BENTON'S COMMUNICATIONS-RELATED HEADLINES for THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2012
Two hearings of note today: 1) Investigation of the Security Threat Posed by Chinese Telecommunications Companies Huawei and ZTE and 2) Creating Opportunities through Improved Government Spectrum Efficiency
http://benton.org/calendar/2012-09-13/
RADIO/TELEVISION
Negative Media Portrayals are Fueling Stereotypes about Immigrants and Latinos - press release
After ‘Today’ Criticism, NBC News Chief Apologies to Affiliates
TVB: New York's Local News Outdraws Five Cable News Networks Combined [links to web]
Ryvicker: Local TV Advertising is Here to Stay [links to web]
TV, Radio Ad Spend In Local Markets On Rise [links to web]
Sirius XM CEO Mel Karmazin expects to leave after Liberty takeover [links to web]
President Nominates NBCU International Chief Jeff Shell to Head BBG [links to web]
Small Cable Ops to FCC: Attention Must Be Paid [links to web]
ELECTIONS AND MEDIA
Study: Facebook increases voter turnout
ITIF Report Compares Obama, Romney Broadband Telecom Policies - research [links to web]
Campaigns Target Undecided Voters with TV [links to web]
Study: Obama Bounce Tied to Ad Strategy
Democrats Now More Positive on Campaign 2012 - research [links to web]
Political Ad Tracker: Frontline Intel From A Battleground State - op-ed [links to web]
Crossroads hits Dems with $2.5 million buy [links to web]
WIRELESS/SPECTRUM
Behold! The a la carte pay TV model is coming to your mobile data plan
Under-the-Table Subsidies - analysis
Taxation by Condition: Spectrum Repurposing at the FCC and the Prolonging of Spectrum Exhaust - research
T-Mobile: Broadcast Spectrum Will Be Insufficient [links to web]
House lawmakers examine how to keep app economy growing [links to web]
Rep Markey Introduces Mobile Device Privacy Act [links to web]
A billion smartphones shipping by 2016 [links to web]
AT&T’s Wireless Division Reaches Tentative Accord With CWA Union [links to web]
INTERNET/BROADBAND
Online Gambling Bill Stalled by Tactical Spat [links to web]
Coalition Launched to Oppose Net Sales Tax Legislation [links to web]
Supply and Demand in Kansas City - analysis [links to web]
Senate Unlikely to Revisit Cybersecurity Bill before Election, Lieberman Says [links to web]
Sen Wyden to White House: Cyber order should focus on critical infrastructure [links to web]
FCC Chairman Genachowski Touts Promise of Digital Learning and Applauds National School Speed Test Launch - press release [links to web]
CONTENT
YouTube Blocks Anti-Islam Video In Egypt, Libya
Government's e-book case helps Amazon build toward a monopoly - analysis
Data Points: News Division
Media Ecosystem Feeds on Anything Apple
Twitter clash between idealism and profit [links to web]
OWNERSHIP
Could Facebook help Google’s antitrust problem? - analysis
Sirius XM CEO Mel Karmazin expects to leave after Liberty takeover [links to web]
GOVERNMENT & COMMUNICATIONS
Cops might finally need a warrant to read your Gmail
Justice Department Releases a Report on Accessibility of Federal Government Electronic and Information Technology - press release [links to web]
Stronger tech growth possible -- if Washington doesn't blow it [links to web]
Cities Must Change Facebook Page Names, or Else [links to web]
FCC REFORM
FCC Regulatory Fee Process Needs to Be Updated - research [links to web]
STORIES FROM ABROAD
UK spy agency asks academics to tackle cyber risks [links to web]
Competition heats up for sports TV rights [links to web]
MORE ONLINE
FTC Charges Second "Affiliate Network" of Internet Advertisers with Deceiving Consumers by Using Fake News Sites - press release [links to web]
RADIO/TELEVISION
NHMC POLL FINDS THAT NEGATIVE MEDIA PORTRAYALS ARE FUELING STEREOTYPES ABOUT IMMIGRANTS AND LATINOS
[SOURCE: National Hispanic Media Coalition, AUTHOR: Press release]
The National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC) released a national poll showing that media portrayals of Latinos and immigrants are fueling rampant negative stereotypes among the general population that are diminishing perceptions of these groups throughout the United States. After viewing just one minute of media content, poll respondents changed the way they view Latinos. When asked if Latinos were intelligent, those who consumed negative news and entertainment pieces were much more likely to rate Latinos as unintelligent, while those who consumed positive pieces were much more likely to rate Latinos as intelligent. The poll found there is a common misperception that Latinos and undocumented immigrants are one in the same, with 17% of survey respondents actually believing that the majority of U.S. Latinos are undocumented.
The poll also found that:
People exposed to negative entertainment or news narratives about Latinos and/or immigrants hold the most unfavorable and hostile views about both groups.
Negative portrayals of Latinos and immigrants are pervasive in news and entertainment media. Consequently, non-Latinos commonly believe that many media-promoted negative stereotypes about these groups are true.
Conservative talk radio and Fox News audiences are less likely to be personally familiar with Latinos yet more likely to hold anti-immigrant and anti-Latino views. Without direct experience with Latinos, media takes on a larger role in establishing these opinions and attitudes.
Even those most disposed to positive opinions about Latinos have less favorable opinions when exposed to negative entertainment or news narratives.
In discussing those in this country without documentation, the term commonly employed by some media outlets, “illegal aliens,” elicits much more negatives feelings than the term “undocumented immigrants.”
Non-Latinos report seeing Latinos in stereotypically negative or subordinate roles (gardeners, maids, dropouts, and criminals) in television and film.
Tomorrow the NHMC will file letters with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), sharing this new poll data and renewing unanswered requests that NHMC made back in 2009 for the agencies to study the impacts of hate speech in media.
benton.org/node/134311 | National Hispanic Media Coalition
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NBC APOLOGY
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Bill Carter]
As it promised, NBC did not apologize on the air for its decision not to observe a moment of silence during the “Today” show on Sept. 11. But Steve Capus, the president of NBC News, did send out a message to the managers of NBC’s affiliated stations, which acknowledged that they had been hit with a storm of criticism from their viewers over the decision – and apologized for putting the stations through that. The incident received wide coverage, mainly because “Today” was the only one of the three network morning shows not to participate in the moment of silence in memory of those who died on 9/11, but also because “Today” happened to be in the midst of a segment that seemed to invite ridicule: an interview with Kris Jenner, the matriarch of the tabloid-darling Kardashian clan, who was discussing her breast augmentation.
benton.org/node/134327 | New York Times
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ELECTIONS AND MEDIA
FACEBOOK AND TURNOUT
[SOURCE: The Hill, AUTHOR: Alicia Cohn]
Online peer pressure has a strong influence on getting out the vote, according to a new study released by researchers at the University of California in San Diego (UCSD). About one third of a million more people showed up to vote in the United States during the 2010 midterm elections because of a single Facebook message posted on Election Day. The study is good news both for Facebook, an increasingly indispensable political tool, and for the many political campaigns now using the popular social network to connect with supporters. The study is a strong indication that online support, measured on Facebook as “likes,” and engagement, measured as the number of people “talking about” a branded page, has measurable offline consequences. The study, published in the interdisciplinary scientific journal Nature, is based on an experiment involving a nonpartisan, pro-voting Facebook post viewed by 60 million users on Election Day in Nov. 2010.
benton.org/node/134310 | Hill, The | Politico
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OBAMA BOUNCE AND AD STRATEGY
[SOURCE: AdWeek, AUTHOR: Katy Bachman]
President Barack Obama may have his ad strategy to thank for his post-Democratic National Convention 6 percentage point bounce. Both parties avoided a heavy ad schedule during the convention weeks. But Obama and the PACs favoring him aired more than twice the number of ads aired by GOP challenger Mitt Romney and the pro-Romney PACs. Now, a new analysis is tying that heavier ad schedule to Obama's bounce in the polls. According to the Wesleyan Media Project's analysis of Kantar Media Campaign Media Analysis Group data between Aug. 26 and Sept. 8, Obama and his allies aired 40,000 ads. During the same time, Romney and his allies aired 18,000 ads on broadcast and national cable. That added up to $21.1 million spent by the pro-Obama camp, versus $12.9 million spent by the Romney side.
benton.org/node/134315 | AdWeek
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WIRELESS/SPECTRUM
A LA CARTE MOBILE DATA
[SOURCE: GigaOm, AUTHOR: Stacey Higginbotham]
Mobile operator 3 Hong Kong will offer its subscribers a WhatsApp Roaming Pass for $8 ($1 USD) a month that gives them unlimited access to WhatsApp services without counting it against their data caps, or a $48 ($6.19 USD) daily pass offering unlimited WhatsApp use and 5MB of service in 78 destinations around the world. WhatsApp, the popular texting app that has taken a huge chunk out of operators’ lucrative texting plans around the world, has been working to get closer to carriers. But this deal is worth paying attention to because if it succeeds in giving customers what they want while also helping carriers mitigate the margin-shaving effect of over the top services, it may be the future of mobile data plans. Instead of buying a bucket of bytes, what if users ended up buying a bucket of bytes and access to a few favorite apps? Then the mobile pricing looks more like an a la carte cable offering and less like forcing people to pay an arbitrary fee for a device ($40 for a smartphone!) in addition to the bucket of bytes as new plans from AT&T and Verizon do.
benton.org/node/134295 | GigaOm
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UNDER-THE-TABLE SUBSIDIES
[SOURCE: Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, AUTHOR: Richard Bennett]
[Commentary] The Rural Cellular Association, the small carriers’ lobbying group, pressed their case for handset subsidies. They’re formed a new front group called The Interoperability Alliance. If they have their way, handsets will become larger, slower, more expensive, and heavier for the 70% of Americans who have the poor taste to buy cellular service from the two largest carriers. The “interoperability” that the group seeks has three actual effects:
It makes the low-cost spectrum licenses that RCA members bought for the lower 700 MHz band more valuable.
It raises the cost of mainstream smartphones.
It puts the FCC in the middle of the design process for future smartphones.
benton.org/node/134290 | Information Technology and Innovation Foundation
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SPECTRUM REPURPOSING
[SOURCE: Phoenix Center, AUTHOR: T Randolph Beard, George Ford, Lawrence Spiwak, Michael Stern]
We show how the Federal Communications Commission’s regulatory process may be used to impede the efficient functioning of a secondary market for commercial spectrum. In particular, we show that imposing (and threatening to impose) significant conditions when firms seek to repurpose spectrum from a low-value to a higher-value use acts as a “tax” and thus reduces the incentives of firms to exchange spectrum in the secondary market. As a result, “taxation by condition” will discourage the larger scale transactions necessary to resolve spectrum exhaust, though we may still observe many deals of a less material nature that will attract less attention and thus fewer conditions. Our analysis also reveals that in many cases the arguments to condition spectrum licenses based on “market power” concerns are misguided.
benton.org/node/134287 | Phoenix Center
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CONTENT
YOUTUBE BLOCKS VIDEO IN EGYPT, LIBYA
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Amir Efrati]
Google's YouTube unit said it blocked a controversial video that negatively depicts the Prophet Muhammad from appearing in Muslim countries including Libya and Egypt, where anti-American riots took place in recent days. The blocked video, which is available for viewing on YouTube's website in most countries, is a 14-minute segment billed as "Muhammad Movie Trailer." The clip depicts Muhammad as a sex-fueled womanizer, among other negative traits, and has been viewed more than 200,000 times since being published on the site in July. YouTube says Egypt is the "top location" for viewers of the video, followed by Tunisia and Canada. A YouTube spokesman said that "given the very difficult situation in Libya and Egypt we have temporarily restricted access" to the video in both countries. But he added that the video is available on many other websites and "is clearly within our guidelines and so will stay on YouTube." He added: "We work hard to create a community everyone can enjoy and which also enables people to express different opinions. This can be a challenge because what's OK in one country can be offensive elsewhere."
benton.org/node/134328 | Wall Street Journal
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AMAZON AND E-BOOKS
[SOURCE: Los Angeles Times, AUTHOR: Michael Hiltzik]
[Commentary] What's wrong with nipping a nefarious scheme in the bud, especially if the result is that Amazon.com, which was the supposed target of the alleged conspiracy, is liberated to resume selling e-books to you at the rock-bottom price of $9.99? Plenty, if that price is designed to drive off all of Amazon's e-book competition — and kill off the last remaining brick-and-mortar bookstores too — so it can set its own prices as it wishes down the line. Technology is confronting publishers with plenty of tsoris. Finding an audience for unfamiliar new literary voices is immeasurably harder online than in the aisles of a physical bookstore. People may read more after buying a Kindle, but buyers of the iPad and the multimedia Kindle Fire may not. Games, video, Facebook, Twitter, all compete with books for the customer's attention. The last thing publishing needed was to compound all that with the resurgent threat of a single domineering retail behemoth. Yet with this settlement, that's what they're getting.
benton.org/node/134304 | Los Angeles Times
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DATA POINTS: NEWS DIVISION
[SOURCE: AdWeek, AUTHOR: Lucia Moses]
With people increasingly getting their news on the go, the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute surveyed mobile media users on their attitudes towards news sites. The good news for journalists is, mobile users, like consumers overall, place a high value on news that's produced by the professionals (63 percent). They have a higher preference for news that interests them (48.3 percent versus 44.1 percent of consumers overall). Attitudes towards advertising also differ slightly, with mobile media users less likely to consider ads to be of value. When it comes to the future of mobile news, consumers are divided, but mobile users are more likely to believe they'll rely on their devices for all their news in the next 10 years.
benton.org/node/134316 | AdWeek
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ANYTHING APPLE
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Keach Hagey]
The public's bottomless appetite for Apple news has turned producing media about the company into big business, regardless of the medium. That is because the Apple story merges the high advertising rates typically associated with technology news with the mass-entertainment appeal of one of the business world's greatest stories. Walter Isaacson's biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was the best-selling book on Amazon.com last year. Magazines with Mr. Jobs on the cover tend to sell 25% to 45% better on the newsstand than the previous month's issue, according to the Magazine Information Network. Last October, Time's commemorative Steve Jobs cover sold more than twice as well as the magazine's average. The Apple halo even extends to television.
benton.org/node/134326 | Wall Street Journal
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OWNERSHIP
FACEBOOK, GOOGLE AND ANTITRUST
[SOURCE: Washington Post, AUTHOR: Cecilia Kang]
It seemed like a shot across the bow at Google: Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said that his social network is working on building its search business, noting that it already gets about 1 billion search queries a day. But could Facebook’s entry into search help Google as it defends itself in an antitrust probe about its practices as the dominant search engine? Possibly, some analysts say. The Federal Trade Commission in the past has been sensitive to the swift changes in the tech sector. In 2010, it approved Google’s acquisition of AdMob, a mobile advertising network, in part because during its investigation Apple announced that it was launching a rival mobile ad network.
benton.org/node/134305 | Washington Post
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GOVERNMENT & COMMUNICATIONS
ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATIONS PRIVACY ACT
[SOURCE: ars technica, AUTHOR: Cyrus Farivar]
Right now, if the cops want to read my e-mail, it’s pretty trivial for them to do so. All they have to do is ask my online e-mail provider. But a new bill set to be introduced in the Senate Judiciary Committee by its chair, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), seems to stand the best chance of finally changing that situation and giving e-mail stored on remote servers the same privacy protections as e-mail stored on one's home computer. When Congress passed the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), a time when massive online storage of e-mail was essentially unimaginable, it was presumed that if you hadn’t actually bothered to download your e-mail, it could be considered "abandoned" after 180 days. By that logic, law enforcement would not need a warrant to go to the e-mail provider or ISP to get the messages that are older than 180 days; police only need to show that they have "reasonable grounds to believe" the information gathered would be useful in an investigation. Many Americans and legal scholars have found this standard, in today’s world, problematic. Chairman Leahy, who was one of ECPA’s original authors, proposed similar changes in May 2011, but that was never even brought to a vote in the committee. The new version, which keeps the most important element of the 2011 proposal, will be incorporated into a larger bill aimed at revising the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA).
benton.org/node/134320 | Ars Technica
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