October 2012

Television remains the top source for political election coverage for consumers and is cited by voters as the most important media for deciding which way to vote, according to a new study from Mindshare about media habits defining the 2012 campaign season.

The WPP-owned agency conducted a nationally representative online survey of 1,032 adults in late September. While much has been made of declining broadcast network news ratings in recent years, the Mindshare survey showed that TV was the go-to medium for election coverage. Sixty percent of respondents said they tuned to broadcast network news coverage of the presidential race -- more than any other medium. Cable TV news was cited as the second-most-favored medium for keeping up with politics. Fifty-three percent said they used the medium for doing so. Neither the Internet or newspapers was ranked third. Rather, it was word of mouth.

The agency charged with securing U.S. embassies plans to purchase a system that could locate and track diplomats during an emergency based on the signals beaming from their satellite and cell phones, solicitation documents show.

That system could be extremely effective at monitoring security during an embassy or consulate attack, such as the Sept. 11 attacks in Libya and Egypt, but also could expose diplomats to new dangers if the system is hacked. The personnel tracking locator system would replace nine-year-old technology that the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service uses to pinpoint the location of employees both at embassies and domestically, the solicitation documents said.

Heath Mallory works at Western Iowa Telephone, a small independent phone company. He says recent plans by the Federal Communications Commission to make high-speed Internet access available in rural areas could also slow it down.

That's because, if these FCC changes cause Western Iowa Telephone to lose money, they may not be able expand and maintain their rural broadband service. "What we're primarily concerned with is, carriers that have used our networks in the past are no longer going to be forced to pay us to use our network and what that means is our end user customers, our telephone customers, our cable TV customers, our Internet customers are going to have to pay higher rates" Mallory said. So, how does this affect pricing changes? The FCC tells us the old system of compensating phone companies for processing calls from other phone companies was becoming ineffective, especially as people started making calls using broadband connections. In some areas fees varied greatly. The FCC issued a release, explaining these changes. "The Connect America Fund is designed to expand broadband access to the 19 million rural Americans who lack it -- including over 200,000 rural Iowans -- while at the same time increasing fiscal responsibility in order to be fair to the consumers and small businesses nationwide who pay into the fund." That means, for some rural locations where subsidies artificially lowered phone service, bills could go up. Western Iowa Telephone is currently evaluating a possible rate increase as a result of the FCC's changes. Mallory says one option you have before his company raises rates is to write to your local representative.

In an appearance on “The Daily Show” with Jon Stewart, statistician and New York Times blogger Nate Silver turned media critic:

If you look long-term, how do people on “The McLaughlin Group” do? They get half their predictions right and half of them wrong. Because they’re basically entertainers. People criticize this show maybe and say, ‘Oh, it’s entertainment masquerading as news,’ but a lot of news is really entertainment masquerading as news. ……the media is the one who covers the campaigns in a silly way a lot of the time, where a lot of the time, look, nothing happens over the course of a day. Now we’re actually in a pennant race, so it matters, but the average day in April, when there’s campaigning, nothing of importance at all happens. But you still have to have a lead story… You have to generate fake news. …There’s always someone who can take the other side of the argument. The way that news coverage works it’s a lot of kind of point-counterpoint, and no matter how ridiculous the point is there’s always someone to take the counterpoint. …