You need a break from writing your paper. Check out CBC’s Doc Zone tonight: Paris Hilton Inc.

Look, we covered tabloid culture in this class – this is educational, not just brain candy! And if you miss it tonight it’ll repeat on Saturday.

United Hollywood is a site for the Writers Guild of America strike – videos, actions, blogs, news coverage.

Highlights from the National Conference for Media Reform, Memphis, January 2007

Jesse Jackson at the National Conference for Media Reform, Memphis, January 2007

Bill Moyers at the National Conference for Media Reform, Memphis, January 2007, Part 1

Bill Moyers at the National Conference for Media Reform, Memphis, January 2007, Part 2

Other video clips, audios, media coverage and transcripts are at the Free Press site.

Media Reform Information Centre - lots of links to advocacy groups, articles/books, and progressive media reform outlets (U.S.), from the Corporate Accountability Project.

Social Science Research Center, Necessary Knowledge for a Democratic Public Sphere.  

Canadian Activism

MediaReform.ca – Canadian group

Canadians for Democratic Media

Tom Barrett. News Media Revolt? McChesney Rallies Growing Movement. The Tyee, November 17, 2007.

More resources re US and Media Reform
Bettig, Ronald V. and Jeanne Lynn Hall. (2003) Big Media, Big Money: Cultural Texts and Political Economics. Lanham. MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Chaudrey, Lakshmi. February 20, 2002. Mega Media Merger Mania. Alternet. URL: http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=12451

Dreazen, Yochi J. and Joe Flint. June 3, 2003. FCC Eases Media-Ownership Caps, Clearing the Way for New Mergers. The Wall Street Journal, p. A1.

Epstein, Edward. October 14, 2003. Congress tries to put clamps on media mergers. San Francisco Chronicle. URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/10/14/MNG3P2AS9J1.DTL

Labaton, Stephen. June 25, 2004. Court Orders Rethinking of Rules Allowing Large Media Companies to Expand. The New York Times, pp. –

Labaton, Stephen. June 23, 2004. Senate Votes to Repeal Media Rules. The New York Times.

Labaton, Stephen. July 24, 2003. FCC Media Rule Blocked in House 400-to-21 Vote. The New York Times: A1.

McChesney, Robert and John Nichols. (December 20, 2001). The Making of a Movement. The Nation.

McChesney, Robert. (2004). The Problem of the Media: US Communication Politics in the 21st Century. NY: Monthly Review Press. Website for the book.

McChesney, Robert, Russell Newman, and Ben Scott. (2005). The Future of Media: Resistance and Reform in the 21st Century. NY: Seven Stories Press.

Nichols, John and Robert McChesney. (2005). Tragedy & Farce: How the American Media ell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy. NY: The New Press.

Powell, Michael K. April 8, 1998. The Public Interest Standard: A New Regulator’s Search for Enlightenment. Speech Given to the American Bar Association 17th Annual Legal Forum on Communications Law, Las Vegas, Nevada. URL: http://www.fcc.gov/Speeches/Powell/spmkp806.html

Stern, Christopher. March 15, 2002. FCC Gives Cable Firms Net Rights. Washington Post: E1.

Leslie Regan Shade, Media Reform in the United States, web post for Mediascapes: New Patterns of Canadian Communication, 2nd ed., Nelson Thomson, 2005.

Web Resources
Media Reform Information Center

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting

Media Channel

Media Access Project

Media Alliance

Center for Public Integrity, Well Connected

Free Press

Action Coalition for Media Education

“Skinny, Sleazy and Stupid”

EKOS Research Finds Enduring Double Standard Riles young women
Media Action to Encourage Equitable, Diverse, Realistic Portrayals

In conjunction with National Media Education Week, Media Action (formerly MediaWatch) has released an EKOS research study looking at young women’s responses to dominant media portrayals. Young women in several Canadian cities expressed almost universal frustration with pervasive images of “flawless” female bodies, and the disproportionate media attention paid to women as sex objects and “those who mess up.”

The report reveals the conflicted relationship young women have with pop culture, simultaneously engaging with many forms of traditional and emerging media, while rejecting and resenting many dominant messages about female sexuality and appearance. They were particularly quick to note the double standard that exists regarding the greater diversity of male body types and portrayals.

Young women noted that “society worships guys who come across as good or bad, tough, responsible, independent and even weird,” and “They don’t have to conform to one specific image.

According to director Shari Graydon, “This research reminds us that despite the enormous gains women have made in recent decades, many media practices continue to reinforce limiting and destructive stereotypes. Media Action’s investment in improving the picture and giving women a voice on these issues remains timely and relevant.”

See also the reports:

Popular Culture and Female Sexuality: Consuming the ‘Representations’
and

“It Just Sucks You In”: Young Women’s Use of Facebook

Interview with Susan Faludi on her new book, The Terror Dream on Alternet, Nov. 3 2007

L.S. Kim, Do We Still Need Feminist Media? in Ms. Magazine, and posted on Alternet, Nov 9, 2007

Note: These resources, with the exception of the GMMP, are US in orientation.

Carolyn Byerly. A Feminist Analysis of Media Conglomeration presented at Network of Women in Media, India Bandra, India, 13 January, 2004.

Carolyn Byerly. Questioning Media Access: Analysis of Women and Minority FCC Ownership Data. “The Benton Foundation and the Social Science Research Council released four independent academic studies of the impact of media consolidation in the U.S. The studies focus on how the concentration of media ownership affect media content, from local news reporting to radio music programming and how minority groups have fared – as both media outlet owners and as historically-undeserved audiences — in an increasingly deregulated media environment. These studies make clear that media consolidation does not correlate with better, more local or more diverse media content. To the contrary, they strongly suggest that media ownership rules should be tightened not relaxed.”

Jennifer L. Pozner, Why Fixing the Media System Should Be on the Feminist Agenda, essay adapted for Reclaim the Media and NOW’s NW Organizing Project from an essay in BitchFest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine and in Alternet.

Women in Media and News, includes a section on Research on Media and Women/Gender, Pozner’s articles and essays, and a section on Media Justice: A Women’s Issue.

Global Media Monitoring Project, 2005. “On 16th February 2005 the world’s news media came under scrutiny when hundreds of people in over 76 countries monitored the representation and portrayal of women and men in news on television, radio and in newspaper. A year on, groups in over 50 countries launched the results of that incredible effort and challenged the media to ensure that fair gender portrayal becomes a professional criterion like any other such as balance, fairness and honesty which all good journalists should aspire to in their work.”

Media Report to Women. Industry Statistics.

OpenSourceCinema.org, a project of Brett Gaylor. Includes the script on a wiki, raw and mixed tapes. Thanks to Hugh McGuire for this info…

Neil Henry’s webpage at UC-Berkeley
Review of American Carnival in NY Review of Books

Bill Moyers Buying the War

Greg Palast’s Big Easy to Big Empty

Perez Hilton…

A pdf of a powerpoint on IP and CR issues…
ip_225.pdf

Courtney Love Does Her Math – In Defense of Napster, Salon, 2000.

Calvin Leung. Digi-drama: Internet movie piracy. Canadian Business(February 13-26, 2006).

Michael Geist. US Movie Piracy Claims Mostly Fiction. Toronto Star (February 5, 2007).

Digital Copyright Canada

Laura Murray’s FairCopyright.ca

CIPPIC on Copyright Reform

Creative Commons and Creative Commons Canada

Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture and LL Blog

Students for Free Culture

The Free Expression Policy Project – CR Issues

Siva Vaidhayanthan

Other resources on IP….

Good Copy Bad Copy (doc directed by Andreas Johnsen, Ralf Christensen, and Henrik Moltke, 2007, Denmark)

Illegal Art 

Center for Digital Democracy. Digital Marketing, Privacy and the Public Interest part of the Web 2.0 In the Public Interest project.

Digital Ads - Interactive Food & Beverage Advertising (Jeff Chester, Kathryn Montgomery and the Berkeley Media Studies Group)

Stephanie Dunnewind. Teen recruits create word-of-mouth ‘buzz’ to hook peers on products, Seattle Times, November 20, 2004.

We know what you did online last summer…from CMD, PR Watch

New York Times (October 18 2007):

WASHINGTON, Oct. 17 — The head of the Federal Communications Commission has circulated an ambitious plan to relax the decades-old media ownership rules, including repealing a rule that forbids a company to own both a newspaper and a television or radio station in the same city.

Kevin J. Martin, chairman of the commission, wants to repeal the rule in the next two months — a plan that, if successful, would be a big victory for some executives of media conglomerates.

Among them are Samuel Zell, the Chicago investor who is seeking to complete a buyout of the Tribune Company, and Rupert Murdoch, who has lobbied against the rule for years so that he can continue controlling both The New York Post and a Fox television station in New York.

Response from John Nichols at FreePress:

This ‘company wide scheme’ …. wherein ….one corporation can own the daily newspapers, the weekly “alternative” newspaper, the city magazine, suburban publications, the eight largest radio stations, the dominant broadcast and cable television stations, popular internet news and calendar sites, billboards and concert halls in even the largest American city….

is the citizen’s nightmare. With this rewrite of the rules, local, state and national democratic processes would be run through the wringer of media monopolies designed to reap massive profits – while comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted in a manner that maintains the political and economic status quo. Basic liberties — freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom to assemble, freedom to petition for the redress of grievances — would exist largely within boundaries established and policied by local media managers. It’s an Orwellian scenario that the American people rejected overwhelming in George Bush’s first term, when three millions citizens and activist groups of the left and right united to oppose a similar set of rule changes proposed by Martin and then-FCC chair Michael Powell in 2003.
<See blog link from Mediascapes 2 re Media Reform in The US>