Free Press and Net Neutrality

The progressives are not anything if not creative in their nomenclature. What could be more peaceful and reassuring than a free press right?

In this day of focus groups, closing one door only to open another under another guise, we find Free Press, a media advocacy group has won the prize for deflecting negative attention by using a name that just gives you the warm fuzzies.

They are also at the center of the net neutrality efforts.

Our Purpose

Media play a huge role in our lives. TV, radio, the Internet, movies, books and newspapers inform and influence our ideas, opinions, values and beliefs. They shape our understanding of the world and give us the information we need to hold our leaders accountable. But our media system is failing.

This failure isn't natural. For far too long, corrupt media policy has been made behind closed doors in the public's name but without our informed consent. If we want better media, we need better media policies. If we want better policies, we must engage more people in policy debates and demand better media.

Basically they would have more government involvement, reduce the availability of news source to a "local" level and remove capitalist competition including rights to intellectual property. That's music, movies, books etc., to the likes of you and me.

People say what's wrong with that? Even Rick Carnes of the Huffington Post has a problem with that:

"The bottom line is that Free Press is pretty explicit in their desire to wipe out every significant media business - news, movies, music, cable and telecommunications - and replace them with some sort of government facsimile, all to further McChesney's abstract revolutionary vision. They say they are for a free press and independent media, but how free and independent can media be when the government is paying the bills. As a longtime advocate of freedom of speech and expression in creative works, I worry greatly about the government becoming too involved in the information, media and creative industries. Don't you?"

Too much ado about nothing? Maybe. But I like to know the players and Robert McChesney, co-founder of Free Press is quite the character:

"There is no real answer, but to remove, brick by brick, the capitalist system itself, rebuilding the entire society on socialist principles."

That is his plan. In an interview he gives a little insite into how this has been an ongoing plan with the left: “What should we do about the problem of the media?” There was a traditional Left response available at the time: “we understand that the media is not separate from, but an integral part of how capitalist power is upheld in society; when we make the revolution or the revolution just happens, the problem of the media will be resolved then.”

Not if but when the revolution happens.