias is the ideological distortion of information. Is there media bias? Of course. Is it new? Of course not.

We have forgotten the yellow journalism that led us into war with Spain at the beginning of the 20th century. We have forgotten the media bias that led to the persecution of Paul Robeson and the promotion of Joe McCarthy. We have forgotten that most journalists supported the war in Vietnam for the vast majority of the time we were there, and ignored the problems of the ghettoes and barrios until the riots of the 1960′s. No bias is not new.

Most of the critiques of media on the left or the right tend to focus on a perceived partisan bias. But the problem is much deeper than that. The problem of bias is built into our current system. Our communication system supports a vibrant commercial media but ignores the needs of a government of the people. The bias inherent in such a system promotes the agenda of corporations not citizens.

I think most Americans are right to expect news organizations to be fair, even-handed and respectful but persistent and tough with our public servants. I think most Americans are right to want news organizations to select news and to select the experts who speak about events or policies in a way that treats all reasonable sides fairly. This is an ideal, and however distant, I think this is an ideal that is right to strive for . . . it is a democratic ideal.

But our peculiar American system of communication says that whoever has the most money will be the loudest voice in the public debate. Is this the sort of system that leads to fairness?
The focus of my remarks today will be on what I think of as a core problem, not the speech that results because of that core problem. I will also propose that the solution to the problem of bad speech is not censorship but better speech.

The founders of our democracy would say that debate dominated by any one faction in our society is not sufficient to the needs of democracy. With our relatively recent focus on the first amendment to the constitution, we forget that even before it was amended the founders created a mechanism that supported the communication of all Americans . . . it was called the Post Office. The Post Office was the largest part of the federal republic under the founders. It was larger than the army or the treasury. It was larger and more robust than any other advanced nation in the world.

When Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about democracy in America, newspapers were highly ideological, highly partisan and carried by the U.S. Post Office at a discount. Moreover, newspapers were delivered free to other newspaper publishers so that news could spread.

Newspaper distribution was subsidized by business and personal correspondence in Jefferson’s America. The founders established a system that promoted diverse communication as a way to check and balance different political factions. And they understood that merchants and bankers were a political faction.

It is true that we live in more complex times. And in many ways we live in times that are far more open and democratic than the time of the founders. But I think there are important lessons in the fact that the founders placed such importance on constructing a communications system that made truly diverse and equal political communication possible. Our current structure of communications is far off the democratic course established by the founders.

Before I am misunderstood, let me repeat that the one faction dominating our political conversation is not the radical right and it is certainly not the few remaining public figures willing to be called liberal. Multinational corporations dominate the political conversation in the U.S. today.

These multinational corporations are provided a tax structure that promotes their lifeblood . . . advertising. They are given free licenses to use the public airwaves. They are given access to our streets and alleys. And what is most important to Viacom, the News Corporation, General Electric, Disney, Comcast and, yes, even the New York Times is whether at the end of the quarter they turn a profit. That’s what counts.

If Americans do not understand one another because of the distortions or omissions in the news, NBC will not lose their access to public property. If Americans and countless civilians in other countries lose their lives because of the drumbeat for war, FOX will not be punished. The New York Times will not be held responsible for focusing on Whitewater and passing on lies about weapons of mass destruction.

Let me be clear that I believe in the importance of a competitive commercial press unrestrained by government. But we need more. We need a media responsible to promote democratic dialogue. We need media independent of corporations.

If we really want news we can trust, we must create a structure that makes it possible and we must pay for it. One way to do this is to require commercial media to pay full fare for their access to public resources and use that money to fully support public service media in the U.S. A modern equivalent of the post office would be independent from both partisan and corporate pressure, unlike our current structure. And, unlike our current structure, it must be truly accountable to local communities through democratic means.
I would say these steps were radical, if they were not consistent with the founders of our republic. And unless we take these steps, we can only expect a continuation of the sort of yellow journalism we are experiencing today.