The departure of Free Press Executive Director Josh Silver is expected to have little effect on advocacy by the group, which at times has been highly critical of FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, especially on net neutrality. Silver, a MoveOn.org veteran, is leaving to form a new group, the Democracy Fund, and will be replaced by Managing Director Craig Aaron. “I don’t think it makes much difference,” said an FCC official. “Free Press serves a constituency and it’s a constituency that will remain the same.” An official at another public interest group said Free Press’s Washington, D.C., office operated largely independently of its Massachusetts headquarters. “Josh was very good at providing overall vision and direction, keeping the faithful pumped, and bringing in money -- basically what you want from an executive director,” the source said. Senior Vice President Andrew Schwartzman of the Media Access Project said that, “in organizing a mass constituency on media policy issues, Josh has accomplished something that many others had tried, and failed, to do.” Commissioner Michael Copps said that “many of the causes” Free Press “champions are causes for which I also have fought. Due in no small part to the efforts of Josh and the dedicated staff at Free Press, the voices of millions of Americans that would otherwise have gone unheard have been heard here at the FCC and in the halls of Congress.” Silver, who has been at Free Press since it was founded in 2002, said his new group will aim for “reforming the media and reducing the influence of the K Street lobbying juggernaut.”
Challenges to the FCC’s net neutrality order are “a sideshow” and should be dismissed, Media Access Project Senior Vice President Andrew Jay Schwartzman said Tuesday. MAP joined with Free Press, Media Mobilizing Project, Access Humboldt and the Mountain Area Information Network to intervene against Verizon and MetroPCS in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. “Verizon adopted a bizarre legal theory to obtain a tactical legal advantage,” Schwartzman said. Free Press wasn’t happy with the FCC’s neutrality order, but “believes that the Verizon and MetroPCS suits were improperly brought,” the group said in its own news release.
Challenges to the FCC’s net neutrality order are “a sideshow” and should be dismissed, Media Access Project Senior Vice President Andrew Jay Schwartzman said Tuesday. MAP joined with Free Press, Media Mobilizing Project, Access Humboldt and the Mountain Area Information Network to intervene against Verizon and MetroPCS in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. “Verizon adopted a bizarre legal theory to obtain a tactical legal advantage,” Schwartzman said. Free Press wasn’t happy with the FCC’s neutrality order, but “believes that the Verizon and MetroPCS suits were improperly brought,” the group said in its own news release.
The FCC is probing the representations of News Corp.’s Fox Television Stations in discussions it had with the agency over the pending and contested license renewal of WWOR-TV Secaucus, N.J. Media Bureau Chief Bill Lake on Thursday sent the a lawyer for the broadcast network a letter of inquiry saying it’s investigating whether Fox broke several rules by allegedly misrepresenting the extent of its news and operations. WWOR is the only full-power commercial station in New Jersey and is required to carry news serving the specific audience of the northern part of the state, rather than just its community of license, as is the case with all other U.S. TV stations.
The judge who dominated questions in oral argument on Cablevision v. FCC asked many questions that appeared skeptical of the cable operator’s challenge to program access rules at the U.S. Appeals Court for the D.C. Circuit. Judge David Tatel asked the vast majority of the questions of the cable operator and the commission Monday. He and Judge Thomas Griffith asked how Cablevision’s challenge could get around a ruling that the NCTA lost at the appeals court about exclusive arrangements between cable operators and apartment buildings.
The U.S. government wants more time to seek Supreme Court review of a 2010 decision by the 2nd U.S. Court of Appeals against an FCC policy that the utterance of a single, unscripted curse word can be an indecency violation. A filing Thursday by acting Solicitor General Neal Kaytal sought a 30-day extension to March 22 of the deadline to file an appeal of Fox v. FCC. That’s according to Media Access Project Senior Vice President Andrew Schwartzman, who represented content creators that sided with the broadcast network in Fox. He said the decision to seek more time to file for an appeal had been expected.
All submissions to the FCC must be available online, with staff required to assign docket numbers to all proceedings other than those in “exceptional circumstances,” the commission said in an order released late Friday. It’s the second order approved by commissioners last week that the agency said would help improve public access to FCC materials. “These two items should result in significant efficiency and fairness improvements for the Commission and for those who do business with us,” said FCC General Counsel Austin Schlick.
The NAB and the Association for Maximum Service TV asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to continue to hold in abeyance challenges to the FCC’s white spaces order. The groups were responding to a request by the court for the parties’ opinions about how the case should be handled as the commission considers petitions for reconsideration.
The NAB and the Association for Maximum Service TV asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to continue to hold in abeyance challenges to the FCC’s white spaces order. The groups were responding to a request by the court for the parties’ opinions about how the case should be handled as the commission considers petitions for reconsideration.
The FCC expanded its ex parte rules to require filings be made in most active proceedings after any lobbying conversation with commissioners, their aides or other agency officials. An order approved by the commissioners and released late Wednesday largely stuck to a draft that circulated in October (CD Oct 29 p2) in also doubling the amount of time in which most ex parte filings can be made to two business days. That would have made on-time some of the recent late filings we found in our review, as many were made a day late. But advocates for ex parte reform focused on the order’s expansion of the ex parte rules.