The events of the last month in the United States should leave no question that a fascist, white-supermacist element is on the resurgence here. Spurred on by nationalist and hate-denialist sites like Breitbart, the Daily Caller, and other notable right-wing media conglomerates such as News Corp. (FOX News), Sinclair, and Salem, this despicable ideology has its own well-developed media ecosystem now.
Although much of this media-behavior’s out in the open presently, it’s cropped up throughout our history on broadcast stations that, by law, should not exist. I’ve written about some of these here, including ostansible pro-German prankster-stations during World Wars One and Two, and the curious case of Reverend Carl McIntire who, after creating a loose syndicated radio-version of the FOX News Channel in the 1950-60s, lost the licenses to his Pennsylvania radio stations in 1970. Continue reading “Right-Wing Pirates: Hateful but Rare”
Month: August 2017
FCC's Trumpist Trajectory Intensifies
The rotten hubris that is the Trump administraton is in full bloom at the FCC. It began when its leadership refused to defend core communications principles like free speech and press and flourished when they swore fealty to hypercapitalism and preemptively demonized those who may oppose their policy agenda. Now the dirty tricks have arrived. It’s all so far outside the already-troublesome norm of how media policy is made as to be head-spinning.
Let’s begin with the agency’s effort to repeal network neutrality regulations. An issue that’s overly complicated in most news coverage, the nation turns to John Oliver to make sense of it. He’s done this twice now – most recently in May, and as before his coverage inspired millions to visit the FCC’s public-comment site and make their thoughts known on the issue.
The first time, the public response in favor of net neutrality was so overwhelming that it crashed the FCC’s servers. This time, the system went down again…but the FCC claims that it was due to a malicious attack of unknown origin. According to (now-gone) Chief Information Officer David Bray, as Oliver’s latest segment went to air, “the FCC was subject to multiple distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDos). These were deliberate attempts by external actors to bombard the FCC’s comment system with a high amount of traffic. . .[they] were not attempting to file comments themselves; rather they made it difficult for legitimate commenters to access and file with the FCC.” Continue reading “FCC's Trumpist Trajectory Intensifies”