MEDIAThese are articles previously published by Toward Freedom related to this category.
Will audiences keep tuning in to radio if the information and music they want can be more easily accessed by other means? Can FM compete with the quality and reliability of new portable devices? And will listeners continue to pay attention to long fund drive pitches? These are some of the difficult questions public and community radio must answer in the near future.
"The technology of journalism has advanced more in the last decade than in the 100 years before," notes former Toward Freedom Editor Greg Guma in a recent post on his new blog, Maverick Media. A witness to and participant in many of the radical changes in mass media since the late 1960s, he became Pacifica Radio's executive director in 2006. Now, after 40 years as a journalist, organizer and manager, he looks back - and forward - at media politics and the alternative press.
On the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq, media coverage of the occupation continues to decline. According to a survey by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, the percentage of news stories devoted to the war has sharply declined since last year, dropping from an average of 15% last July to just 3% in February, 2008. Public interest has also dropped.
When independent journalists step beyond the corporate media's code of courtly niceties in dealing with government policy and officials, they are often saddled with the label of 'advocacy journalism.' Meanwhile, the incestuous relationships between mainstream journalists and policy makers escape popular scrutiny. Recently I spoke Robert Jensen, a professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, about the value of independent media, and the question of objectivity in mainstream and independent news.Robert Jensen
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which makes policy governing the Internet's Domain Name System, recently held its 30th International Public Meeting in Los Angeles. ICANN has stumbled into serious controversy as it threatens to establish policies for systematic censorship of generic top-level domains ("gTLDs" such as '.com' or '.org'), and it left these issues unresolved as it ended the week with a meeting of the Board of Directors on Friday, November 2nd.
Congress created The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) in 1967. It is a private, non-profit organization that funds over 1,000 public television and radio stations in the U.S. using an annual appropriation from Congress. The CPB also funds producers, educators and technology specialists for the development of new public television and radio programming and new media.
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