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[Commentary] What originally appeared as a visible but subtle change of direction at Venezuelan television station Glovovisión has in the last two weeks become a raucous turning point with multiple journalists being fired or resigning.
The turmoil leaves Globovisión’s role as an opposition outlet in doubt and appears to represent a new extension of the Venezuelan government’s control over broadcast media. Following Guillermo Zuloaga’s announcement in March that he had agreed in principle to the sale of Globovisión it was finally acquired at the beginning of May by a business group rumored to have ties with the Government. The announcement of the hiring of journalists Vladimir Villegas and Leopoldo Castillo as station directors generated considerable optimism about the new Globovisión and its independence. However on May 13, after a meeting with the new owners, Mr. Villegas surprisingly announced on Twitter that he would not be accepting the position after all.
Is Venezuela's opposition TV channel bowing to government pressure?
Telecom Italia has agreed to separate its fixed-line network into a new business as the group continues to consider a proposal to merge its mobile operations with Hong Kong’s Hutchison Whampoa.
The company’s board voted in favor of plans to create a separate company that would own the copper and fiber-line network. That company would, at least initially, be wholly controlled by Telecom Italia. The separation is the first step to a sale of a minority stake in the business to Cassa Depositi e Prestiti, a state-backed fund, which would help raise cash for heavily indebted Telecom Italia.
Telecom Italia agrees to separate fixed-line network
In a study submitted to the Federal Communications Commission, the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council and BIA/Kelsey conclude that it appears that “cross-media interests' impact on minority and women broadcast ownership is not sufficiently material to be a material justification for tightening or retaining the [cross-ownership] rules.”
"The results of this study, while not dispositive, do provide evidence that the impact of cross-media ownership on minority and women broadcast ownership is probably negligible," said BIA/Kelsey. One reason they were not dispositive was that the survey was based on only 14 respondents (representing 31 stations) in markets with grandfathered cross-ownership combos and with stations owned by minorities and/or women. BIA/Kelsey conceded more responses would have been preferable, but argued that it was never meant to be a comprehensive, random sample survey of all cross-media combos in markets with minority and women owners. It said the answers it did get were "sufficiently compelling and unambiguous" to support its conclusion of, essentially, no harm, no foul. But there were caveats. MMTC President David Honig pointed out in a letter to the FCC that there was one market in which all the respondents mentioned cross-media interests as having a competitive impact. That came in a medium market with a combination of the only daily newspaper, a full-power TV station and radio stations. A second caveat was that the study only looked at the impact of cross-ownership on diverse ownership.
"MMTC based its conclusions on an opinion survey of existing media owners," said Free Press Policy Director Matt Wood. "This qualitative approach might have yielded some interesting anecdotes, but it's not a substitute for real analysis of likely outcomes from the disastrous rule changes pushed by former [FCC] Chairman [Julius] Genachowski. We'll review the survey, and take part if and when the FCC seeks comment on it. But there's nothing surprising about the fact that MMTC -- a group on the record as supporting more media consolidation -- would design and produce a survey claiming that no harm results from consolidation."
Broadcasters: Impact of Cross-Ownership on Minority/Female Ownership 'Probably Negligible' Cross-media Rivals Don’t Worry Broadcasters (TVNewsCheck)
The National Federation of the Blind and the Motion Picture Association of America are working together to support a treaty that would allow published works that have been converted to formats more accessible to blind and visually impaired users — such as audiobooks — to be distributed around the globe.
“There is a book famine that affects the worldwide blind community,” said Chris Danielsen, the director of public affairs for the National Federation for the Blind. Copyright restrictions have made it difficult for the blind community to gain access to published works, Danielsen said, because even when someone has put the considerable work it takes into converting a book into a format that a blind person can use they're very limited in the way they can distribute the adapted work. While 57 countries, including the United States, have already made some exceptions in their copyright laws to make it easier to convert texts into formats for the blind, it’s illegal to distribute these texts across borders. That, Danielsen said, means that there’s a lot of duplication. The proposed treaty was crafted as a result of collaboration from blind advocates around the world and the World Intellectual Property Organization and would allow more accessible materials to be sent across national boundaries. The treaty is set to be discussed at a conference in Morocco in June.
National Federation of the Blind, MPAA join forces to back book treaty MPAA, National Federation of the Blind Team on Treaty Stance (B&C)
[Commentary] Today, information warfare, also called cyberwarfare, while still in its infancy, is disruptive.
Cyberattacks can include stealing valuable corporate research, intercepting military communications and the destruction of computer systems. These attacks can be used to augment traditional, kinetic attacks – those using troops and guns, or to destroy physical assets such as power generation facilities or systems used to control emergency services. Cyberattacks present a great risk to industrialized nations, which are highly connected and extremely dependent on computers from the electric grid and financial services to transportation and national defense. Developing nations, such as emerging and frontier countries throughout parts of Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia are less dependent on computers. As a result, they have a lower cyber risk profile. Many developing nations see cyber as an equalizer – a mechanism to shift advantage in the face of superior technology and numbers. As a result, these countries are making investments to develop talent, techniques and technology related to information warfare. For example, it's difficult to get empirical evidence about North Korea, but it has been sited that in North Korea approximately 500 "cyber warriors" graduate every year. We must build our security strategies with the understanding that despite having strong or weak security, given the proper resources, time and motivation, compromise is virtually imminent. Public and private sector organizations have been focused too long on incident prevention without adequate controls for incident detection and response.
[Brian Contos is chief security officer at forensics firm Solera Networks]
Why cyberwarfare is the great equalizer
The National Association of Broadcasters is firing back at claims by the American Cable Association that broadcasters collectively negotiating retransmission consent in a market is consumer unfriendly.
While the FCC's two-year-old retransmission proposals are unlikely to be acted on anytime soon, the FCC has raised the issue of joint station agreements -- which often include joint retransmission negotiations -- in other proceedings, including its media ownership and program access rulemakings. ACA has long argued that the joint agreements are a way for broadcasters to skirt local ownership caps and give them undue market power in carriage agreements that wind up translating to higher cable bills for their customers. In a filing in the retransmission docket at the FCC, NAB said it was countering "erroneous contentions" by cable TV interests in recent submissions, then goes on to cite several ACA filings. NAB asserts that cable operators are misleading the commission about the impact of retrans and with claims of improper broadcast bargaining, are abusing their market power and are the ones hurting the public.
NAB Defends Joint Retransmission Negotiations NAB to FCC: ACA Wrong on Retransmission (TVNewsCheck)
During the 2012 campaign, Barack Obama’s reelection team had an underappreciated asset: Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt. He helped recruit talent, choose technology, and coach the campaign manager, Jim Messina, on the finer points of leading a large organization. “On election night he was in our boiler room in Chicago,” says David Plouffe, then a senior White House adviser. Schmidt had a particular affinity for a group of engineers and statisticians tucked away beneath a disco ball in a darkened corner of the office known as “the Cave.” The data analytics team, led by 30-year-old Dan Wagner, is credited with producing Obama’s surprising 5 million-vote margin of victory.
Schmidt thought enough of the team that when the campaign ended, he put up several million dollars to keep its core together as a new consulting firm, Civis Analytics, run by Wagner and staffed by two dozen of his former employees. They share ownership with Schmidt, its sole investor. The plan is to bring the same Big Data expertise that guided the most expensive presidential campaign in history to companies and nonprofits.
Google's Eric Schmidt Invests in Obama's Big Data Brains
Netflix wants to spend up to 15 percent of its entire licensing budget on the production of original content within the next few years, according to Chief Content Officer, Ted Sarandos, who said at the Nomura 3rd Annual U.S. Media & Telecom Summit in New York that the company is going to keep growing its original output over the next few years, with the goal of roughly doubling the number of titles within the next 18 months.
Netflix wants to spend up to 15 percent of its content cash on originals
[Commentary] The escalation of advanced persistent threats to federal systems has cybersecurity leaders rethinking their network protection and risk mitigation strategies. Nearly 50,000 incidents were reported by agencies in fiscal 2012, a 5 percent increase over the previous year. The Obama Administration’s response to these threats underscores the danger of cyberattacks. A February executive order, for instance, mandated the development of a framework to protect the nation’s critical infrastructure from such threats, and President Obama’s fiscal 2014 budget proposal calls for an $800 million increase in Defense Department spending on cybersecurity. The increase in threat activity points to an uncomfortable reality: There is no such thing as absolute safety.
The Human Side of Cyber Threats
It only took about six weeks for developers to take all of the theoretically creepy things the Internet dreamt up about the face computer of the future and turn those into real-life Google Glass nightmares.
In addition to that creepy walking-and-stalking app Wink, Glassholes can look forward to a porn app, plus apps that that take advantage of an upcoming facial recognition API. Yes, the reality of Glass wearers surreptitiously watching sex videos is upon us. For most people, however, Google's new facial recognition API presents a more terrifying scenario in terms of creepiness — you know, because of the privacy implications.
All Your Worst Fears About Google Glass Are Coming True, and It's All Your Fault