The Police, the iPhone and Your Right to Record

World Press Freedom Day came and went earlier this month. While it’s important to take a day to recognize our right to speak and share information, threats to our First Amendment freedoms happen all the time, everywhere.

It’s a threat that will become very real on the streets of Chicago this weekend, as a new breed of journalists and onlookers attempt to cover the protests surrounding the NATO summit.

Just ask Carlos Miller. The photojournalist has been arrested three times. His “crime?” Photographing the police. Most recently, in January, Miller was filming the eviction of Occupy Wall Street activists from a park in downtown Miami.

In twist that’s become too familiar to many, the journalist became the story as police focused their crackdown on the scrum of reporters there to cover the eviction. Miller came face to face with Officer Nancy Perez, who confiscated his camera and placed him under arrest.

And Miller is not alone. Since Occupy Wall Street began last September, more than 75 journalists have been arrested. My colleague Josh Stearns has chronicled these arrests since the movement’s earliest days. Stearns expects to see an uptick in arrests as thousands of protesters and reporters converge on Chicago.

Radical Transparency and the Police

Journalists record many of these arrests themselves as they’re shoved to the ground, shackled and hauled off to jail. Onlookers have documented many of these arrests as well.

The ubiquity of camera-ready smartphones has spawned legions of “live-streamers” who can be found at every large-scale protest streaming a close-up account of almost every arrest. It’s a new form of journalism that’s open to anyone with a mobile phone and the resolve to get between police and protesters.

In the chaos of these events, many live-streamers have been snared in mass arrests. Others are deliberately targeted by officers who aren’t accustomed to the radical transparency of the smartphone era.

Tim Pool has seen the live-streaming phenomenon grow exponentially since he first started streaming Occupy Wall Street protests using a live-linked Galaxy S2 phone. “Most of the people are live-streaming because they think the mainstream media isn’t telling the story that needs to be told,” he says.

The audience for Pool’s smartphone stream peaked above 30,000 simultaneous viewers during last year’s Occupy evictions, making Pool’s raw and unedited reporting a model hundreds of other live-streamers have followed.

Pool plans to organize a global collective of live-streamers to create an alternative news network that gets the story live on the streets before the traditional news vans arrive. “There are not enough streamers for breaking 24-hour global news coverage,” he says, “but we’re getting pretty close.”

The First Amendment a ‘Nuisance’

The ubiquity of smartphones has contributed to America’s decline as a champion of free speech and freedom of the press. The U.S. dropped to 22nd place on Freedom House’s annual ranking of press freedoms. We’re now tied with Estonia and Jamaica. Our flagging status is due to the “detentions, rough police tactics, and other difficulties encountered [by those] covering protests associated with the Occupy movement,” according to Freedom House.

Many arrests result from snap judgments officers make when encountering a swarm of smartphone-carrying citizen reporters.

People, and even police officers, often don’t understand our rights with regard to public photography. At the local level the newsgathering rights of every individual, whether credentialed as a journalist or not, become even murkier.

But that’s changing:

• In January, the Justice Department filed a statement urging the U.S. District Court of Maryland to uphold an individual’s “First Amendment right to record police officers in the public discharge of their duties” and to find that “officers violate citizens’ Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights when they seize and destroy such recordings without warrant or due process.”


• In late March, Simon Glik won a civil suit against the City of Boston, after the First Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously ruled against his arrest for attempting to record police brutality. The court found that Glik had a “constitutionally protected right to videotape police carrying out their duties in public.”


• In early May, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ordered a preliminary injunction against the Illinois Eavesdropping Act, which made the recording of police officers without their consent a felony, punishable by four to 15 years in prison.


• Earlier this week the Justice Department again intervened in the Maryland case, with a unequivocal statement supporting the right to record police officers, urging the Baltimore Police Department to instruct its officers to protect this First Amendment freedom.

Police departments like having a degree of flexibility in interpreting the law as it gives their officers loose rein to arrest anyone they deem a nuisance, even when they know their case will collapse before the courts.

“When I have been confronted by officers the implicit threat is that if I continued to videotape, they would take away my liberty,” says advocacy journalist Bill Huston. Police have harassed Huston as he’s attempted to record public events related to the fracking controversy in Pennsylvania and New York.

“Even though this is constitutionally protected behavior, the police will intimidate you and demand that you follow their orders,” he said. “Even though we may get a legal remedy in the courts we are still prevented from videotaping on the scene. Our rights are still violated. This is not how the system is supposed to work.”

Smartphone Freedom

Though cases involving our right to record have not yet reached the Supreme Court, it may only be a matter of time. Thus far most of the lower courts have found a rock-solid First Amendment argument for taking photos and video of law enforcement officers in public.

The nation’s leading free speech and civil rights groups agree. Earlier this month, we wrote U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder urging him to address ongoing abuse of our First Amendment freedoms and protect everyone’s right to record.

While the media landscape has changed, our First Amendment rights haven’t. Freedom of the press is more important, not less, when anyone with a mobile phone and an Internet connection can act as a journalist.

Super PACs Tell Lies, but the Media Spread Them

If you think presidential politics have gotten ugly, just wait.

With wealthy corporations and individuals spending billions of dollars to influence your vote, the real dirt is about to hit your TV screen like mud on a linen bed sheet.

According to the New York Times, which got its hands on a conservative proposal from a shadowy Super PAC, wealthy Republican strategists are working overtime on a billionaire-fueled campaign to flood the airwaves with race-laced attacks against President Obama:

The plan, which is awaiting approval, calls for running commercials linking Mr. Obama to incendiary comments by his former spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., whose race-related sermons made him a highly charged figure in the 2008 campaign.

The money would be funneled from the pockets of Ameritrade founder and billionaire Joe Ricketts through a Super PAC called the Ending Spending Action Fund into the coffers of the local broadcast stations that would air the resulting attacks.

According to the Times, the plan even features a defensive strategy. To confront any charges of race baiting, the strategists would hire as a spokesman an “extremely literate conservative African-American” who can argue that President Obama fooled the nation into thinking he was what the proposal calls a “metrosexual, black Abe Lincoln.”

The level of disgust this news has generated in social media has been palpable. Liberal commentators are striking back with their own vile incriminations of the right-wing hacks behind this effort. Both sides are dragging American politics deeper into the muck.

 The Times’ Jeff Zeleny and Jim Rutenberg write of the proposal:

[It] serves as a rare, detailed look at the birth of the sort of political sneak attack that has traditionally been hatched in the shadows and has become a staple of presidential politics. It also shows how a single individual can create his own movement and spend unlimited sums to have major influence on a presidential election in a campaign finance environment in which groups operating independently of candidates are flourishing.

Whether such ads are true or not doesn’t seem to be an issue with the writers of the Times story. The facts have taken a back seat to money and politics in this country.

And what of the local broadcast stations that air and profit from political ads? According to Kantar Media, attack ads will air hundreds of thousands of times before viewers become voters in November.

And the media outlets airing these ads are not giving viewers enough of the antidote: the kind of news and information that would allow Americans to separate fact from fiction when they step into voting booths in November.

According to a recent survey by the Columbia Journalism Review, television viewers in Pennsylvania sat through more than 28 hours of political ads related to a local congressional race. All of these aired in a seven-and-a-half week period prior to the April 24 primary.

 How much news coverage did these viewers get to counter this flood of political bias? A few minutes total, says CJR, which counted less than a half-dozen news reports devoted to the corresponding race.

So while Super PACs are a big part of the problem, consider the other half of the picture: local broadcasters who are all too happy to profit from misinformation — and all too reluctant to debunk it.

Who's Afraid of Rupert Murdoch?

The answer: the Federal Communications Commission and Congress.

While the media mogul was called before Parliament and hammered by regulators in the United Kingdom, few in the halls of U.S. power are willing to call News Corp. to account for the “culture of corruption” that has spread through its media empire.

Late Wednesday, Sen. Frank Lautenberg asked FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski whether U.K. findings of News Corp.’s “rampant law breaking” meant the FCC would revoke any of the 27 broadcast licenses granted to Murdoch’s company in the U.S.

“It’s not appropriate for me to comment,” Genachowski told the senator, ducking any real commitment to investigate News Corp.

Genachowski’s tone echoes that of House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, who has declined to investigate Murdoch in spite of mounting evidence that News Corp. has committed crimes in the U.S.

“This is a story about a unit in another country,” Issa said during an interview on Murdoch’s Fox News Channel. “And we want to make sure we don’t enter the ground that is most inappropriate for us."

Meanwhile the News Corp. board — a hand-picked circle of the Murdochs’ closest allies — refuses to take action against a chairman a British government committee deemed “not fit to run an international company.” On Wednesday, the board rubberstamped a vote of confidence in its leader, citing "Rupert Murdoch's vision and leadership in building News Corporation, his ongoing performance as chairman and CEO and his demonstrated resolve to address the mistakes of the company."

What Now for Murdoch?

So what’s next? We’re nearly one year into one of the biggest scandals in modern media. It’s a scandal involving widespread criminal behavior and a subsequent cover-up by News Corp.’s most senior executives.

And yet very few of America’s powerful are willing to call this U.S. company forth to respond to the serious allegations or answer for its misdeeds.

True, the Department of Justice is investigating possible breaches of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, but allegations against News Corp. don’t end there:

• News reports contend that newspaper staff hacked into the voicemail of American 9/11 victims.
• An attorney representing U.K. phone-hacking victims claims that at least four of his clients were illegally spied on while in the U.S.
• A company subsidiary, News America Marketing, allegedly hacked into a competitor’s computers to steal away clients and destroy its reputation.
• A former company subsidiary, Israel’s NDS Group Ltd., allegedly hired hackers to break the security codes of rival satellite television companies in the U.S. and elsewhere and make them available for use by copyright pirates.

The FCC

When granting broadcast licenses, the FCC must determine whether applicants meet good character qualifications in accordance with the Communications Act. But the agency has a dismal record on license renewals, and it rarely considers questions of character when vetting applicants.

Over the FCC's more than 75 years in existence, it has granted well over 100,000 broadcast license renewals while denying only four for failing to meet public interest obligations. And while viewers regularly petition the agency to deny a broadcaster's renewal on such grounds, you would have to go back more than 30 years to find the most recent instance in which the FCC responded by pulling a license.

Steve Waldman, the author of the 2011 FCC study on the state of the U.S. media, attributes the dearth of FCC action to commissioners who "no doubt feared denying licenses would trigger contentious battles with broadcasters."

The FCC’s Genachowski seems no different than his predecessors, thus far avoiding a confrontation with one of the largest holders of TV broadcast spectrum.

Congress

Congress has the power to subpoena people and gather evidence on issues of national concern. Most often congressional inquiries relate to government malfeasance, but News Corp., with its heavy reliance on government-granted licenses, could easily fall under that category.

Yet with only a few exceptions, members of Congress have refused to budge.

Parliamentary hearings and investigations in the U.K. have shed new light on numerous incidents of News Corp. misconduct, as well as the great lengths its executives will go to to cover up illegal activities. Parliamentary inquiries have also exposed the degree to which elected officials sought to curry favor with Murdoch and win approval from his numerous media outlets. The government Q&A with Murdoch uncovered several secret meetings between Murdoch and Prime Minister David Cameron, who even interrupted a family vacation to take a jet to a sit-down with the corporate head aboard a Murdoch family yacht anchored off a Greek island.

The influence game in the U.S. is perhaps less exotic. News Corp. has also spent big to impress U.S. politicians, shelling out more than $61 million to lobby Washington and another $8.1 million in campaign contributions.

But the public’s right to know shouldn’t get lost in this exchange of money and favors. Congress should concern itself with questionable activity by a company that controls so much of our nation’s media, and dictates so much of our political discourse.

The American people expect the media to uncover government and corporate vice — not contribute to it. It is Congress’ responsibility to get our back, and investigate corruption and cover-ups of this scale.

How Will the Murdoch Implosion Be Felt in the U.S.?

A scathing report in Britain that Rupert Murdoch and other News Corp. executives engaged in a cover-up of "rampant law breaking" may have ramifications for the media mogul in the United States.

How far-reaching those consequences are depends on U.S. politicians' willingness to face down one of the most powerful media figures of our generation.

But chinks in Murdoch's armor have deepened since last week, when a U.K. government investigation found that News Corp. executives hacked private phone messages, bribed government officials and then sought to conceal this wrongdoing, in part by giving misleading testimony to British law enforcement and Parliament.

The investigation, conducted by the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, concluded that News Corp.'s media empire is so corrupt that Murdoch is "not fit to run an international company."

The report leaves in question Murdoch's bid to take a controlling share of Britain's largest satellite TV firm, BSkyB, a deal requiring approval of the country's media regulator Ofcom.

But Murdoch's problems may extend well beyond British shores. At issue is whether News Corp. meets the minimum ethical standards required of broadcast license holders in the U.S., where the company controls 27 local TV stations among its consolidated media holdings.

When granting broadcast licenses, the Federal Communications Commission must determine whether applicants meet character qualifications in accordance with the Communications Act.

In making that judgment, the FCC is entitled to consider past conduct of media owners even if that conduct does not relate directly to their broadcasting interests, and may consider any pattern of misbehavior. The agency also is supposed to weigh whether the grantee serves the public interest. Broadcast licenses come up for review and renewal every eight years, but the FCC can revoke licenses at any time during that term.

Captive and Cowered

Unfortunately, the federal agency has a dismal record on renewals. The numbers tell the story: Over the FCC's more than 75 years in existence, it has granted well over 100,000 broadcast license renewals while denying only four on the basis of failure to meet public interest obligations.

And while viewers regularly petition the agency to deny a broadcaster's renewal on such grounds, you would have to go back more than 30 years to find the most recent instance in which the FCC responded by pulling a license.

The FCC's oversight system "operates almost on auto-pilot to the benefit of current license holders," writes Steve Waldman, the lead author of the 2011 FCC study "The Information Needs of Communities." He attributes the dearth of FCC action against stations to commissioners who "no doubt feared denying licenses would trigger contentious battles with broadcasters."

And no broadcaster more aggressively pushes back against government oversight than News Corp., which has spent more than $61 million to lobby Washington and another $8.1 million on campaign contributions.

It's a way to buy influence among elected officials that has paid handsome dividends for the American company.

On Tuesday, MP Tom Watson singled out Murdoch for overseeing a culture of corruption that has spread through News Corp.

"More than any individual alive, he's to blame," he said. "Morally, the deeds are his. He paid the piper, and he called the tune. It is his company, his culture, his people, his business, his failure, his lies, his crimes, the price of profits and his power."

Watson added that Rupert and his son James "lied and cheated, blackmailed and bullied. And we should all be ashamed when we think how we cowered before them for so long."

It's an indictment of the Murdochs but also of Watson's fellow politicians, which can be transposed to this side of the Atlantic where a U.S. body politic too often regards media moguls as above the law.

New York Times reporter David Carr has exposed a litany of offenses committed on U.S. soil by News Corp.; its subsidiary New America Marketing, to take just one example, hacked into competitors' computers. In addition, News Corp. is alleged to have hacked into the phones of the families of 9/11 victims and to have violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which forbids the bribing of foreign officials to further a U.S. company's business interests.

For these and other alleged crimes the company is already the subject of a Department of Justice investigation. But as the British Parliament has shown, Congress also has a role to play.

Parliamentary hearings in the U.K. exposed the duplicitous nature of News Corp. executives and the extreme lengths to which they would go to cover up crimes and mislead the public.

Congressional hearings in the U.S. could bring to light even more misdeeds by a company that thinks itself too big to fail -- or be held accountable before the law.

Finding Frank in Hoboken

In 1955 Swiss photographer Robert Frank visited Hoboken to document the city's centennial celebration. It's a day that generated several memorable Frank photographs, including two that open his masterful photo essay "The Americans."

This one features as the cover of the book:

In the spring of 2009, the National Art Gallery opened an exhibition of Frank's monograph. Titled "Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans," the show traveled from Washington, to San Francisco to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, where I viewed the work and purchased the catalog.

In the catalog and on display were contact sheets from Frank's day in Hoboken. These recently unseen images featured urban landmarks that still stand today. From these I was able to retrace the footsteps of Frank in Hoboken -- from City Hall, where he photographed preening local politicians, down Washington Street to the building featured in the cover photo. I located the windows where I believe Frank captured the image:

I was fairly certain above was the right pair of windows based on a contact sheet image from his second camera, in which the flag is clearly visible in a wider frame including the building to the north:

Here's my present-day photograph from a similar angle:

Note the orientation of the two floors with the northern floor approximately four to six inches higher. Also note the detail of the corresponding window lintels.

I then looked more closely, photographing the brick patterns between the two windows. I compared these to those of the original cover image. The match is unmistakable:

The top image is from the present and the lower from 1955 with my trace in orange.

I then checked this brick pattern against all of the other sets of windows along Frank's route down Washington Street. There was no other match.

The Misinformation Machine

Published at BillMoyers.com

Dirty politics is a growth industry with few happy customers. In the run-up to Super Tuesday, television viewers nationwide had to endure an onslaught of negative and deceptive political ads.

For many in key primary and caucus states that meant sitting through up to 12 such ads an hour. And the vast majority of these ads went on the attack: The three political action committees buying the most television time this election season have spent more than 98 percent of their money on ads that discredit one or another candidate, according to Kantar Media.

These attacks by their very nature are misleading. FactCheck.org, which tracks accuracy in political messaging, found that the "avalanche of negativity" in recent political ads also contained a fair share of distortions and lies.

In February, Restore Our Future, the pro-Mitt Romney Super PAC, pushed an ad portraying Newt Gingrich as a supporter of China's one-child policy, a claim that sent the lie detectors at Politifact spinning.

Meanwhile, the pro-Santorum camp fired a salvo in Super Tuesday states with an ad claiming Romney left Massachusetts $1 billion in debt during his time as governor. Also false.

And it doesn't end with attacks on Republicans. An ad from the shadowy American Future Fund attempts to tar President Obama by listing dozens of former Wall Street executives allegedly serving under the president in the White House. One problem: Half of the people on the list never actually worked as Wall Street executives. As for the names of those financing the American Future Fund ad, the independent political group -- like all other Super PACs and 501(c)(4)s -- has no legal obligation to disclose.

The Real News Antidote

In this era of deceptive political ads, TV viewers don't receive enough of the antidote: the kind of hard-hitting reporting and election coverage that would help local voters separate political fact from fiction before they pick a candidate.

A 2011 Federal Communications Commission report found that 33 percent of commercial TV stations nationwide air little to no local news coverage. For those that do air news, the picture remains dim. Nearly two-thirds of local stations reported staff cuts in 2009 as owners focused on maximizing their profit margins. This has translated into fewer reporters on the political beat and less objective reporting about electoral issues.

A 2010 report by USC's Annenberg School of Communications shows that in the average 30-minute local news broadcast, less than 30 seconds is devoted to hard local government news, including reporting on political campaigns. Meanwhile, it's estimated that political ads will air up to 200,000 times nationwide before viewers become voters in November.

But what was bad for viewers and voters on Super Tuesday has been a boon for local broadcasters. Even after the rise of the Internet, local broadcast television has remained our most influential communications medium. According to a Pew Research Center survey, 78 percent of American viewers report getting their news from their hometown stations on a typical day -- more than the number that rely on newspapers, radio or the Internet.

Collateral Damage

Where viewers go, so goes the money to influence their votes. Industry analysts report that local television station advertising revenue is "going gangbusters" in 2012 as changes to campaign finance rules will unleash an estimated $3.3 billion in political ad buys across the country.

The media industry even has a term for this, "the Quadrennial Effect," which accounts for the surge in broadcast revenues every four years as national elections take center stage. The biggest beneficiaries are media corporations that control local broadcast television stations in battleground states. That group includes CBS Corp., Gannett Co., Media General and News Corp. All of these conglomerates have bought up stations in battleground states where cyclical election ad spending is concentrated.

What they don't want you to know, however, is that the broadcasters' rush to air political ads has caused collateral damage.

It is accepted wisdom among the campaigns and Super PACs that a political lie hammered repeatedly into the collective consciousness of the electorate will embed itself in the minds of many as truth. Spreading lies via an endless drumbeat of attack ads works especially well at a time when the press, by and large, doesn't question them.

And while all broadcast stations are legally entitled to reject outright any third-party political ad that pedals misinformation, few do.

Thus far in 2012, FactCheck.org hasn't found a single instance where a station has rejected a political ad for inaccuracy. "It's not to the advertisers or stations' competitive advantage to publicize this fact," says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, which runs FactCheck.org. "So the likelihood that we'll hear about this is low."

The irony, of course, is that stations pay a higher price for deciding to debunk political misinformation and pursue the truth. So they opt not to. That's not the way media are supposed to function in a democracy.

They could correct course by spending some of their election-year profits on the kind of quality political reporting that viewers need before they go to the polls. They could devote more news coverage to exposing the wealthy individuals and corporations funding attack ads. They could do a better job of opening their own political files to public scrutiny to shed light on the Super PACs and independent groups that trade in deception.

But will they? With so much political ad money up for grabs in 2012, few broadcasters are willing to bite the hands that feed them. And that's bad news for anyone who believes the media should serve democracy and not merely profit from its demise.

Murdoch's Date With Justice

A legal net is closing around media mogul Rupert Murdoch. On Monday a top investigator in London reported that senior News Corp. employees authorized hundreds of bribes to police officers and other government officials.

But these reports of criminal behavior in the United Kingdom have yet to trigger a prosecution of Murdoch here in the States, where top executives can be held liable for systematically bribing foreign officials.

To stop this scandal from jumping the Atlantic, Murdoch has added legions of lobbyists and lawyers to his ranks. Their goal is to defang the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which makes it unlawful for a U.S. corporation to pay off a foreign official for the purpose of advancing or protecting a business interest.

Rupert's Dream Team

Murdoch's new team of legal aces includes Mark Mendelsohn, a former Justice Department prosecutor who helped bring FCPA cases against companies including Siemens, Daimler Chrysler and Johnson & Johnson. In a controversial move, Mendelsohn jumped to the private sector to protect Murdoch and his fellow executives against the very sort of prosecutions that he used to lead.

Murdoch would not have put that level of investment into a legal team if he didn't think that U.S. enforcement against News Corp. fell within the realm of possibility. But while the Justice Department, FBI and Securities and Exchange Commission opened investigations against News Corp. last year, they have since said very little about their progress.

Some experts predict we will see no enforcement action against News Corp. during an election year as politicians and government agencies steer clear of a confrontation with one of the nation's most powerful media companies. Others believe News Corp. will move to settle before prosecutors assemble their FCPA case and take it to court.

Media Power Corrupts Absolutely

For its part News Corp. has sought to mute coverage of the phone-hacking and bribery scandals across its news empire. Last fall it went so far as to censor a joke Alec Baldwin planned to tell about the company's alleged crimes during Fox's broadcast of the Emmys.

Murdoch also invested a million dollars in lobbying efforts to declaw the FCPA, donating to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce last summer just as the group was set to launch a high-profile campaign to rewrite the anti-bribery law.

This is how Murdoch works. For decades now he's wielded his enormous media power and financial might to build an empire, fight the public interest and place himself and his fellow News Corp. executives above the law.

Several public advocacy groups, including Free Press, Public Campaign, ThinkProgress, CREDO Action and Media Matters for America, have collected signatures from more than 200,000 Americans demanding a full investigation.

The present situation with News Corp. is exactly the sort of scenario these groups have warned against for years. When one company amasses too much control over a nation's public discourse, democracy suffers and corruption spreads. It's clear that Murdoch and his News Corp. colleagues believed that their tremendous media power placed them above the law.

But their fortunes are turning, and Rupert Murdoch must now answer for all that has happened under his watch. If he or his executives broke the law, they must be held accountable in the United States.

The Intellectual Dishonesty at the Heart of the Heartland Institute

More media have pored over leaked internal memos that expose the intellectual dishonesty at the heart of the Heartland Institute, the coin-operated think tank that has made a living spreading lies in the service of corporations.

The most revealing of the memos reveals the Institute's plans to create an anti-climate change curriculum for k-12 schools nationwide. The goal, according to the memo is to show "that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain — two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science."

"There’s your smoking gun," write the editors at the Star-Ledger:

Climate change deniers use a strategy identical to those who want creationism taught alongside evolution in science classes: Ignore the science and teach the debate, as if the simple act of disagreeing with scientific fact is educationally significant.

Science deniers want you to believe theirs is honest disagreement, when, in fact, it’s deliberate ignorance ... Scientific data aren't an opinion open to debate. Scientific data can be challenged — with new scientific data. But challenging science with opinion is like challenging math. You can’t “honestly disagree” with 2+2=4 simply because you would rather believe it equals 3. Or 37.

The rejection of fact in favor of opinion and ignorance is the MO of the Heartland Institute, whether its trying to sow doubt over long established scientific evidence of global warming or spreading telco-industry myths to undermine policies designed to protect the freedoms of Internet users.

The Heartland Institute masks itself behind claims of intellectual rigor and independence in order to lend legitimacy to the dubious claims of its corporate sponsors.

It's a lucrative trade in misinformation that has served the Institute well. That Heartland has sought relentlessly to conceal the identity of the corporations and wealthy industrialists that have bought into this scam is, in its own way, an admission of guilt.

According to the Star Journal:

The danger in this culture of skepticism is that it will become a "culture of ignorance," as author Isaac Asimov described it: a "thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"

Slate recently posted this video, which concludes, if the leaked documents are accurate, Heartland is "committed to using funds reaped from coal-mining corporations to cast doubt on established science."

Minneapolis Star Tribune: The onslaught is coming to a TV near you

This piece was published earlier this week by the Star Tribune:

If Minnesotans flip on their TVs right now, they're likely to see at least one -- a political ad slinging mud at a presidential candidate.

As Tuesday's statewide caucuses approach, they're more likely to see many more. Viewers in Florida reported seeing as many as 12 political ads an hour in the runup to that state's Jan. 31 primary. The campaigns and super PACs that bought these ads have now turned their attention from Florida -- where they spent tens of millions of dollars on local media buys -- to Minnesota.

These attack ads by their very nature are negative. But they can also be misleading. FactCheck.org, which tracks accuracy in political messaging, found that the "avalanche of negativity" in recent Florida ads also contained a fair share of distortions and outright lies.

... Read the full oped.

Obama Joins the Democracy Sell Off

President Obama succumbed late Monday to the dark logic of the Super PACs, instructing top West Wing staffers to help raise money for the so-called "independent" groups that have been successful in picking winners and losers thus far in 2012.

"We decided to do this because we can't afford for the work you're doing in your communities, and the grassroots donations you give to support it, to be destroyed by hundreds of millions of dollars in negative ads," Obama's campaign manager Jim Messina wrote supporters in an email Monday night.

This is no small news -- which explains why the New York Times placed this story on page one today -- as it signals that the president has reversed his earlier stance against working with Super PACs and joined others on the low road to political influence.

It also sounds the starting gun for the real race to win the White House in 2012 -- one that will very likely award the candidate who raises the most cash with victory in November. In this case, though, it won't be the victor who gets the spoils, but the wealthy corporations and individuals that funded him.

What's really happening in 2012 is a transfer of money and power unlike any other in the history of U.S. politics. It's a process that's unfolding in corporate boardrooms and corridors of political power, far from public view or scrutiny.

Here's what we've found:

1. Money Wins Elections: According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the federal candidate who raised more money in 2008 won his or her race nine out of 10 times. Former White House political czar Karl Rove knows this well. His Super PAC American Crossroads and 501(c)(4) group Crossroads GPS recorded an unbroken string of victories in 2010 after spending an estimated $40 million. This year he's aiming to raise more than five times that.

2. The Wealthiest Give the Most: Thanks to the 2010 Citizens United decision, the overwhelming majority of political contributions (in terms of dollars) now come from the wealthiest corporations and individuals. According to the Sunlight Foundation, almost half of the contributions to the nine largest super PAC spenders thus far came from just 22 donors, who each gave more than $500,000. Nearly 80 percent of their donors were those who gave more than $100,000. It's a list that includes some of the wealthiest hedge fund managers (Julian Robertson: $1 million for pro-Mitt Romney Super PAC), Hollywood execs (Jeffrey Katzenberg: $2 million for pro-Obama Super PAC) and property developers (Bob Perry: $2.5 million for Karl Rove's Super PAC).

3. There's More Being Spent Now than Ever Before: 2012 will break all previous records for contributions to campaigns, Super PACs and even less accountable 501(c)(4)s, all of which are concentrating their spending on media buys in local television markets. Kantar Media's Campaign Media Analysis Group estimates that candidates, political parties and independent groups will spend up to $3.3 billion to buy TV ads during the 2012 election season. That's a 57 percent increase over the estimated $2.1 billion that was spent on local ads during the 2008 election cycle.

4.Political Ads Work: The reason so much money is being spent on so many ads is that it's a proven formula for success. Newt Gingrich saw a near-complete reversal of his political fortunes in both Iowa and Florida after "Restore Our Future," a pro-Romney Super PAC, plowed many times more money into ads in those states than Gingrich's counterpart. Romney's camp and his allies aired nearly 13,000 television commercials in Florida, compared with fewer than 300 by Gingrich and his supporters, according to a study by the Wesleyan Media Project. As in Iowa, this on-air onslaught coincided with the decline of Gingrich support in the polls, and, ultimately, at the ballot box.

5. Broadcasters Are a Part of the Problem: The broadcasters benefiting most from this massive transfer of money oppose any effort that would require them to better disclose who's buying political influence. Broadcasters balked at the Federal Communications Commission proposal to put online the political advertising information in their "public files," preferring to keep this information hidden away. But it gets worse. According to Free Press' recent report Citizens Inundated, stations are also providing less of the sort of local political coverage that would help viewers separate political fact from fiction in an election year.

6. Transparency Can't Take a Back Seat to Business as Usual: The FCC chair who is supposed to hold stations accountable just got a signal from his boss in the White House that this backdoor money-and-media game is now business as usual in Washington. The FCC would do well to ignore that message and push broadcasters to embrace the sort of transparency and accountability that would shed light on the money that makes these Super PACs tick. This action becomes even more important now that the president has decided to cast his lot with these shadowy outside groups.

This Prettty Much Says it All

By Bill Brown, Free Press' ingenious graphic designer.

Citizens Inundated

The Supreme Court's Citizens United decision has already picked a winner in the 2012 elections: TV broadcasters.

Companies like CBS Corp, News Corp. and Sinclair Broadcast Group are already dividing the spoils of an election year that will see unprecedented spending on political ads.

More than $12 million was spent on ads during the Iowa Republican caucus. More than $14 million was spent on the South Carolina primary. And Floridians are already seeing the effect of millions more in ad buys as the state readies for next Tuesday's vote.

But that's just the first glimpse of an election year that will leave viewers awash in misinformation. All told TV broadcast companies stand to pocket more than $3 billion in political ad revenues by November. What they're not doing is letting viewers and voters in on the full story behind all this money and all these ads.

Free Press today released Citizens Inundated, a report exposing the media's role in the Citizens United problem. It traces a trail of political influence money that begins with contributions from wealthy corporations and individuals and ends up in the bank accounts of some of the most powerful television conglomerates in the United States.

Broadcast media, understandably, have no interest in shedding light on this excessive transfer of money. As a result, we are facing a crisis that threatens to undermine the most important single action people take in a democracy: voting.

Of, By and For the 1 Percent

Citizens United gave the wealthiest 1 percent unchecked power to pick and choose our nation's leaders. By November's general election, corporations and the rich will have funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into campaigns and Super PACs. The bulk of this money (approximately 60 cents to every dollar contributed to campaigns) will buy televised political attack ads that often misrepresent the issues and misinform the viewing and voting public.

Rarely within their local news coverage do local stations reveal the true funding sources behind this flood of misleading ads. Nor do they devote much of their news programming to reporting that might separate political fact from fiction and engage viewers in the democratic process. It's a confidence scheme that enriches broadcast media execs, while leaving voters none the wiser.

A 2011 FCC staff report found that 33 percent of commercial TV stations air little to no local news whatsoever. For those that do air news, the picture remains dim. Nearly two-thirds of local TV news directors reported staff cuts in 2009, as bosses slashed their reporting budgets. This translates into fewer reporters on the political beat and less objective reporting about electoral issues. A 2010 USC Annenberg School report showed that in the average 30-minute local news broadcast, less than 30 seconds is devoted to hard local government news, including reporting on political campaigns.

Meanwhile, it's estimated that political ads will air up to 200,000 times before viewers become voters in November. When researchers examined sample markets with a race for the House of Representatives back in 2004, political advertising outstripped news coverage of those elections by an average of 6 to 1. In markets where Senate races took place that year, political ads exceeded news coverage of those races by as much as 17 to 1. The situation is likely to be even worse in a post-Citizens United world.

This television news failure hasn't been remedied by the rise of the Internet. Despite decades of advances in new media, broadcast television remains our most influential communications medium. According to a Pew Research Center survey, 78 percent of American viewers report getting their news from local TV on a typical day -- more than the number that rely on newspapers, radio or the Web.

Toward Transparency

Broadcasters have been unwilling to do much to live up to obligations to viewers. They balked when the FCC asked whether they should put online the political advertising information in their "public files" -- preferring to keep this information hidden away in dusty file cabinets. They unleash the full force of their mighty lobbying group, the National Association of Broadcasters, against any effort to ensure that stations, in the words of the Communications Act, "serve the public interest, convenience and necessity."

Such is the arrogance of an industry that profits from free access to our airwaves. In exchange for this free use, media companies are supposed to fulfill the news and information needs of the local communities in which they broadcast.

Broadcasters can start by more fully disclosing the financial interests that stand behind the Super PACs dominating political discourse in 2012. And broadcasters need to invest more of their election-year profits in the kind of reporting that engages viewers in political issues and increases election turnout. These changes would make voters the ultimate winners come Election Day.

Why We Go Black

Wikipedia and Google blacked out? Redditers in an uproar? Thousands of geeks abandoning their cubicles to take to the streets?

What's happening here?

Today's nationwide protest of Internet blacklist legislation is part of a brewing movement to keep control over the Internet out of the hands of corporations and governments. It's a struggle that puts Internet users before information gatekeepers. At stake is everyone's democratic right to information.

The movement owes its momentum to a recent sequence of events. Leading up to 2010 millions of Internet users became advocates in support of Net Neutrality protections. In 2011, the importance of digital freedom spilled out onto the streets as demonstrators with a mobile phones and a connection became a force in global protests.

Now, millions are rallying against two bills in Congress that allegedly protect intellectual property but go way too far, threatening to hold our free speech rights captive and stifle the creativity and innovation that's become a hallmark of the online community.

Over the weekend the White House succumbed to popular pressure and modified its position on the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect-IP Act (PIPA) saying it would not support any legislation that "reduces freedom of expression" or "undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet."

Rupert's Twitter Attack

The White House's change of heart gave one media tycoon fits. News Corporation Chairman Rupert Murdoch, who has been a staunch supporter of the most draconian curbs to Internet freedom, sent out rapid-fire series of tweets accusing President Obama of throwing in his lot with thieves, pirates and terrorists.

That Murdoch doesn't get the Internet shouldn't surprise anyone watching his recent efforts to control it. It's a campaign that goes well beyond Murdoch's MySpace miscalculation to include tens of millions of dollars spent on Washington lobbyists who are intent on passing laws to undermine the Internet's open architecture.

What's happening is that millions of people are joining to protest Murdoch and his ilk and protect our fundamental freedom to connect, link to and share information without censor or filter.

This open Internet movement is the natural outgrowth of a network that was conceived upon a principle of non-discrimination -- a network engineering ideal that had profound ramifications for democracy. According to one of its founders, Sir Tim Berners Lee, the Internet's original architecture was guided by a powerful concept: "that any person could share information with anyone else, anywhere. In this spirit, the Web spread quickly from the grassroots up."

The First Amendment Goes Digital

Indeed, the open web evolved to become an indispensable organizing tool of social movements worldwide. It's no surprise then that the Internet would soon have a movement all its own.

Today's Web blackouts are its latest face, but the movement dates far back to the earlier days of the popular Internet -- about eight years ago -- when powerful phone and cable companies began to talk up ways they could control network traffic. Those words gave birth to Net Neutrality advocacy and engaged millions in efforts to stop industry efforts to filter or block content.

It also has antecedents in the backlash to web censorship by China and other repressive regimes. The blocking of online content from Beijing to Cairo only served to highlight the Internet's vital role in democracy movements and galvanize global efforts to pierce official firewalls and protect online activists.

And the movement has grown out of an open source community that believes decades of Luddite copyright legislation have stifled, not fostered, the online creativity and innovation that's essential to growth and prosperity.

In truth, the principles behind the open Internet movement go back much further, to the First Amendment, which was written to protect the sort of popular exchange of ideas that is the lifeblood of any democracy.

While America's founding fathers likely could not have imagined a technology that would put the power of the mass media into the hands of millions, they understood that, in the words of James Madison, a democracy must allow people to "arm themselves with the power knowledge gives."

The open Internet is the means to this power. The movement to protect it has found a voice in the millions of people who are taking action today. And the implications should be clear to any person, government or corporation that thinks it can harm our network without a fight.

Iowa Kicks Off the Media's Mud Season

If you flip on a local television station and watch for an hour or so, you're likely to see at least one: a political ad that attacks a local or national candidate.

If you live in any of the "battleground states," you'll see many, many more -- up to 12 political ads an hour.

Viewers in Iowa fell under a barrage of these ads leading up to Tuesday's caucuses. This on-air onslaught offers the rest of us a preview of what television viewing will be like as Election Day 2012 draws closer.

It's estimated that American television viewers will see such political ads aired more than 200,000 times by the first week in November. What we're far less likely to see is any explanation of who really sponsors these ads, what interests they represent and whether the content of the attacks is true.

Federal Election Commission rules require any political advertiser to tag its ad with the name of the group that is "responsible for the content of the message." But viewers rarely know the true sources of funding and power behind the names.

And the local television stations that profit from airing often misleading ads aren't eager to reveal much more. But these broadcasters face a more powerful obligation to disclose, not from the FEC but from the Federal Communications Commission, which is weighing whether or not to hold them to doing it in a truly accessible way.

Shedding Sunlight on Attack Ads

Existing lax disclosure rules explain the proliferation of ads from benevolent-sounding front groups like Concerned Taxpayers of America, Restore Our Future, Make Us Great Again and Citizens for a Responsible Government. The names might sound right and patriotic at the end of a 30-second spot, but they don't tell the whole story.

The Concerned Taxpayers of America has blanketed parts of the country with ads calling for a grassroots revolt against "stifling government bureaucracy." What viewers likely don't know is that CTA's populist front is merely the creation of two shadowy corporate spenders -- a Maryland concrete company and a New York hedge fund manager.

The FEC isn't willing to address the lack of transparency in these ads. The Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision lifted restrictions on corporate political spending, making its ability to rein them in even more difficult. The FCC, however, has a federal mandate to ensure that broadcasters "fully and fairly disclose the true identity of the person or persons, or corporation, committee, association or other unincorporated group" paying for commercials.

The good news is that the FCC is finally taking a few initial steps toward such full and fair disclosure. Broadcasters are already required to maintain "public inspection files" listing the names of groups that purchase political advertising time, the cost involved and the names of executives at these organizations. The FCC has asked for public comments on a proposed rule that would force broadcasters to move this information out of dusty file cabinets and onto the Internet. If broadcasters put this data online, people will be able to access vital information without having to schlep down to their local stations.

Unfortunately, many broadcasters are reluctant to make this data more broadly accessible. In a recently filed comment to the FCC, the National Association of Broadcasters urged the agency to drop its effort to make it easier for the public to ferret out this information. The NAB argued that requiring broadcasters to post their political file online would place an unnecessary burden on local stations. Another group of broadcasters warned the FCC against any effort "to stimulate such examinations" of a station's public records by their viewers.

You read that right. In 2012, broadcasters fear a stimulated viewing public -- or at least one that wants to learn more about how local TV stations operate.

The Public Return on Investment

Before Americans vote, we need to know who is trying to influence us and why. And the FCC needs to hold broadcasters' feet to the fire -- especially in an election year in which media companies will enrich themselves with a projected $3 billion in revenue from these same ads.

Broadcasters enjoy free access to our airwaves; in exchange, they're supposed to fulfill the news and information needs of the communities in which they broadcast. They can start by more fully disclosing the names of both the front groups that place political ads and the main financial interests that bankroll these commercials.

Requiring broadcasters to put all of this political information online is a change that needs to happen now, before misleading political ads muddy our elections any further.

The FCC is poised to move in the right direction. It just needs to hear from you.

Verizon's Broadband Bunk

A recent letter to the editor of the New York Times from Verizon Chairman Ivan Seidenberg had me scratching my head today.

Seidenberg wrote to rebut a Times Op-Ed by former White House technology adviser Susan Crawford, in which she argues that the United States high-speed Internet marketplace suffers from a lack of competition, a problem that drives broadband prices up and services down for American Internet users.

"Over the last 10 years, we have deregulated high-speed Internet access in the hope that competition among providers would protect consumers," Crawford wrote. "The result? We now have neither a functioning competitive market for high-speed wired Internet access nor government oversight."

Broadband Backwater

Indeed. It’s gotten so bad the U.S. has gone from number one in broadband penetration at the close of the 20th century down to — depending on the survey — 18th, 22nd or 25th in the world. And Americans continue to pay a whole lot more and get a whole lot less of the Internet speeds that we deserve.

Compare our circumstances to those in Japan, for example, where Internet users are accustomed to surfing the Web at speeds of 100 Mbps (or megabits per second) at the same prices Americans pay for dial-up. In Hong Kong, one provider now offers a $20 a month “triple play” package that includes a blistering 1,000 Mbps data service.

Despite the evidence, Verizon's Seidenberg wrote that Crawford was wrong; America's Internet is the best in the world.

"America has a very good broadband story; someone just has to be willing to tell it," Seidenberg argues in his letter to the Times. As evidence he cites a 2011 World Economic Forum global survey, which in the words of Seidenberg “ranks the United States first in Internet competition.”

Say what? I had to see that for myself.

The most recent WEF "Global Competitiveness" report (pdf) features U.S. rankings on page 363. The good news is that we're ranked first in the world for available airline seats. But the United States' Internet rankings are terrible. We’re 18th in the availability of the latest technology, 18th in Internet users per capita and 26th in Internet bandwidth per capita.

Perhaps Seidenberg’s evidence is buried elsewhere. On page 294 of another WEF report (pdf) I found a section on "political and regulatory environments" that featured an Internet and telephone sector competition index.

The report allegedly looks at the level of competition for "retail Internet access services, for international long-distance calls, and for digital cellular mobile services," placing countries on a 0 (worst) to 6 (best) scale.

But it doesn't actually measure market competition beyond determining whether these three separate fields remain state-sanctioned monopolies.

Well, U.S. telecommunications isn't a monopoly anymore. We did manage to break up Ma Bell in the 1980s, but her children are showing every intention to reassemble themselves as a modern-day equivalent. But that hasn't happened. At least not yet, so on retail Internet access we get a 2, indicating that its not a monopoly market; on international long distance we get a 2; and on digital cellular mobile services we get a 2.

Our cumulative score is a 6, according to the report, the best possible ranking — or "first in Internet competition" in Seidenberg’s profoundly misleading interpretation.

Want to know who else came in “first?”

Sixty other countries, including Angola, Burundi, the Kyrgyz Republic, Venezuela and Vietnam.

We’re all Number One!

So if you are proud that the U.S. offers an Internet that's on par with, er… Angola's, stand beside Seidenberg and wave the flag.

But if you agree with Crawford that the lack of true competition in the U.S. has put us on a perilous path, demand that we do more to guarantee universal and affordable access in a marketplace with real choices.