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[Commentary] Comcast took to Washington to sell its mega-merger with Time Warner Cable. But in a week that Comcast had hoped to parade the proposed merger past Congress and regulators it quickly became clear that the cable giant couldn't make the case.

Every step of the way, they were asked by skeptical lawmakers to explain how, exactly, this merger would benefit the public. Apparently, the answer is better DVRs. And that's about all we get for letting the No. 1 cable company swallow up No. 2. If this merger goes through, Comcast's service area will cover almost two-thirds of the United States.

On day one, Comcast will control nearly 50 percent of the truly high-speed Internet market, and it will be the only broadband provider that can deliver Internet and pay-TV services to nearly four out of every 10 US homes. Judging by the hearing, the Senate wasn't buying what Comcast was selling -- and neither is the public.

Will an outraged public be able to counteract Comcast's lobbying onslaught? Can organized people beat organized money? Well, it's the only thing that ever has.

[Aaron is President and CEO, Free Press]

[Commentary] The Star-Ledger's owner announced massive layoffs at the newspaper as part of a larger effort at consolidation. Now, entire sections of the Newark newsroom sit empty; a newsroom that has shed an astonishing 240 jobs since 2008, or two-thirds of its former staff.

Philadelphia columnist Will Bunch called the Star-Ledger pink slips for reporters the "best news" of Christie's career. Why? "With fewer of them on the beat, Christie -- and all the other corrupt politicians of the Garden State -- will be able to keep more of their secrets from the public than ever before."

But the sad news regarding the Star-Ledger isn't just about the challenges New Jersey's largest newspaper faces trying to cover the 11th most populous state with a newsroom one-third its previous size. The larger, disturbing question is what happens to newsgathering, and what happens to a democracy, when the cutbacks show no signs of abating while at the same time new, super-donor forces in American politics, led by people like the Koch brothers, exert unprecedented influence via staggering sums of money, misinformation, and faux news on the state level. "We are going to consolidate ourselves right out of a democracy," quipped one New Jersey journalist.

Charles and David Koch aren't alone among right-wing donors eager to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to defeat Democrats and to permanently alter the political landscape. Aspiring Republican presidential candidates recently traveled to Las Vegas for the so-called Sheldon Adelson Primary; to court the casino billionaire who spent $92 million in a failed attempt to defeat Obama in 2012. Unlike Adelson, however, the Koch brothers are helping to build an enormous, sprawling, and unprecedented infrastructure not only to help elect Republicans, including a Republican president, but to try to rewrite the laws across the country.

[Boehlert is Senior Fellow, Media Matters for America]

[Commentary] Everyone's taking about the Supreme Court's perfectly predictable "Citizens United 2" McCutcheon decision. It's what we are not talking about that worries me.

Ironically, the far right that many on the left see as the only beneficiary of a decision that treats money and free speech as if they are the same thing, is also not happy with it. They wanted, and may still get, the end of all campaign finance reform. This decision keeps individual giving caps in place and, in the Right's view doesn't go far enough -- although in their war of many slashes and cuts, they clearly see laws and policies trending in their direction.

Yes, the Court decision is bad for those of us who still believe, naively perhaps, that politics should not be dominated by the superrich, and their corporate order. But no, McCutcheon is not going to sink the Good Ship democracy that, like that Malaysian airliner, may have already been heading for those waves.

[Schechter is Founder and executive editor, MediaChannel]

Participants at the BBC's Safety of Journalists Synopsium issued a joint statement calling for the protection of journalists, the BBC reported.

“We have gathered to protest at the increasing attacks on journalism around the world and the damage to free speech that can result from the rise in violence and intimidation against the media," the statement read. At least 70 journalists were killed worldwide in 2013, and 547 have been killed between January 2007 to 2014, according to the statement.

The supporters of the statement ultimately protested the censorship of journalists and fought for "establishing a safe and enabling environment for journalism." The statement called specific attention to Anja Niedringhaus, the Associated Press photographer who was shot dead in Afghanistan while covering the upcoming presidential election. It then pointed to Al Jazeera journalists Peter Greste, Mohamed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed, who have been detained in Egypt since December as a result of their coverage and alleged collaboration with the outlawed Muslin Brotherhood. Finally, the statement drew attention to the hundreds of journalists who have been killed within the last seven or so years, particularly the more than 90 journalists killed covering the three-year-old conflict in Syria.

A major step has been taken towards the protection of journalists. A resolution adopted by the United Nations Human Rights Council now acknowledges “the promotion and protection of human rights in the context of peaceful protests.”

Reporters Without Borders announced that it "recognizes and endorses" the duties of journalists covering protests and demonstrations and denounces any attacks against the journalists as they fulfill these duties.

There was a "a dramatic increase in violence and intimidation in 2013," Reporters Without Borders head of research and advocacy Lucie Morillon said. The resolution, submitted by Turkey, Costa Rica and Switzerland, stresses the important role that journalists play at demonstrations in providing people with coverage, essential information and "documenting human rights violations or abuses committed in the context of peaceful protests.”

The resolution urges states to pay close attention to journalists' safety and vulnerability while covering peaceful protests, and to ensure that the resolution is effective immediately.

[Commentary] The entire right-wing mediasphere flexed its powerful muscles against its only regulator, the Federal Communications Commission. It started when the new Republican FCC Commissioner, Ajit Pai, ignored traditional inter-agency channels and went straight to the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal to accuse his colleagues of "meddling with the news."

However, despite the right wing hyperventilation over the nefariousness of the CIN study, it's simply part of the FCC's statutory mandate. What's most interesting, however, is that Commissioner Pai enlisted the very same right wing Pied Pipers who have long taken control of and, indeed, dominate the very airwaves we ALL own, and which most of us agree need more diversity and public oversight -- in hopes of intimidating the new Democratic FCC Chair Tom Wheeler into providing less diversity and public oversight.

Following the siren call of Commissioner Pai's piping, both Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck dutifully took to those airwaves coast-to-coast to work their 30 million or so radio listeners into a frenzy to prevent the FCC from following the agency's decades-long mandate for determining whether local broadcast news organizations are serving the "public interest" or whether they are merely producing news stories mandated by their corporate owners.

[Wilson is Director, 'Broadcast Blues', Media Action Center]

[Commentary] It was a truly historic moment when Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) took to the Senate floor to warn that the CIA's continuing cover-up of its torture program is threatening our Constitutional division of power. As Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), chair of the Judiciary Committee that will be investigating Feinstein's charges noted, "in 40 years here, it was one of the best speeches I'd ever heard and one of the most important."

That was particularly so, given that Feinstein's searing indictment of the CIA's decade-long subversion of congressional oversight of its torture program comes from a senator who previously has worked overtime to justify the subversion of democratic governance by the CIA and other spy agencies. But clearly the lady has by now had enough, given the CIA's recent hacking of her Senate committee's computers in an effort to suppress a key piece of evidence supporting the veracity of the committee's completed but still not released 6,300- page study that the CIA is bent on suppressing.

[Scheer is Editor, Truthdig.com]

[Commentary] There is a new sheriff at the Federal Communications Commission, and it looks like Tom Wheeler is here to protect the townspeople, not the outlaws.

As new chair, Wheeler explained in a statement, "Protecting Television Consumers by Protecting Competition," the FCC is required by law to assess its media ownership rules every four years to determine if they need to be modified to serve the public interest. If broadcast station owners held the same standards of fairness and duty to the public interest they did at the onset of broadcasting, we wouldn't need all these rules. But these times, they are a changing, and both profit and politics too often trumps the public interest.

[Wilson is Director of 'Broadcast Blues', Media Action Center]

[March 11]

[Commentary] I love online quizzes. And it doesn't matter whether these quizzes are based on data or not. When you tell a site which of a dozen brands is your favorite fast-food chain and which name you'd choose for your baby, you're adding new data, making big data bigger and enabling number crunchers to discover clusters and patterns that no one had seen before.

Technically, it's child's play to match up what you disclose on a quiz with whatever else you've disclosed to other data bases, from Twitter to car loan applications to retailer loyalty cards. Much of this information is commercially available: the terms of service you agree to without reading almost always permit selling your data to data brokers. Not only do you not get paid for this. You also make it possible for companies, government agencies and hackers to figure out who you are, often down to your name and address.

"Behavioral advertising" is the term for targeting consumers based on data they've provided, and I've surprised myself by kind of loving it. I'm also glad that issue campaigns and political candidates can target ads and canvassers based on entertainment preferences, voter rolls and (conceivably, anyway) which puppy picture I think is cutest. If the best way to get the Senate to ratify a climate change treaty is to mobilize the voters most likely to punish their Senators for siding with carbon polluters, I'm glad that the data to do that exists. I think data collection should require consumers to consciously opt-in, data brokers should be regulated, courts should be super-vigilant about surveillance and identity thieves should be forced to watch Capital One credit card ads until the end of time.

[Kaplan is USC Annenberg professor and Norman Lear Center director]

[March 10]

Fox News channel’s Megyn Kelly called the Obama Administration "crazy" for a new proposal that would allow researchers to investigate newsrooms nationwide.

The Federal Communications Commission's proposal aims to investigate how stories are chosen and if coverage is subject to editorial bias, but some see that as a violation of press freedom that could be detrimental to journalists. "What kind of crazy talk is that!?" Kelly said of the proposal. "Whose brain-child was this in the first place?" Kelly seemed to find it ridiculous, even laughing at one point, that the government would try to advise news outlets about "what the people need to hear." She said it gives people "a window" into what the Obama Administration is really thinking.