A Voters Guide to Indie Media Issues

[BridgeTheGap]

Where do the candidates stand when it comes to supporting alternative media?

So far this election, the media’s focus has been limited to calling (rather unsuccessfully) the long and short odds of the presidential candidates as they jockey for primary positions. Analysis of the candidates’ platforms has been scarce. We know that change = good, terrorists = bad, and health care reform is important (minus the details).

Beyond a few touchstone issues, though, information turns from scant to nonexistent. The sorry state of mainstream election coverage makes this much clear: A flourishing independent media should be a campaign issue. So we ferreted out the candidates’ stances on some key issues that determine the health of the country’s independent media, and homed in on two major strains:

First, we looked at their positions on media ownership, specifically recent trends toward consolidation. This includes the candidates’ responses to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rule change in December that relaxed restrictions on a single company’s ability to own both a newspaper and a broadcast outlet in the same market. The rule change is a boon to industry moguls, and, as the Nation reports, poses a great threat to media diversity.

Second, we examined their stances on network neutrality—the belief that in order to preserve the democratic nature of the Internet, service providers shouldn’t be able to charge more based on content, website destination, or platform. In other words, the information highway shouldn’t become an information toll way. This fundamental tenet of the internet has helped usher in an era of unprecedented openness and participation in the creation of media.

http://tinyurl.com/22h8ug

[KoKo]

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