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US voters are becoming oblivious to the political ads dominating the airwaves during this election campaign, according to a study of media consumption habits.
Nearly a third of likely voters had not watched live television in the past seven days, according to a June poll conducted by Say Media, a digital publishing company, in conjunction with two political advertising consultancies and two pollsters that represent both Democrats and Republicans. Respondents watched an average of 20 hours of video a week, but nearly half of that time was on platforms that make it easy to avoid commercials, such as the web or digital video recorders. Of respondents who own DVRs, 85 per cent said they skipped ads at least three-quarters of the time. The 2012 campaign has seen a surge in political advertising paid for by super-political action committees and other outside groups enabled by the Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United ruling in 2010. But the study’s findings illustrate how changing habits of media consumption are making it harder for candidates to reach voters with TV ads alone.
Voters turn on but tune out political ads
Dozens of bystanders grabbed their cellphones and hit the record button as a knife-wielding man skipped backward through Times Square. Some witnesses, holding their cellphones above their heads to capture the action, ran alongside police officers as they pursued the man down Seventh Avenue with guns drawn. The dramatic scene, which unfolded on a sunny afternoon at the crossroads of one of the world’s busiest tourist destinations, ended as two officers confronted the man, Darrius H. Kennedy, 51, and fatally shot him when, the police say, he lunged at them.
Minutes after the shooting, video of the episode, which included audio of hammerlike gun shots, shouts of officers ordering the crowd to “move back,” and cursing from stunned spectators, was all over the Internet. Several witnesses posted their video on YouTube or Facebook and provided it to television stations. Viewers were riveted. The video also caught the attention of law enforcement officials. In the age of the ubiquitous smartphone, it is increasingly common for crimes, shootings involving the police and catastrophes to be captured on video, often prompting investigators to seek the video as evidence to help them piece together what happened. But the quests also raise questions of what rights the police have to witnesses’ smartphones and whether police officers make clear that bystanders are not legally obligated to turn over their phones.
Police Sought Cellphones for Video of Times Square Shooting
More than a dozen big merchants are expected to announce August 15 their plans to jointly develop a mobile-payments network that would battle similar services from Google and other companies, people involved in the effort said. Wal-Mart, Target, 7-Eleven, and Sunoco are among the companies hoping to elbow their way into the burgeoning market that turns smartphones into devices for making purchases. The push by merchants, called Merchant Customer Exchange, or MCX, is at an early stage, and the companies haven't set a launch date or hired a chief executive.
Payments Network Takes On Google
Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-FL) -- chairman of the House Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations -- was refusing to concede late August 14 to a veterinarian who has never held elected office. But by all appearances, Florida voters had delivered a stunning defeat to Rep Stearns who put the White House on the hot seat over Solyndra and helped trigger this year's Komen-Planned Parenthood blowup.
Political novice Ted Yoho, leading by 829 votes out of 63,690 counted with all precincts reporting, wasn't waiting to celebrate victory. It's possible that still-to-be-counted provisional ballots and overseas absentee ballots could eat into Yoho's lead, or even reverse the outcome. For now, though, Yoho's margin is 1.3 percent, outside the 0.5-percent margin that Florida law sets for an automatic recount. Yoho had 34.4 percent of the vote to Stearns's 33.1 percent in a four-candidate field. Still, the outcome was an unexpected rebuke for Stearns, an incumbent whose $2.1 million campaign war chest far outweighed Yoho's $129,500 as of late July — and who, as recently as March, appeared to be a rising Republican rock star. Rep Stearns was battling in a newly redrawn North Florida district under a voter-approved redistricting system that was aimed at reducing gerrymandering. He also suffered a number of self-inflicted injuries, including incidents in which he questioned whether Obama's birth certificate was “legitimate,” admitted he had wrongly accused the White House of withholding Solyndra-related emails, and incorrectly boasted that his probe of the failed solar company had led to “the first subpoena issued to the White House since the Watergate era.”
Rep Cliff Stearns trailing newcomer in Florida primary
[Commentary] Mooresville (NC) is best known as "Race City, U.S.A.," home of Nascar. But these days Mooresville is leading the nation in a different way—by using digital technology to improve public education.
"Fixing Our Schools," a documentary I am hosting for the Fox News Channel this Sunday, looks at how digital learning is being used by schools like those in Mooresville to help fix our broken education system. The big change in Mooresville began when Superintendent Mark Edwards took the radical step of cutting back on teachers and using the money to give every student from third grade through high school a laptop computer. All of their textbooks, notes, learning materials and assignments are computerized, allowing teachers and parents to track their progress in real time. If a student is struggling, their computer-learning program can be adjusted to meet their needs and get them back up to speed. And the best students no longer wait on slow students to catch up. Top students are constantly pushed to their limits by new curricular material on their laptops. Nearly every phase of students' education is a data-point that can be tracked, analyzed and compared with their peers. The bottom line is that bringing more technology into the classroom shows tremendous promise to improve schools. And any doubters should take a look at the little school district now speeding along in Mooresville. [Williams is a columnist for the Hill and a political analyst for Fox News Channel]
A High-Tech Fix for Broken Schools
Wireless provider AT&T, seeking to bring attention to a serious road-safety problem, urged all Americans to pledge to stop texting while driving, and then to join with others Sept. 19 to make a lifelong commitment to never do so again.
AT&T, its employees and other supporters are calling on all drivers to go to www.itcanwait.com to take the no-texting-and-driving pledge, and then share their promise with others via Twitter (#itcanwait) and Facebook. The pledge effort is part of the company’s public awareness campaign aimed directly at stopping the dangerous practice of texting while driving.
AT&T Calls on Nation's Drivers to Pledge: Never Text and Drive
[Commentary] I recently had an opportunity to address the annual Minority Media and Telecommunications Council Conference in Washington, DC. MMTC has for years toiled mightily to enhance the role of minorities in our telecom and media enterprises. But the current woeful state of diversity in our media goes beyond the ability of any single organization to resolve. Any proposal for truly meaningful remedies runs head-long into special interest opposition in the private sector and, more often than not, lack of interest in the public sector. Both sectors are at fault; both sectors are in default. The bottom line is that minorities have been grievously short-changed; diversity in all its many forms has been largely abandoned as a regulatory objective; and our civic dialogue has been diminished just when it most needs to be nourished. I want to expand upon my remarks at MMTC because we have to develop a sense of national urgency about this problem. Our country is now nearly one-third minority—yet minority issues and cultural contributions receive shockingly sparse attention in our media. When minorities are covered, it is too often in stereotype, too infrequently based on facts. Who at this moment can really claim there is anything approaching equitable, real-world coverage of minorities and their concerns? Why are there so few programs with a minority focus? With minority lead characters? Why are so many news interviews conducted with white males instead of people of color—or women, who are actually a majority of our population? At last report, people of color own about 3 percent of full-power commercial TV stations! And the numbers are only getting worse.
Diversity Denied
After the House unanimously passed a non-binding resolution opposing international efforts to regulate the Internet, the measure's author called on the Senate to take swift action to take up the legislation.
The resolution, which passed the House earlier this month on 414-0 vote, calls on U.S. officials to work to "implement the position of the United States on Internet governance that clearly articulates the consistent and unequivocal policy of the United States to promote a global Internet free from government control and preserve and advance the successful multi-stakeholder model that governs the Internet today." In a letter, Rep. Mary Bono Mack (R-CA) -- chairman of the House Commerce Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade -- called on Senate leaders to take up her resolution when the Senate returns from its August break. Many lawmakers and other U.S .government officials have voiced concern about proposals being floated by some countries ahead of December's International Telecommunication Union conference in Dubai that would give the United Nations agency more authority over the Internet. At the Dubai conference, the ITU is set to consider changes to its international telecom treaty.
Chairman Bono Mack Urges Senate Action on Net Resolution
Demand Progress, a progressive advocacy group, launched a campaign to urge the Republican and Democratic parties to include a commitment to protecting Internet freedom in their party platforms. "It's about time for the Democratic and Republican parties to stand up for Internet Freedom — and to do it in writing," the group wrote. "2012 has been a landmark year for those who believe in the right of Americans to share information and communicate with each other free from censorship and surveillance."
Advocacy group urges parties to include Internet freedom in platforms
Verizon officials did not know that 911 emergency service was out in Fairfax County during June’s derecho storm until the county called to tell them, according to a Verizon executive and a company report to be released to local governments.
The report, to be presented August 15 to the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, for the first time acknowledges widespread failures in Verizon’s 911 emergency backup systems during the storm. It also admits significant problems with Arlington County’s 911 service that Verizon had previously denied. In addition, the report says drained batteries, faulty generators and the failure of a technician to thoroughly explore the cause of troubles extended the delays in restoring full 911 service to nearly 2.3 million residents in Fairfax, Arlington and Prince William counties and Manassas and Manassas Park.
Verizon details errors in derecho, calls response to 911 outages ‘insufficient’