The media reform cabal is at it again.  The same professional Soros-funded astroturfers who brought us Van Jones to demand “media justice” and SaveTheInternet and Net Neutrality have been focused on a new target.  For months now, Free Press, Media Access Project, Public Knowledge, Consumers Union, and the New America Foundation have been thwarting the proposed merger of cell phone providers AT&T and T-Mobile, saying the move would raise prices for consumers and cost jobs.  As the deal sits with the FCC, which just this week temporarily halted its review of the proposal, AT&T and T-Mobile have tried to reassure consumers and activists that the merger would lower prices, increase access to service in rural areas and give consumers better choices.  The AFL-CIO, which represents 42,000 AT&T workers through the CWA, agrees with AT&T and T-Mobile.  Ironically, that puts the country’s most powerful labor federation on the opposite side of its progressive media reform allies.

But as these supposed media reformers actively work with community groups and state and federal agencies to oppose corporate interests on behalf of consumers, they fail to divulge their own ties to competitive corporate interests. And now, there are reports that a state commission may also have played a role in helping the competition.

As Amanda Carey has detailed at The Daily Caller, these Net Neutrality advocates have a long history of opposing these very companies, with the support of corporate competitors.

(more…)

Politics makes strange bedfellows.  Witness the latest liaison, with Cellular South’s CEO, Hu Meena, and his new partnership with the NoTakeOver Project – a coalition of professional misanthropes that wants to stop the AT&T / T-Mobile merger at any cost.

Meena’s company is the nation’s largest privately-owned wireless carrier.  Meena testified with other NoTakeOver members at a Senate hearing last week, strenuously urging that the merger be killed by the FCC and DoJ.  Getting there, he had to paint a dire picture – that consumers would suffer, jobs would diminish, Internet innovation would end, and the wireless industry would tank – if the merger gets the official OK from regulators.

His relationship with NoTakeOver is particularly odd in that his new friends – especially those at New America Foundation, Public Knowledge and Media Access Project – want to crush companies like his with “light touch” Net Neutrality regulations recently imposed by the FCC.

From the moment those Internet regulations got announced last December, New America Foundation, Public Knowledge and Media Access Project started grumbling like petulant children who didn’t get exactly what they asked for on their birthday.  “Sure,” they huffed, “the rules are better than nothing.  But we demand more.  FCC, you’ve come up short!”

In their view, the only way to ensure that the Internet remains “open” is through 19^th Century rules that check the sure-to-be “evilness” of network providers…like Cellular South.

(more…)

On December 15 in a speech for the Media Access Project, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chief Diversity Officer Mark Lloyd claimed to refute numerous what he called “exaggerations and distortions” of a wide range of his thoughts, positions and policy prescriptions from what he called a “right-wing smear campaign.”  What Lloyd did was offer numerous falsehoods and denials about things that are undeniably true.

Just some of his many misrepresentations:

• LLOYD LIE: That the “right-wing smear campaign” was “distorting my views about the First Amendment.”

(more…)

In the wake of reports that the Obama administration may be inching away from a national broadband policy that encompasses strong net neutrality provisions, observers of the ongoing net neutrality debate say that a major rift may be developing between big-name groups on the left.

On one side are public interest groups including the Media Access Project, Free Press, Consumers Union and the New America Foundation.  On the other are several high-profile African-American groups including the National Black Caucus of State Legislators, the National Organization of Black Elected Legislative Women, The National Black Caucus of Local Elected Officials and the National Association of Black County Officials.

According to National Journal, the public interest groups wrote to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski last week to express concern regarding recent statements made by an FCC official that were less than enthusiastically favorable toward net neutrality.  The groups were evidently seeking Genachowski’s assurance that the FCC was not “pre-judging” the outcome of its rulemaking process with regard to the net neutrality issue.

(more…)