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.

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A New York Times Bits blog post has some parts of the technology world buzzing– and not exclusively in a good way.  In the post, entitled “A Call to Take Back the Internet From Corporations,” NYT author Jennifer 8. Lee profiles a speech by Rebecca MacKinnon, an Internet scholar at the New America Foundation, urging Internet users to push back on Internet firms like the English pushed back on King John via the Magna Carta.

But the piece is not grabbing attention merely because it compares an urged expansion of government power to one of history’s leading efforts to constrain government.  In addition, the post just so happens to echo several grievances of Wikileaks, relating to Internet firms’ decisions to “constrain” (in Lee’s words) the organization:

Several companies constrained WikiLeaks, including Amazon, which kicked WikiLeaks off its servers after pressure from American lawmakers; PayPal, which suspended WikiLeaks’ account; and credit card companies, which refused to take donations for it.

Governments at this point rarely act directly to constrain the Internet; instead, their policies are mediated through privately owned and operated services, Ms. MacKinnon said.

Lee, it just so happens, has “been assisting” Wikileaks with their PR and social media strategy.  Last year, after some back-and-forth, she admitted to the Columbia Journalism Review that she had helped Wikileaks roll out video of a 2007 missile strike on a van in Baghdad.

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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.

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(And we do not mean this august publication.)

John Donne famously said no man is an island.  He didn’t live to see the Media Marxists and their absurd policy positions.

These Leftist alleged media “reformers” incessantly demand massive government insertion into and interference with every free market-media nook and cranny.

Insertion and interference in which almost no one else has any interest.

Save, of course, for the other forces of Big Government – Big Government being always interested in expanding its authoritarian sway.

We have noted this previously.  For instance, the Media Marxists have all along been strident proponents of Network Neutrality – a government takeover of the Internet that was and remains the kid sitting by himself in the high school cafeteria – almost no one else wanted anything to do with it.

Except, again, Big Government.  President Barack Obama’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) joined the Media Marxists at the lonely lunch table – and unilaterally and illegally imposed Net Neutrality.

So radical and foolish is Net Neutrality that – in addition to 302 members of the then Democrat-controlled Congress and a unanimous D.C. Circuit court – a gaggle of normally pro-government groups are opposed to its imposition.

The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Minority Media and Telecommunications Council (MMTC), the Urban League and the Sierra Club, to name but a few.

And then there were the unions.

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As the war against for-profit schools drags on, several organizations continue to cry wolf in the hopes of landing the final blow to the resilient colleges. One of the biggest players in recent battles has been the New American Foundation. A seemingly ‘nonpartisan public policy institute’, this group is layered with traces of political leanings and loaded assertions.

The most vocal arm of the New America Foundation has been their publication of ‘Higher Ed Watch.’ Editor Stephen Burd remains one of the strongest opponents of for-profit schools having slandered the industry at every turn. Articles such as, “For Profit Higher Education’s New Conspiracy Theory” and “Heads Will Roll At For-Profit Colleges — But Not The Right Ones,” have allowed Burd to preach from his soapbox and reveal the political tendencies of the foundations largest donors.

George Soros, one of the looming figures behind the war against for-profit schools, has managed to force his philosophies into the group by means of a quite sizeable contribution. New America Foundation received between $250-000 and $999,999 from short seller Soros’ Open Society Institute. Steve Coll, President of New America Foundation, receives a base compensation of $271,000. The former contributor at The New Yorker Magazine calls the shots at NAF amid a cloud of outsider influence. With staff salaries paid in part by the contribution of George Soros, NAF’s alleged ‘bi-partisan’ reputation becomes an ever harder pill to swallow.

Even the chairman of the New America Foundation’s board, Eric Schmidt, can be called into question. Schmidt, the Chairman and CEO of Google, not only campaigned for President Obama but is also rumored to be on the short list for Commerce Secretary. Given all the incestuous political ties, it remains difficult to ignore the administration’s ability to force the hand of various non-profits.

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The Washington think tank New America Foundation has been reporting on drone strikes in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq for quite some time and its tally of kills by U.S. drones reveals an interesting thing. It shows that drone kills under President Obama are far and away higher than those under Bush.

Reliable numbers of those killed by U.S. drones are obviously hard to come by. Strikes are deep in unfriendly territory and subject to obfuscation by both a U.S. government that isn’t too keen on reporting kills as well as its enemies that try to downplay the strikes in order to discredit their effectiveness. Because of this the NAF reports a range between which the truth may lie.

For instance, in these first few months of 2010 NAF reports that so far between 141 and 240 people have been killed by U.S. predator drones. This includes “collateral damage” as well as the deaths of actual terrorists.

That is a pretty wide span, to be sure. But if we choose some middle point between the NAF’s estimates of predator drone kills we can see that during Obama’s year in office drone kills have gone up precipitously.

Between 2009 and today a middling estimate of drone kills clocks in at 692. However, according to the NAF the kills tallied by U.S. drones during the Bush years — all of the Bush years — is about 392.

The kills during this one year of Obama’s term in office seem to have doubled compared to the number during the Bush years. I’ll say that again: in just one year Obama has doubled Bush’s drone kill rate.

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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.

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