Open Letter Regarding Rules on Net Neutrality
10 January 2010
Julius Genachowski, Chairman
Federal Communications Commission
445 12th Street, SW
Washington, DC 20554
RE: Rules on Net Neutrality
Dear Chairman Genachowski,
The National Association of Latino Independent Producers (NALIP) is a national membership organization that promotes the advancement, development and funding of Latino/Latina film and media arts in all genres. Our constituents are Latino media makers - writers and producers, directors and performers of such films as LA MISMA LUNA, such television shows as "Ugly Betty," and such documentaries as MAD HOT BALLROOM and "Clemente." Our members are also industry executives and representatives, funders and broadcasters, educators and advocates. NALIP is the only national organization committed to supporting both grassroots and community-based producers/media makers along with publicly funded and industry-based producers from the Latino community. We reach over 10,000 professionals twice each week through our eNewsletter Latinos in the Industry.
We are writing to urge the FCC to pass a series of proposed new rules that will prevent cable and telecom companies from restricting or limiting access to Internet sites and other content as they deliver service to consumers.
Digital technology presents a vast range of possibilities to content creators and consumers alike, and it would be a tragedy to squeeze all of that into a narrow commercial band. Without the rules, a relatively small number of major institutions might also come to control access to content on the Internet -- big studios, network providers, or application and service providers.
The concern is that Internet service providers could give favored treatment to certain sites and services that pay for speedier delivery -- or even block sites that it deems competition -- and shut out less established or connected content creators, notably minority and independent filmmakers who are wildly under-represented in major media establishments (studios, networks, agencies), both in front of the camera and behind it.
NALIP joins other minority and women's organizations in asking the FCC to think hard about the impact of proposed net neutrality rules on the digital divide. We hope that you will consider each of your six proposed neutrality rules, and gauge their effect on minority investment, deployment, adoption, and participation in the broadband economy.
NALIP wants the FCC to know that we support internet freedom. Ultimately we believe that rules well designed to protect net neutrality will provide for the very open marketplace that now exists on the internet. We look to your new rules to prevent the kind of consolidation that has allowed six media conglomerates to achieve control of traditional media outlets, to the detriment of independent production and diversity of content. We believe that Congress and the FCC should codify net neutrality rules that insure Internet Freedom, because this corporate media consolidation has happened on the FCC's watch over the past decade. Please, Mr. Genachowski, don't let this opportunity to impact the future for media artists and their creations follow the same path as your predecessors.
Please feel free to contact us through our Executive Director Kathryn Galan at 310.395.8880, if we can provide additional information regarding the concerns of our media maker constituency.
Respectfully,
Bienvenida Matias
Chair
Board of Directors
The National Association of Latino Independent Producers
Cc: Mark Lloyd, FCC Chief Diversity Officer
Download a PDF of this letter
 The Internet Must Not Become a Segregated Community
Co-authored by Malkia Cyril, Chris Rabb and Joseph Torres
When Fox News' Glenn Beck called President Barack Obama a racist this past July, the online advocacy group ColorOfChange.org launched a campaign to convince advertisers to boycott the show. To date, some 285,000 people have joined the effort, and more than 80 companies have pulled their ads.
CNN parted ways with Lou Dobbs last month after civil rights groups and Presente.org mobilized thousands of Latinos online to call on CNN to dump the talk show host for spewing hate against immigrants for years.
None of this -- not these advocacy efforts, not countless small business success stories, not even the election of President Obama -- would have happened without a free and open Internet. For communities of color, the Internet provides us with a unique opportunity to speak for ourselves without first seeking approval or permission or having to secure major funds to do so. But the big telecommunications companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast want to create an effectively segregated online community where they will act as our gatekeepers.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is now considering new rules that could protect the fundamental principle of "Network Neutrality" once and for all. Net Neutrality prohibits Internet service providers (ISPs) from blocking, discriminating against or deterring Internet users from accessing online content and applications of their choice -- such as e-newsletters, blogs, social networking sites, online videos, podcasts and smart-phone apps.
It's not that network owners are secretly plotting to stifle free speech. But they have an undeniable, rational interest in creating a pay-for-play model for the treatment of communication on the Internet. Commercial Web sites that pay will get speed and quality, and the noncommercial uses of the Net will be collateral damage -- relegated to the slow lane. It's not necessarily that they want to block our speech for political reasons. It's that our speech is not important to them because it's not going to make them money.
The Internet provides our communities with a medium to access services, find jobs, connect to friends, make inexpensive international phone calls to family members, and to advocate for social change. Many of the most valuable things we do online are noncommercial; they exist because the Internet is the first mass media system with no gatekeepers to dole out privilege to the highest bidder. That freedom and openness is what makes the Internet different from broadcasting and cable. We can't allow Comcast, AT&T, Verizon and other broadband providers to deliver substandard Internet service to our communities.
Telecom Companies Want to Create Second-Class "Netizens"
But the big phone and cable companies want to get rid of Net Neutrality and control how the public accesses the Internet.
This threat to Internet freedom isn't hypothetical. Verizon got caught blocking text messages sent by the pro-choice group NARAL to its own members - backing down only in response to public pressure. Comcast has also illegally interfered with file-sharing on its network, a practice that earned the company a rebuke from the FCC.
Even though President Obama pledged that he would "take a back seat to no one" on Net Neutrality, the big phone and cable companies are pulling out all the stops to derail it, including deploying Karl Rove-style scare tactics within our communities and using their massive resources to block Obama's agenda.
In the first nine months of 2009, they employed nearly 500 lobbyists and spent some $74 million to influence Congress and the FCC. Their misinformation has even convinced Glenn Beck that Net Neutrality is an attempt by President Obama to take over the Internet.
Who will protect the online rights of marginalized communities against the raw profit motive of big business? We urge leaders not to yield to the underhanded scare tactics that corporations like AT&T have used on our communities.
We Must Reject a Separate but Unequal Online World
One of those scare tactics is the claim, pushed by phone and cable companies, that Network Neutrality poses a threat to digital inclusion. Nothing could be further from the truth. Not only does Net Neutrality expand media diversity and access by ensuring fairness and nondiscrimination by big corporations, it will prevent the kind of media consolidation that has happened in the broadcast industry by helping our communities develop a diversity of civic and commercial online enterprises on a scale that represents our growing online numbers.
A primary reason for the digital divide is that the cost of fully engaging in the online world is just too high for many in our communities. Broadband in the United States is among the slowest but most expensive of any industrialized nation. After years of consolidation, the largest telecom companies have gotten away with price-gouging our communities because of a lack of competition in the broadband market.
More choices for broadband service -- not permitting more discrimination -- are the key to bringing down costs. Scrapping Net Neutrality in order to consolidate control over the Internet by cable and phone companies is not the answer. More market control won't give them more incentive to sell low-cost high-quality services to low-income communities. Our communities will still be subject to the same business logic that has marginalized us in the first place since our households don't have a lot of money to spend. Shareholders aren't charities, and we are foolish to expect otherwise.
But more importantly, we should not be sacrificing an open Internet to bribe phone and cable companies not to practice forms of red-lining. The answer to the digital divide cannot be to deliver a second-class, closed Internet to our communities.
The historic fight against discrimination by groups like the NAACP and the League of United Latin American Citizens has led to great societal change, laying the groundwork for the election of a president of color. We urge our colleagues in the civil rights community to fight with us to ensure that telecom and cable companies are not allowed to discriminate against our communities or interfere with our capacity to speak for ourselves without first asking AT&T, Verizon or Comcast for permission.
So far, several organizations of color have spoken out in favor of passing Net Neutrality regulations, including the National Hispanic Media Coalition, UNITY: Journalists of Color and ColorOfChange.org.
We are living through a critical moment in our nation's history. The FCC is going to decide whether the Internet will remain an open platform that allows for the greatest number of voices to participate in our democratic society, or whether it will be a closed network controlled by the big telecom companies.
We are concerned about the dire consequences of living without Net Neutrality. It would create a separate but unequal online world where our communities will be unable to use the Internet to compete or to advocate for justice when we have been wronged.
We need civil rights, media justice, community-oriented and grassroots organizations to stand together to make sure effective Net Neutrality regulation will protect our communities from the predatory practices of the phone and cable companies.
As with past civil rights struggles that successfully expanded access, thwarted discrimination, destroyed legalized segregation, and created broad opportunity, so too will the cause of Internet freedom.
About the Authors: Malkia Cyril is the executive director of the Center for Media Justice. Chris Rabb is the founder of the online community Afro-Netizen and is a visiting researcher at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. Joseph Torres is the government relations manager of Free Press and former deputy director of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.
 My Web Series Made Possible by Net Neutrality
By Ruth Livier
I've been a working actress for years. But being an artist at heart, I was increasingly dissatisfied by the number and type of roles that were available to me. So in my quest to expand my job opportunities and income potential, I turned to writing. Insert laugh here. Yeah, that in itself didn't completely do the trick because I was still bumping up against the traditional Hollywood gatekeepers.
But then I discovered the power of the Web, and my world was suddenly full of possibilities. I could take my ideas and my talent online.
Initially, I created my Web series YLSE as a half-hour TV pilot, but quickly realized that even getting a meeting with media execs would be a fruitless battle. I was dissuaded many times from even trying.
After all, my show didn't naturally fit the cookie-cutter content that typically gets the green light. YLSE is a bicultural dramedy about a modern American Latina: someone with big dreams juggling a career, a not-so-successful love life and a family that sometimes doesn't understand her progressive American ways.
I wasn't surprised to hear the skepticism I inevitably encountered. "Who is going to watch this?" was always the first question I was asked. With no precedent for such programming, and a market geared toward content that can be resold in other, most notably European, markets, that question effectively ended any conversation. How could I possibly prove that there was an audience for my content if my show was never to see the light of day?
But the Internet changed everything, allowing me to create my show the way I envisioned it. My small startup's ability to prove a market was suddenly no longer an impossible proposition. Distribution was now available! So I brought together an extremely smart and talented group of friends and we got to work.
With a skeleton crew and production team, an amazing cast, a lot of sweat equity and a shoestring budget, we've been able to produce and distribute the award-winning indie series YLSE AND we've been able to prove our market: Our viewership has multiplied from a few thousand during season one to more than 500,000 halfway through season two... all on our zero marketing dollars.
On the Web, modest budgets are not an obstacle to content creation; access isn't readily denied by gatekeepers; and distribution is at our fingertips! Finally, we have the unique opportunity to compete based on the popularity and strength of our content and audiences' ability to find us.
Unfortunately, Internet service providers are lobbying hard to change all of this and keep opportunity in the hands of the few (as with traditional media). They want to block any attempts to safeguard the principle called "Net Neutrality," which allows the Internet to operate as it is - a level platform where anyone can create and distribute content. These companies spent $74 million in Washington in the first six months of 2009 alone and have 550 lobbyists making repeat visits to our government representatives in their aggressive push to control online content.
Allowing ISPs to construct barriers to entry or to offer advantages to those with the deepest pockets will only serve to derail the innovation and entrepreneurial spirit that have driven the Internet since it was created -- the same freedom that allowed innovators to create the Web in the first place.
And let's not forget that the Internet itself is a government-funded innovation.
A neutral, nondiscriminatory Internet is a market-driven, equal playing field for all Americans regardless of ethnicity or socio-economic standing. It allows viewers to find the information and entertainment they want, without filters or gatekeepers. It is critical to the vitality of American public discourse and to our democracy.
To clarify, I am not a big government kind of gal. As an American citizen, I believe encouraging the entrepreneurial spirit and setting the foundations for free enterprise are fundamental to our economic success. And I also believe in equal opportunity for all.
The Web is the new land of opportunity. Its low barriers to entry encouraged me to take action. Now, in addition to being an actress/writer, I'm effectively a content creator/small-business owner and my show has worldwide distribution. Imagine that?! And this has only been possible thanks to the power and reach of a neutral, open, accessible, nondiscriminatory Internet that drives innovation and encourages the independent American entrepreneurial spirit.
The FCC is in the process of making a rule that would protect Net Neutrality. They are accepting public comments on the rule until January 14. File your comments today, and join the nearly 2 million people who support Net Neutrality at Save theInternet.com.
About Ruth Livier: Ruth Livier was recently featured on the cover of Written By, the WGA's (Writers Guild of America) magazine, as the first person to join the writers' union for her work in New Media. Her award-winning dramedy "Ylse" (www.Ylse.net), now in its second season, is produced under film and television industry unions SAG (Screen Actors Guild), DGA (Directors Guild of America) and the WGA. Prior to her work on the web, Ms. Livier garnered recognition for her screen, stage and voice-over work. Her starring role in the groundbreaking TV series "Resurrection Blvd." earned a Best Actress ALMA Awards nomination and a win for the show.
Network Television Diversity Report Cards: 2008-2009 Primetime
We are celebrating the 10th anniversary of a national movement to change the face of television in this country. In 1999 - 2000, the Multi-Ethnic Media Coalition, a group comprised of the National Latino Media Council (NLMC), the National Asian/Pacific American Media Coalition, the NAACP and the American Indians in Film and Television, persuaded the four major television networks, ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC, to signunprecedented Memoranda of Understanding. Before these memoranda were signed, we saw much fewer people of color on television than we do today.
The Memoranda serve to diversify the networks' workforce both in front and behind the camera and to open up procurement opportunities for people of color. These initiatives have incrementally increased diversity over the past ten years; however, the job is far from complete. In 1999, Greg Braxton, of the Los Angeles Times, wrote that out of the 24 new shows debuting at ABC, NBC CBS, and FOX, there was not one single person of color in a lead or regular role. Ten years later, the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) reports the following breakdown of film and TV roles for 2008: 72.5% Caucasian, 13.3% African-American, 6.4% Latino-Hispanic, 3.8% Asian & Pacific Islander, .03% Native American and 3.8% other/unknown.
The 9th annual "Report Cards" summarize the progress and/or shortfalls of the networks' efforts to diversify their workforce and increase minority vendor contracts in calendar year 2009.
There has been incremental progress at all four networks in terms of American Latinos. There are three criteria areas that we measure. The three criteria are: institutional programs and measures taken to bring Latinos into the employment ranks both in front and back of camera; out and out performance, that is, actual hiring that is concrete and measurable; and the third criterion is the submission of clear, statistical data utilized to accurately grade diversity performance. Because hours of primetime programming vary per network per week, the grades received are proportional to the number of hours of prime-time programming each network had on the air during the '08-'09 period.
ABC
ABC has a history of developing strong Latino actors that have become extremely successful thanks to the network exposure. Eva Longoria, America Ferrera and Sara Ramirez are a few of the Latinas that play ground-breaking roles that shatter traditional stereotypes. ABC has preserved its strong numbers for American Latino actors in primetime. ABC also maintained a large total number of Writers/Producers, specifically writers. It is especially encouraging to see the increase of writers since this is a category of utmost importance to the NLMC. It is the writers that can depict the three-dimensional stories of real Latinos in the U.S. Not only is ABC committed to the NLMC Writers Program, investing time and money to develop writers, but it has shown commitment in placing these upcoming writers on their shows.
The area where ABC needs to improve on is with directors. The number was already low last year at 5, and that number has dropped down to 4, which is only half of the directors that they had in 2007, when they were at 8. Steve McPherson, ABC Entertainment President, has already moved to rectify that problem.
In terms of new program development, ABC has added "Modern Family," a fresh and funny scripted show featuring Sofia Vergara and Rico Rodriguez as prominent regulars, and "V" with Morena Baccarin playing the leader of cosmic alien "visitors."
The ABC mega-hit, "Ugly Betty," has given girls of all ages and ethnic backgrounds a great role model to regularly watch on television. It is these types of roles that make a difference for our children, teens and young adults. This program shines as an example of one that employs a large number of Latinos and addresses issues that speak to and about the American Latino community in a unique and thoughtful way. We applaud Steve McPherson and his team for making this show such a great success - it will be a classic in years to come.
An area to improve on is Creative Executives, with only one Latina in this team. It's essential that Latinos be at the table where decisions are being made about original content and talent. ABC continues to be the leader in awarding contracts to Latino businesses, both in terms of Latino entrepreneurs and actual spent.
The overall diversity grade that ABC Television earned for the 2008-2009 season is a B+.
NBC
NBC has successfully cast Latinos in regular supporting roles. Alana de la Garza in "Law & Order," who joined the cast in 2006, has won accolades for her performance. Oscar Nunez in "The Office" breaks down stereotypes in his role as the ever-reasonable gay, Latino accountant, Oscar Martinez. Dania Ramirez has become a familiar face after being cast on the hit show, "Heroes." NBC continues to add new Latino roles to its schedule, such as Aubrey Plaza of "Parks & Recreation," who comically portrays an unusual young woman of Puerto Rican descent. The creative casting of Salma Hayek as Alec Baldwin's love interest on "30 Rock," and Rosie Perez on "Lipstick Jungle" showcase great Latino talent in a different setting. It is this type of casting that incrementally improves diversity on television. NBC moved from a B to a B+ in this category.
In the "reality" category, NBC improved greatly from last year, adding co-host Susie Castillo in "Superstars of Dance," Alex Castro in a prominent role on "American Gladiators," and a healthy representation of Latino contestants.
NBC has been very pro-active in the Writers/Producers category, promoting Danielle Sanchez-Witzel from Producer to Co-Executive Producer of cancelled show "My Name is Earl," and now retaining her as a behind the camera Latino talent. Additionally, it promoted Mick Betancourt from staff writer to story editor on "Law & Order: SVU."
In addition to supporting the NLMC Writers Program with mentoring time and money, NBC is also placing these Fellows on their shows. Avena, Lauren LeFranc of "My Own Worst Enemy," and Jessica Lopez of "Kath & Kim" were named staff writers during the last season.
This season, NBC had fewer Latino Directors and episodes directed by those Directors. Norberto Barba led the field in episodes directed on the long-running hit show, "Law & Order." Norberto is a past participant of the Film Makers Program administrated by Universal Studios and NHMC in the early 90's.
Regarding business procurement with the American Latino community, NBC this year outdid itself by posting truly impressive total spent numbers. For their remarkable procurement performance we are happy to award NBC an A in this important category.
In the category for Creative Executives NBC, however, received an F. This network is the only one that has not included at least one Latino in its creative team for several years. Although it has done well in the past in other areas of the work force, it is essential that NBC include Latinos at the table where decisions are being made regarding original content and talent. We have waited long enough to see progress in this arena and are no longer willing to wait. NBC's overall grade is thus a C+.
CBS
CBS has a track record of promoting Latino actors in prominent regular roles on hit shows such as Michael Irby in "The Unit," Eva La Rue and Adam Rodriguez in "CSI: Miami," Enrique Murciano and Roselyn Sanchez in "Without a Trace," and Danny Pino in "Cold Case." All of these actors provide honest depictions of Latinos. However, CBS continues to struggle in the representation of Latinos in its reality programs. This year the network had the lowest number of Latino contestants on popular reality shows in the past three years. CBS must be creative to attract more Latinos to respond to their reality casting. There are, undoubtedly, many qualified Latinos seeking reality spots.
Comparatively speaking, CBS is the network with the second highest number of Latino Writers. NLMC applauds CBS for providing Danny Pino with the opportunity to be a regular writer on "Cold Case." As far as NLMC is concerned, writers are key players when it comes to enhancing diversity. Although having less then a handful of Latino writers for primetime series is inexcusable, we continue to grade by comparison in hope that we will see substantial progress in the near future.
On the other hand, CBS excels in the director category, with higher numbers than each of the other three networks. Not only are Latino directors getting the opportunity to direct CBS' hit shows, but they also direct multiple episodes. CBS is enabling Roxann Dawson, Felix Alcala, Marcos Ciega, Emilio Estevez, Nick Gomez and Gloria Muzio to excel in the profession.
CBS's unprecedented Daytime Diversity Initiative launched in February unveiled a completely new approach to creating opportunities for actors of color in the high profile Daytime Drama arena. This exemplifies Nina Tassler's mandate to create "points of entry" for people of color. Already there have been a total of 12 bookings of people of color since the program began. Although this report card doesn't grade daytime diversity, it is well known that many of the successful prime time actors (such as Eva Longoria) have come from Daytime shows. Bravo to CBS for thinking outside of the box and finding a new pipeline for people of color.
CBS continues to have the most visible and highest ranking Latinos in their Creative Team, with Nina Tassler at the helm. This is a very important category that networks need to strive to be inclusive in, as it is this group that can make the biggest impact in regards to diversity on television.
CBS gets an overall grade of a B.
FOX
In recent years FOX has included more Latino regulars on its shows such as "Prison Break," "24" and "Fringe." Amaury Nolasco, for example, thrived in his regular role as a kind-hearted but conflicted young father on "Prison Break," and Carlos Bernard played a regular role on the wildly-popular "24.". In addition, FOX has had major success in reality shows such as "American Idol" and "So You Think You Can Dance." This past season we were introduced to Jorge Nuñez and Allison Iraheta on Season 8 of American Idol, this series has launched many promising careers and we are pleased to see Latinos included prominently.
However, FOX continues to falter in providing transparent data in its reports. Although there has been progress throughout the years in the format of its reporting, it is essential that the network have a goal of being as transparent as possible in providing the names of the talent they would like to get credit for.
In the Writers/Producers category, FOX has remained consistent in its total number of American Latino on primetime. Highlights include Manny Coto and Carlos Bernard as executive producers on "24" and Kalinda Vasquez, story editor on "Prison Break" and Valentina Garza story editor on "The Simpsons" As for directors, FOX has the second-highest number of Latinos with, among others, Norberto Barba who directs "Fringe," Juan Campanella, who directs "House," and pioneer Chicano filmmaker Jesús Treviño on "Mental."
We applaud FOX for its inclusion of Latinos in its executive creative team and the network has established a pro-active outreach initiative to recruit Latinos throughout its workforce.
In the last couple of years we have seen great improvement at FOX Television in regards to Latino Americans included in front and behind the camera, however, the network's business procurement efforts continues to lag. It remains with a C- in this category. As such, we will continue to work with the network and closely monitor its efforts in the very important area of business procurement.
FOX'S overall grade remains at B+.
SUMMARY
In summary, the NLMC strongly believes that after nine years of assessing the diversity efforts of ABC, NBC, CBS and FOX, that network television diversity is finally taking hold. The number of American Latinos both in front and back of camera has increased, but we also realize that they are incremental numbers in proportion to the American Latino population, who are now over 15% of people in this country. The network diversity programs at the time the Memoranda were executed are now bearing fruit and it is reasonable to expect that the present numbers will continue to climb without any backsliding.
An important area that all networks need to look at is casting. During our meetings this year it became apparent that there is a lack of diversity in the casting teams of each of the networks. Predictably, a diverse casting team will be better at reaching people of color through their networks and relationships. We have identified this as an area that requires greater focus, and we look forward to working with the networks in bringing more diversity into their casting teams.
To reiterate what we said last year, we continue our on-going efforts to combat hate speech in the media. In the last couple of years we have seen countless reports of vicious hate crimes against Latinos that result in death and great bodily harm. Indeed, the FBI has reported that there was a 40% increase in hate crimes against Latinos in just the past few years. We are certain that this is a direct result of the "immigration hysteria" fueled by irresponsible TV and radio talk show hosts that spread inaccurate and hateful messages about Latinos. As such, hate speech in the media continues to be an important issue for the NLMC and a top priority for the NHMC. Mainstream media needs to do a better job at covering the stories on hate crimes to raise awareness of this problem. And because of the significant lack of positive media images of Latinos in the U.S., and because we do not have sufficient access to the airwaves, the American Latino community is at great risk. If hate speech is allowed to continue, it will be a tremendous disservice to Latinos and non-Latinos across the country, who hear anti-Latino speech and may assume the information being disseminated is correct.
We need more Latinos on television and throughout the entertainment industry as well as on news and public affairs programs. All Americans across this nation need to understand that we have the same aspirations and preoccupations as everyone else - we want to provide for our families, we want to keep them safe, and we want what every other American in this great nation of ours enjoys: equity, fairness and justice.
Download PDFs of the: Report Card
 The Last Days of the Internet
By Robert Eisele for Written By magazine
Artwork by Lou Beach
Seven years ago, a train thundering into Minot, North Dakota, at two in the morning derailed and caromed across a frozen ground. Tank cars, herniated by the impact, gushed 240,000 gallons of anhydrous ammonia in a toxic cloud that shrouded much of Minot, the state's fourth-largest town. But when local residents turned on their radios, instead of an emergency broadcast, they heard music. All six commercial radio stations in Minot were owned by media giant Clear Channel, including the station designated for emergency announcements. Each was operated by computer, so only one employee was on the job. Authorities tried to override their signals by activating the Emergency Alert System, but it failed. As a result, more than 300 people were injured from inhaling the poisonous gas, and one person died. But the music continued to play uninterrupted over Clear Channel's stations, beamed in from out of state.
This could not have happened 15 years ago. No company could legally own and operate more than one AM and FM station in any single market. Today, they can own eight in a single market, and Clear Channel owns 1,200 nationwide. The Telecommunications Act of 1996, guided through Congress by Newt Gingrich's Contract for America and signed by Bill Clinton, is responsible for that nightmarish breakdown in our Emergency Broadcast System. The deregulation of the 1990s led not only to the Telecommunications Act, but to further media consolidation when the FCC and Congress began to roll back the protections of the financial interest and syndication rules (known as fin syn). These rules had prevented broadcasters from owning all the shows they exhibited, requiring them to air entertainment content from independent producers so consumers could view shows from varying perspectives. The intention was to create a marketplace of ideas and stimulate economic competition, the lifeblood of a free market. But as the fin syn rules eroded, so did the percentage of independently produced shows. In the 1992-93 television season, 67 percent of primetime broadcast TV shows were independently produced; in 2007, according to the FCC's Media Ownership Study, that number shrank to only 18 percent.
In 1980, I was a young junior college professor writing plays for regional theater. Then I made my first Hollywood sale. At that time, 29 major corporations in the entertainment media shared $100 billion in annual revenue. The opportunities seemed limitless. And young screenwriters, inspired by the groundbreaking American films of the 1970s, were ready to make their mark. A writer with few or no produced credits could pitch an idea to a studio or production company and get paid to write the screenplay. A generous portion of Hollywood's profits were funneled into such research and development because the competition was fierce. Innovation and originality were at a premium.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the millennium. That $100 billion of annual revenue in 1980 ballooned to $400 billion in 2008. Meanwhile, the 29 companies that shared those revenues in 1980 shrunk to only six conglomerates today. News Corp, NBC Universal, Disney ABC, CBS, Sony Television, and Warner Bros. now control more than 80 percent of all writers' employment.
For the 82 percent of us writers who work for these six conglomerates, life has changed. I know the creator of a primetime series who, a few years ago, was told he couldn't produce an episode because it dramatized the Tragedy of a boy killed for his running shoes. The network felt the episode might offend the advertisers. Since the network also owned the show, there was no independent production company to protest, no voices in management to back up the writer. He felt like Gary Cooper in High Noon, "only my Grace Kelly got on the train. There was nobody to cover my back." The episode was never filmed.
And the line between news and entertainment divisions, hallowed in the days of the late Walter Cronkite, has been erased. Broadcast news divisions have been gutted, and the socalled commentators of cable rail like shock jocks, preaching to the converted in pursuit of ratings. The 1980s "marketplace of ideas" is now an empty Walmart on a country highway. The signs out front still promise choice and variety, but inside there's only one product left. And there's lead in its paint.
Why? Because the repeal of the financial interest and syndication rules transformed the free market of American media into an oligopoly of six, controlling not only profits but nearly all news and entertainment. The effect on creativity has been stifling. The renaissance of American film in the 1970s seems a distant shadow now. These days, movies aren't just made from comic books. They're made from toys like Transformers, Barbie, and G.I. Joe and soon from board games like Candyland. In this climate, getting a dramatic or historical feature film produced by a major studio is nearly impossible. Agents tell their clients there are no screenplay assignments for adult dramas anymore. And because these six conglomerates control not just production but also distribution, there has been nowhere else for most writers to turn. Until the Internet...
More Than Porn
In the Broadway musical Avenue Q, puppets and humans in a New York borough confront the problems of everyday life. In one song, the puppet Kate, ever the optimist, rhapsodizes: "The Internet is really, really great!" Trekkie Monster, the cynic, snarls back: "For porn!" The song continues, with Kate extolling every virtue of the Internet, only to be interrupted by Trekkie's droll refrain, "The Internet is for porn!"
More than a few believe the Internet was created for porn, since pornography rakes in such huge profits. But it was created by university professors with public funds and resources. Their goal was noble: the free exchange of ideas. And it all began in the USA. Forty years ago, UCLA engineers connected two computers and transferred bits of information between them, creating the ARPANET--a project funded by the U.S. government that would one day become the Internet.
By its very nature, the Internet was quickly internationalized. Created, tweaked, and finessed by millions of people from every corner of the globe, the Internet provided a freedom of choice that made it the most democratic medium since the invention of the printing press. Dictatorial regimes have grown to recognize and fear its power, as witnessed by recent shutdowns of the Internet in Iran and China to quell political dissent. Saudi Arabia aggressively polices the Internet for pornography and anything else viewed as anti-Islamic. In countries like North Korea, the Internet as we know it doesn't even exist. But cross the 38th Parallel into South Korea and you'll find 99 percent of the population connected to the net. Today, the democratic spirit of a nation is measured not only by the freedom of its press, but by the freedom and accessibility of its Internet.
That freedom was the original intention of the Internet's creators--an electronic forum where ideas and innovations could thrive, unregulated by government or corporate power. By design, they constructed a chaotic system of managing traffic that brought equality of access to every website. They believed the company that connects you to the Internet should not limit your choices nor interfere with the legal content of sites. The university professors and engineers who created the net were clearly principled people. But they were also geeks, so rather than simply naming this concept Internet Freedom, they waited until someone coined the geeky phrase net neutrality.
You'll hear those words often in the coming months and years because the nation's Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and those six media conglomerates are gathering their forces to control the net. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski delivered a historic speech recently to the Brookings Institution that was a clarion call to action. He proposed formal rules to ensure that every American has access to a robust Internet. Genachowski said, "The rise of serious challenges to the free and open Internet puts us at a crossroads. We could see the Internet's doors shut to entrepreneurs, the spirit of innovation stifled, a full and Free flow of information compromised. Or we could take steps to preserve Internet openness, helping ensure a future of opportunity, innovation, and a vibrant marketplace of ideas."
The battle for Internet Freedom will soon intensify. The forces of Big Media will reframe Genachowski's argument, telling us they intend to stop government regulation or combat piracy on the web. But their real motives are profit and control. Just as they consolidated other media over the past 20 years, stifling competition and creativity, they want to end net neutrality and change the Internet forever. George Bernard Shaw said, "We learn from history that we learn nothing from history." If that's true and we fail to act, we might be experiencing the last days of the Internet as we know it.
A Brief History of Time . . . Warner
Originally, we were all connected to the Internet through the phone lines. The telephone system was already regulated by "common carrier" laws that prohibited AT&T, for example, from blocking your phone connection to a Verizon customer. No telephone company could restrict your calling access to anyone. Sounds fair, doesn't it? In the early 20th century, our government, supported by popular opinion, had decided the phone system was a vital public utility. Telephone service was considered too valuable and essential to allow any company to prevent Americans from communicating with other Americans, just because their phone lines were operated by the competition.
Today, Internet providers, many of them phone companies, have connected us to a new pipeline: broadband cable. Net neutrality, the cornerstone of the original system, was protected by common carrier law when everyone had telephone modems. There was no need for legislation to preserve freedom of the Internet because such laws already existed. But the ISPs and media conglomerates are claiming the new pipeline is not subject to previous rules even though Internet communications are at least as valuable and essential as telephone conversations. In fact, email is largely replacing the "snail mail" of the U.S. Postal Service. (This alone should qualify the Internet as a public utility and ensure net neutrality.)
Internet providers use public resources, public rights of way, and even public airways via wireless modems in airports, train stations, etc. There's a big difference between the Internet and cable TV, a completely closed network where companies like Comcast and Time Warner Cable get to decide your channel lineup. The Internet is a network open to everyone, a vital communication source carrying business transactions, email, and even phone conversations through services like Skype.
That doesn't mean Internet providers shouldn't charge consumers to access the web through their pipelines. But the fact that we pay them for entering the largest library in history doesn't mean they get to own all the books too. And if content creators--"the books in the library"--must also pay for access to consumers, as Internet providers argue, the fastest download speeds will go to the highest bidders, net neutrality will quickly disappear, and a new age of unequal access will begin. In such a brave new world, a handful of corporations will not just control newspapers, radio, movies and television, as they do today--they will control the Internet as well.
The irony, of course, is that the Internet was created by the people, not by media conglomerates or ISPs. The sole reason AT&T built its pipeline is to connect to the vast wealth of content and applications already found on the web. Content that consumers not only want but created through blogging, email, Facebook, Myspace, and more. The Internet wasn't made for porn. It was made for and by everyone; it belongs to everyone.
In 2005, the Federal Communications Commission responded to growing public awareness of what's at stake by adopting a Policy Statement in support of Internet Freedom. It clearly advocates the preservation and promotion of "the open and interconnected nature of the public Internet." But a Policy Statement is unenforceable. There is still no legislation ensuring net neutrality on the broadband network. President Obama supports such a law and FCC Chairman Genachowski's speech calling for an open Internet is encouraging. But just as the health insurance debate rages with hysteria stoked by the misinformation of big pharma and the medical insurance lobby, so are the media conglomerates and Internet providers readying to stop any legislative effort in its tracks. In just the first six months of 2009, cable and telephone companies have spent $47 million on lobbying efforts in Washington, and have hired more than 500 lobbyists.
It's not that Big Media is out to destroy democracy. They just smell profits and are poised to do what any good conglomerate does--gobble up the competition. But in 2005, with the launch of a little media upstart called YouTube, their competition suddenly got a lot stiffer. Quickly, the net evolved from being an information and communication source to an entertainment resource. A year after YouTube's launch, the site served 100 million video views a day, and 200 million by 2009. The broadcast networks began to offer their television content online. Consumers could watch free online episodes of TV classics as well as recent series hits like The Office or Lost. Seemingly overnight, the Internet became a new market for reruns of television shows and movies, as well as an outlet for original content.
It didn't take long for the creative community of writers, directors, producers, composers, actors and musicians to realize the Internet is our future. That's why, in 2007, the Writers Guild of America engaged in a national 100-day strike over the Internet and our place in the future of the entertainment industry. To win residuals for reuse on the Internet and Guild coverage of original, New Media productions, we took to the street and the web to make our case. WGA members blogged about their struggles with the studios, and created viral videos to explain the strike to viewers or poke fun at studio bosses. Since then, WGA members have continued to push onto the Internet, creating original online content such as Joss Whedon's Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog and Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade of Comedy. Both of these projects became Internet sensations, and both were independently produced by writers under Guild contracts.
The creative community's hard-won independence will disappear if net neutrality ends. The six media conglomerates will pay the ISPs for faster speeds. Imagine purchasing a download of Iron Man from Paramount and receiving it in a few minutes, then waiting hours for a controversial documentary or short. Consumers would soon lose patience with slow deliveries of independent content, and the Internet as we know it would be gone forever.
Yo-Ho, Yo-Ho, A Pirate's Life For Me!
Big Media can't control the Internet without first winning the net neutrality debate. To do that, they're already defining its terms. The "newspeak" of George Orwell's 1984 is quickly becoming the "corporatespeak" of 2009. Listen to Dan Glickman, chief of the Motion Picture Association of America, the trade organization for Big Media: "Government regulation of the Internet would impede our ability to respond to consumers in innovative ways..."
Government regulation is still the dirtiest phrase imaginable to big business. But today, no sane neoconservative will deny that the dismantling of financial regulatory structures in 1999 contributed to the global economic crash of 2008. If we've learned anything from this meltdown, we've learned to value common sense above ideology. In other words, not all government oversight is bad. Yet MPAA Chief Glickman, well-versed in corporatespeak, still tries to redefine freedom of the Internet as "government regulation of the Internet." In truth, Internet Freedom just means preserving the web as it is right now.
Glickman and the media conglomerates know their rhetoric against Internet Freedom is hollow. So they've devised an argument focused on a very real threat to both Big Media and the creative community--piracy.
A movie I wrote, The Great Debaters, directed by and starring Denzel Washington, was still in the theaters early last year when someone showed me how pirated versions could be downloaded off the net. The download would take all day, but it was possible. I imagined nerds with eye patches stealing my residual payments, only it wasn't funny. It was deadly serious.
But we can and do fight piracy without Internet providers limiting our access to the web, or stifling legal innovation. Just last year, Congress passed legislation that launched an ambitious effort to curtail piracy--the PRO-IP Act. This act gave the Department of Justice new tools to find and prosecute thieves and also created a White House office dedicated to stamping out piracy. President Obama nominated Victoria Espinel to head this office as the first U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator. The Writers Guild, along with the entire creative community, supported the passage of the PRO-IP Act and will continue to support sensible solutions to piracy. New technologies like digital watermarking and digital fingerprinting hold great promise in the battle against online theft. And the major studios are working with many online providers, such as You- Tube, to remove pirated videos from their sites.
Although the creative community supports these efforts to end piracy, we can't allow Big Media to make Internet Freedom synonymous with Internet theft. As the Independent Film and Television Alliance states, "Copyright enforcement is crucial to our industry, but that cannot be the rationale for abandoning the principles of open and competitive access, which are critical to ensuring a vibrant film industry and diversity of programming."
At this pivotal moment in history, independent talents can still hope to create content for the Internet that they own and control. More than 600,000 Americans now operate small businesses on eBay, bringing revenue and opportunity to the entire country. We can't watch idly as Big Media and the ISPs reenact restrictive, inhibiting policies of the past. The issue is not just Internet Freedom for the creative community. It's freedom for all.
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night...
In free market theory, going back to seminal economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo, the well-being of society is tied to the idea of pure or perfect competition. This economic concept greatly influenced the founding fathers, particularly Thomas Jefferson. The notion is that real competition creates efficiency by ensuring that prices will be as low as possible, because no one will be able to dominate a market. But Smith predicted the rise of monopolies and oligopolies when he issued the following, rarely quoted warning: "People of the same trade seldom meet, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against The public, or in some contrivance, to raise prices."
Pure competition exists for writers, directors, producers, actors, and all working Americans, regardless of what jobs they do. But competition among the media conglomerates is far from pure. Let's not put them and the ISPs in a position to merrily conspire to profit by controlling what we read and watch on the Internet. Let's get it right this time.
What, then, needs to be done? First, Congress and the FCC must confirm and codify the principle of net neutrality. Freedom of the Internet is the only way to ensure a semblance of fair competition between independent producers and media conglomerates. Although the FCC adopted such principles in 2005, Comcast and others are challenging their legality. It's time for the FCC to establish rules that clearly support Internet Freedom, and for Congress to take the bold step of making net neutrality the law of the land.
But there is one element currently missing from the FCC Policy Statement on net neutrality--the principle of nondiscrimination. This means that all traffic on the Internet must be treated equally. Already, new devices are being launched that stack the deck in favor of the media conglomerates. One such device, offered by Zillion TV, would create "fast lanes" on the Internet to stream content owned by the media conglomerates directly to a viewer's television. But prioritizing certain traffic disadvantages other traffic. This discrimination could seriously undermine the ability of smaller online video providers like Netflix to compete, because they'd be relegated to a slower lane on the Internet.
Nondiscrimination has been the guiding light of the Internet since its inception. The FCC and Congress must codify this basic principle to keep all Internet traffic equal, or net neutrality will cease to exist. Chairman Genachowski agrees, insisting that Internet providers should not be allowed to "pick winners by favoring some content or applications over others in the connection to subscribers' homes."
Lastly, Congress and the FCC should consistently monitor the actions of Internet providers. Policing net neutrality should not be left to consumers. We saw what happened to the financial markets without adequate oversight. Internet providers must be consistently held to the standard of maintaining net neutrality, and the FCC should have the means to respond to violations. Chairman Genachowski calls this "a transparency principle--stating that providers of broadband Internet access must be transparent about their network management practices." Otherwise, the corporate censorship we've already experienced will continue to grow.
If we don't act, independent producers and writers--already shut out of traditional media--will have few avenues left to distribute their content. How many creative voices do we dare to mute? How many new, innovative products can we afford to lose? If the Internet remains free, fresh ideas and content will continue to flourish. If it doesn't, who can assess the cost of what is lost, both creatively and economically?
If the FCC and Congress reaffirm the basic principles of net neutrality and nondiscrimination, we can expect the online marketplace to flourish. A college student started Facebook in 2004, a site that now has 300 million members. The phenomenal success of eBay began on a hobbyist's personal website. Google was created in a garage. A graduate student invented Netscape, the first commercially successful web browser. Internet success stories like these abound. This is the free market at its best. If policymakers embrace this entrepreneurial spirit and codify freedom of the Internet, the entire world stands to benefit.
If we do not embrace this freedom, imagine the future in a town like Minot, North Dakota. One day, a single company could own the town's radio stations, the local newspaper (if it still exists), the TV station, and the telephone and cable service. Throughout the country, the entire flow of information and entertainment would be controlled by a new regime of gatekeepers with a stranglehold on the pipeline we call the Internet. And when a citizen would post his blog in protest, no one would read it because it would take too long to find, or the Internet provider would refuse access to it. In a world like that, only corporations would enjoy the right of free speech. Americans, of all people, must never let that happen.
About Robert Eisele: Robert Eisele, a WGA member since 1980, wrote The Great Debaters and the soon-to-be-released Hurricane Season. He was executive producer of the Showtime series Resurrection Blvd.
 Internet Freedom: A New World Worth Fighting For
By F. X. Feeney for Written By magazine
Artwork by Michael Morgenstern
If movies are indeed a new alphabet, barely 100 years old, then the Internet is the most culturally seismic phenomenon to hit humankind since the invention of moveable type. Think about it: That morning in 1450 when Johannes Gutenberg applied his brilliant new trick with inks and leaded alloys to the production of 180 copies of the Bible, he redefined authority in Europe.
The Catholic Church, which had been the keeper of knowledge and information locally for close to 1,000 years, had been quietly superseded. Everybody could now own a copy of the sacred text used to govern them. Is it any wonder the Reformation followed? Martin Luther could publish his arguments, and—boom—“religion” was rediscovered to be a rashomon. Civilization was reborn and reshaped— the world over, as it turned out. The early Renaissance, which produced Gutenberg in the first place, was suddenly energized beyond its original limits: Maps could find their way into the hands of dreamers like Christopher Columbus; texts of an entirely new sacred order were made possible by such as Shakespeare, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine.
Truly, every wondrous leap of the 500 years between 1450 and 1950 was pioneered by that fantastic capacity we now take for granted as a basic right: to privately “own” the world’s common knowledge and think it over for ourselves.
What if the church fathers of the 1400s had been in a position to lock away such developments before the bull escaped the barn? Shakespeare might be remembered as an interesting Jesuit, his “To Be or Not to Be” sermon right up there with the greatest hits of John Donne. Ben Franklin? Maybe he would’ve invented moveable type, in London, and a Stratford rail-splitter named Abraham Lincoln might’ve risen 100 years later to write verse-plays you could recognize as crudely akin to Richard III and Henry V (genius does tend to find a way), but the world as we know it would not exist—or at best, be emerging at a slow pace so cruel as to make it uninhabitable by ourselves. If we reimagine the lives of our ancestors, making their ways through worlds of repression unmediated by Gutenberg’s gift, it’s a mathematical probability that most of us might never have been born.
Such volatile swings of historic potential are worth keeping firmly in view as the issue of Internet Freedom is debated in Congress now. At stake is a world of creative eruption comparable to every positive development of the past 500 years, but on a timetable five to 10 times faster and infinitely more concentrated… and more vulnerably: The corporate giants governing our economies are just as threatened by the speed and vastness of this phenomenon as were Medieval keepers of scripture, except that they have more effective instruments at their disposal to dominate and even suppress its progress.
Corporate Synergy
Cyberspace as a word has come to feel a bit shopworn lately, but it describes the phenomenon—the big bang—of the past two decades more amply and accurately than the modest Internet. What we’ve enjoyed is an explosion of “new space” that has energized and redefined everything we do, from banking to making love to reading the paper. Its frontiers are so unlimited as to constitute the discovery of a second planet within the one we’re living on.
But when the real estate feels infinite, the temptation to make a land-grab proves irresistible to a royalty determined to remain in power. Enter Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T. These three telecommunications giants were blindsided by the interactivities that flourish along their superhighways. They simply did not foresee the next wave coming. How could they?
Neither did the Vatican. Neither did Gutenberg. The titans of our time have thus been helpless onlookers as Google, Yahoo, Facebook and MySpace, or “indie” phone services such as Vonage and Skype have all but gushed money, flooding the pockets of their inventors in a blissful tsunami of cash, billions of dollars worth, all of it flowing closely past the eyes of the corporate throne-holders, yet maddeningly beyond their reach.
“What they would like to do is use my pipes free,” AT&T CEO Edward Whitacre complained to Business Week in 2005, “but I ain’t going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it.” These words became known as the Shot Heard ’Round the Web for partisans of Internet Freedom, especially with Whitacre directly challenging in his next breath: “Why should they be allowed to use my pipes? The Internet can’t be free in that sense because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!” Another executive at AT&T’s rival Verizon recently told the Washington Post that Google is “enjoying a free lunch that should, by any rational account, be the lunch of the facilities providers.” As the creatively barren Salieri so memorably lamented in Peter Schaffer’s play Amadeus, when speaking of the genius Mozart: “There I was—staring through the bars of my cage— at an absolute beauty.” The agony of the telecoms is no less exquisite—and in line with Salieri’s legend, they want their piece, even if they have to kill the source to get it. The campfires of their lobbyists encircle the Capitol Dome as we speak. What they want sounds reasonable enough. They built the packets and pipes through which information travels: Why not levy a private tax upon those who profit most from what they’ve built? Indeed, why not levy an entrance fee? Open a “private” Internet, where “serious” traffickers can pay to play, while everybody else— amateur wizards, guerilla filmmakers, artists, writers, creators of every self-starting stripe—can accept hard luck for a change and constipate in outer darkness among the hackers, copyright pirates, and child pornographers. Unfair as such a result would be to the best of the net’s independent users—or so goes the corporate logic—life itself is unfair, and the brute truth is, here we have a newborn world of money to be made.
Or do we, really? The even colder truth is that the sages of these telecom giants could never in their wildest dreams have foreseen or even dimly imagined a Google or a YouTube or the galaxies of entrepreneurs uploading homespun video, audio, and images to personal websites—or they would have gotten creative themselves and done something about it. The wealth of the Internet has been a direct byproduct of its very neutrality as an economic medium. The intense cross-fertilizations of information and ideas made freely available in cyberspace have improved the web’s extraordinary reach, most dramatically fueling popular political protest this past spring in the streets of Tehran, precisely because access to the truth is free.
The telecom giants are belatedly seeking instead a creator’s royalty for what others have created. It’s a bit like the person who’s built a road, charging not only a toll from every driver (which is fair; each of us must pay to get on the Internet; that’s a given) but demanding yet another piece from the auto manufacturers, the oil companies that fuel the cars, and from the restaurants and theaters their road leads to, as well as a nickel against every toy or comic book in the hands of little passengers riding in kid carseats.
The interstate highway system was originally devised (and sold to congress by President Eisenhower in 1956) as a means for America’s strategic defense against invasion. Masses of troops could be reliably delivered from anywhere to anywhere in the lower 48 states in two-and-a-half days or less. That massive truckloads of fresh groceries and goods could also be delivered in the same timespan (depending on the strength of the driver’s amphetamines) is a side benefit we’ve been reaping for half a century now.
So it is with the Internet, which was likewise devised as a strategic protector. Masses of vital information could be delivered from anywhere to anywhere, independent of any single computer system. Data would be routed in “packets” to separate locations, only to be reassembled at the intended destination; thus not even a nuclear war could disable key communications within the United States. When Senator Al Gore shepherded the Internet into public use in the early 1990s, the same technical principles applied. The emails you send at any moment are broken down to a set of speeding numerals, distributed in packets all over the web, then sped to their addressees and reassembled, generally within fractions of a second. Amazing to think about, even now, after more than 15 years of use—and this is why the issue of deep-packet inspection is such a sore point in the discussions of Internet Freedom before congress.
Packets are in effect the moveable type of the web. Control their speed, monitor their contents, and you narrow how much information can flow and how effectively. You may even limit, if that is your goal, the varieties of ideas transmitted. You also get to track who is exchanging what ideas and with whom.
In a free cultural hemisphere as dominated by commerce such as ours, the short-term consequences of such chokepoints would be commercially frustrating. A major film studio given the Internet version of an EZ Pass will be able to traffic its films at greater speed and with better resolution than the indie filmmaker who has something more personal and more original to upload. A freelance journalist for whom the web is a prime venue will find in turn that their websites might be harder to operate, eclipsed in graphic quality, or marooned in technical remoteness by a media organ whose deeper pockets and speedier packets have the blessing of, say, Rupert Murdoch. Such needless congestions would certainly be annoying, if not bitterly appalling, when set against the vibrancy enjoyed by the homespun entrepreneurs in the first two decades of the web. But in the long term, there are far deeper and more historically meaningful freedoms at stake.
How to Crush a Revolution
“The Iranian regime,” according to the Wall Street Journal, “has developed, with the assistance of European telecommunications companies, one of the world’s most sophisticated mechanisms for controlling and censoring the Internet, allowing it to examine the content of individual online communications on a massive scale.” This article appeared June 22, 2009, in the wake of thrilling, nonviolent, and Internetdriven rebellion by millions of the Iranian people against the blatant voter-fraud perpetrated by the authorities over the course of that week’s national election.
“Interviews with technology experts in Iran and outside the country say Iranian efforts at monitoring Internet information go well beyond blocking access to websites or severing Internet connections,” the article reveals. “Instead, in confronting the political turmoil that has consumed the country this past week, the Iranian government appears to be engaging in a practice often called deep packet inspection, which enables authorities to not only block communication but to monitor it to gather information about individuals, as well as alter it for disinformation purposes, according to these experts.” This is the dark side of deep packet inspection, and it no less afflicts Chinese citizens, who sadly joke of “The Great Firewall of China” imposed by their own government.
Are we similarly at risk here in America? Yes, but only if we give our power away. Last year, a bill was introduced before congress—introduced by Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota—that protects against such incursions, affirms the “common carriage” principle of the Communications Act of 1934, and updates that statute to uphold “freedom” for the Internet as well, stating in part:
(1) The Internet has had profound benefits for numerous aspects of daily life for millions of people throughout the United States and is increasingly vital to the economy of the United States. (2) The importance of the broadband marketplace to citizens, communities, and commerce warrants a thorough inquiry to obtain input and ideas for a variety of broadband policies that will promote openness, competition, innovation, and affordable, ubiquitous broadband service for all individuals in the United States.
The issue goes beyond liberal and conservative, beyond partisanships of “right” and “left.” (Indeed, it seems to be that rare libertarian issue on which left and right can agree.) In addition to then-Senators Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry, the bill’s backers included such conservative republicans as Olympia Snowe of Maine and, before he retired, Chip Pickering of Mississippi. Fear-mongering rhetoric to the contrary, one is not opposing “capitalism” or proposing “socialism” by upholding these freedoms—even though the opposition is heavily funded by enormous stores of corporate capital, while their leaders nurse tender hopes of amassing much, much more money. What one is defending is the very essence of a free marketplace— the current net, in practical terms, is a nearly perfect “free market” in which consumers and individuals are free to watch and read from a multitude of sources.
Choices dictated by a handful of powerful companies would hardly be as free. What the cause of net neutrality (more precisely, Internet Freedom) opposes is the vertical alignment of power, concentrated in the hands of the few.
In late 2007, Verizon Wireless—one of only two companies that serve all mobile phone needs in the United States— got caught red-handed blocking political content for its text-messengers. Specifically, they refused to grant an entirely voluntary subscription-service, requested by an abortionrights organization, which proposed to give news updates that customers could only access by choice, by punching in an access code. “[We do] not accept issue-oriented (abortion, war, etc.) programs,” Verizon explained, when first confronted, “only basic, general politician-related programs (Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton, etc.).” When Naral Pro Choice America, the offended organization, took the dispute public, Verizon relented, quickly dubbing the matter “an isolated incident” and telling the New York Times that the confusion grew out of their company’s good-faith efforts “to ward against communications such as anonymous hate messaging and adult materials sent to children.” Call it the politics of fear: Pornography, and the threat of piracy (always effective in corralling creative people), are frequently invoked by lobbyists for what has been loosely termed a private Internet, but might be more precisely be described as a sealed enclosure where companies, as opposed to individuals, make decisions about content. Fears of copyright violation strike reasonable fear into the heart of every filmmaker, just as the bottom-feeding potentials of pornography strike reasonable fear into the heart of every parent. The telecommunications giants play upon such fears with expert, Fiery zeal—but we must bear in mind that the laws and tracking methods are already in place to combat these evils.
And they work. Policing the net will not be improved upon by creating a class-system of the web, except in that brute sense Orson Welles wrote of in Touch of Evil: “A policeman’s job is only easy in a police state.”
There They Go Again
We need to keep a close and disenchanted eye on just who is playing whom. The Internet is packed with excellent information regarding this issue, but a set of particularly lucid and fair-minded analyses have been made by legal scholar Susan P. Crawford, an adviser to President Obama.
In her 2007 essay “Network Rules,” Crawford sharply dissects what she calls the “romantic builder” arguments put forth by the telecom giants: I built these pipes, why can’t I take a cut of everything that flows through them?
“There is nothing wrong with charging a price for a service,” she replies, then argues: “They are using their controlled distribution channel to capture returns that come from value they have not created.” In effect, they are trying to assert a creator’s “copyright” of the net. The danger, Crawford suggests, is that this will “turn the Internet into a mobile-phone-walled garden with a cable system overlay.” Meaning a theme park of ready entertainment piped into your home—an Internet that is strictly for download, as opposed to upload.
Because much of the traffic on the U.S. Internet is already dominated by Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Verizon, and AT&T, it systematically takes a lot longer to upload a film than it does to download one, and so truly independent, selfstarting filmmakers are already at a slight (if tolerable) disadvantage to the major studios when it comes to distributing their work.
This is not the case in Japan, where government protection has worked in concert with the corporate ambitions of NTT (Nippon Telephone & Telegraph) to put fiberoptic technology into every home, yet still make room on its web for countless competing services. NTT was thereby permitted to retain its hegemony in the marketplace but restrained against creating any monopoly on content—with the positive result, writes Crawford, of “vibrant competition, low prices, very high speeds, very high penetration of the consumer market for broadband access, and explosive innovation in applications and services.” Although NTT’s profit margin has not grown at all from what it has built, it has been able to stay profitable, based on the contents and applications it’s created and put up on the web, in fair competition with everybody else.
Germany is the opposite story. The dominant telecommunications giant DT (Deutsche Telekom) is in such flagrante delicto with the government that it monopolizes the content (entertainment, mostly) and dominates the platforms. The result? They are being threatened with punitive legal action by the rest of the European Union, and fewer Germans are Up to broadband than the residents of any other nearby country.
Crawford suggests two possible solutions may save Americans from this latter trap. The first and costliest would be for the federal government to invoke “eminent domain,” as it did in real estate when building the superhighways— and reimburse the telecom giants for their fiber packets and pipes, as a means of freeing and protecting these channels for the public trust. The other, and more workable possibility in this Times- Are-Tight environment, would be for the government to create an agreeable structure under whose protection the telecoms would be repaid over time for what they’ve built. Our packets would then be kept as they are, free of moderation or inspection (except by warranted law enforcement), and our information highways would thereby be maintained as unprivatized, public, and neutral.
Where Greed is Good & Bad
Money is energy. There is no other definition for it—those coins in our pockets are just clinking objects, Stone Age amulets, without the life-giving properties we agree to lend them in our imaginations.
This is why the only form of energy on Earth that is more psychologically binding (or liberating or threatening) than money is the imagination itself. An individual dreaming up narratives, schemes, projects, always has the edge, the inner wealth that makes outer wealth possible. So the battle lines are drawn in perpetuity, between two wildly unpredictable groups of haves and have-nots: those who have the wealth of ideas, and those who have the cash to implement them. Perhaps “battle” is too savage an analogy—creativity and commerce manifest a square dance of changing partners when both sides are at their most abundant and robust; at humanity’s best, idea-folk have cash, and moneyfolk have ideas for putting more cash together. But change and entropy are laws of history as much as physics, and there are times (“interesting” times, the kind we’re living in) when economies fall apart, when powers are hoarded, and progress gets choked off.
Thomas Edison, one of several geniuses who “invented” movies, also had a ruthless ingenuity when it came to business.
Edison spent the better part of two decades fighting to establish his own supremacy in the matter of “who owns the patent” on motion pictures. He was so outmaneuvered by events that he was reduced to seeking a patent over sprocket holes. After all, the larger technologies of movies had been pioneered not only by Edison, but by other men and women working in general ignorance of one another, at more or less the same time, an ocean apart. Edison was so avid for control that he even paid thugs to attack and beat his rivals while filming.
Hence Samuel Goldfish—later Goldwyn—headed west with C.B. DeMille to make films in a hollyscented suburb of Los Angeles.
Had Edison prevailed, movie history would have been radically different. Our medium might have been choked in its cradle by one of its own creators, had his rivals not been ready to fight, and been so creative in defense. In addition to grinding Edison “slowly to dust in court,” as historian Kevin Brownlow described it, Adolph Zukor and Carl Laemmle spearheaded a parallel battle in the public’s imagination, by inviting audiences to look past company names and instead fall in love with their various actors, whose names they aggressively placed above the titles of films. By the creation of the star system, Edison was beaten in the marketplace as well as the courts; movies were saved by the invention of the “movies” as we know them.
The Internet, which among other astounding potentials might be the whole future of television and movie distribution, invites us to rise to a comparable challenge. Money is energy, yet it still isn’t everything—much as one hates to speak such a heretical belief aloud, in this fortune-building country.
Lucky as we are that the Vatican couldn’t stop Gutenberg, we’re also lucky that the printer never got in his own way.
What if Gutenberg had been able to control a patent on his invention? Could he have resisted the temptation? He might have become richer than Bill Gates, in Renaissance terms: And we might be the poorer. Happily, he amassed a greater wealth: Gutenberg made worlds possible.
So may we.
Network Report Card Grading Explanation Fall 2007 - Fall 2008 Primetime
Delivered by Esteban Torres, National Latino Media Council
The National Latino Media Council is made up of sixteen of the largest Latino advocacy civil rights organizations in the nation. They are: the Cuban American National Foundation; League of United Latin American Citizens, also known as LULAC; Mexican American Legal Defense & Education Fund; National Association of Hispanic Publications; National Association of Latino Independent Producers; National Council of La Raza; National Hispanic Media Coalition; Nosotros; Latino Justice, formerly known as the Puerto Rican Legal Defense & Education Fund; National Association of Latino Elected Officials; the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute; Mexican American Opportunity Foundation; Latino Literacy Now; the National Institute for Latino Policy, MANA and the Arizona State University Center for Community Development and Civil Rights.
This report and the grades earned by the four major networks are based on information provided by them. The report focuses on the primetime scripted programs from Fall of 2007 to Fall of 2008 as well as the Reality programs on the air during the same time period. It grades the networks in eight categories, on numbers reflective of where they are as of this date. Given that we are in the ninth year of the diversity initiatives, the National Latino Media Council (NLMC) has set the bar high with expectations that diversity performance in the eight categories should be much better by this time. It is also important to note that all four networks were extremely challenged by the WGA Writers Strike during the 2007-2008 TV season, so our assessment of their diversity efforts includes this factor.
Let me start by saying that there has been incremental progress at all four networks in terms of American Latinos. There are three criteria areas that we measure. The three criteria are: Institutional programs and measures taken to bring Latinos into the employment ranks both in front and back of camera; out and out performance, that is, actual hiring that is concrete and measurable; and the third criterion is the clear submission of statistical data utilized to accurately grade diversity performance. Please also note that there are varied hours of primetime programming per network per week, therefore the grades received are proportional to the number of hours of prime-time programming each network had on the air during the ’07-’08 period. Allow me to now go through the networks one at a time.
ABC
Despite the WGA Writers Strike that nearly crippled network television, ABC still managed to increase its total number of American Latino actors in primetime by 6.4%, driven primarily by a significant increase of Latino actors in ABC’s Unscripted “Reality” programming (35). ABC also increased its total number of Writers/Producers by 7%, but fell short in its total number of Directors with only 5 American Latino Directors in 2008, versus 8 Directors in 2007. We attribute this shortfall to the Writers strike and have confidence that this number will turn around in the new Television Season.In terms of new program development, ABC is currently developing new Scripted shows that will feature 4 American Latino series regulars: Monique Curen (“The Unusuals”); Rick Gomez (“Cupid”); Camile Guaty (“Cupid”) and National Hispanic Media Coalition Impact Award winner, Judy Reyes (“Scrubs”). ABC also reports that early in the new season, it has 9 Latino writers employed, 2 of which are alumni from the NLMC Writers Program, Rafael Garcia and Leslie Valdes. And of course we have to mention the continued success behind the ABC mega- hit, “Ugly Betty.” This award-winning show continues to demonstrate several Latinos in positive and empowering roles and we look forward to more programs like “Ugly Betty” from ABC and the other networks. In order to have hits like “Ugly Betty,” Latino projects must be looked at and developed, and ABC is doing an incredible job doing precisely that. I congratulate Steve McPhearson and his team for their foresight and commitment to including Latinos at all levels of their operation.
In the important area of business procurement, ABC continues to be the leader in awarding contracts to Latino entrepreneurs, both in terms of Latino entrepreneurs and actual spend. What is very significant for us is that ABC continues its attempt to bring to the screen American Latino themed programming as well as increasing deals with Latino producers and attaching Latino actors to new projects that don’t necessarily have a Latino theme to them. This is exactly what you do if you’re going to increase employment numbers and diverse programming. We thank ABC for their forward thinking and their openness in providing all relevant data to judge their diversity performance. The overall diversity grade that ABC Television earned for the 2007- 2008 season is a B+.
NBC
NBC maintained its overall diversity report card grade of “B,” which is no small feat considering the challenges realized by the Writers Strike. The Peacock network managed to maintain its total number of American Latino actors in Scripted primetime programming (10 in 2007 and 10 in 2008), but fell significantly short in its total number of American Latino actors featured in Unscripted “Reality” programming (0). Considering the increasing popularity of the “Reality TV” genre, this is very unfortunate. On a brighter note, NBC increased its total number of American Latino Writers/Producers by 25% and also maintained its total number of Latino Directors in the 2007-2008 TV season (9).
Regarding business procurement with the American Latino community, NBC demonstrated less spending with Latino vendors for CY 2007 versus its spending with other minority vendors. This is unfortunate, considering the significant buying-power of the American Latino population and the increasing number of Latino entrepreneurs across the country. As such, we were forced to assign NBC a letter grade of “B,” for its diversity efforts in business procurement (the same letter grade earned last season), and will continue to work with the network to make improvements in this important area of diversity. The network does, however, anticipate a Hispanic supplier spend increase of about 53% for CY 2008, so we remain hopeful that NBC will increase its report card grade for business procurement next year.
On a more positive note, NBC continues to support network diversity for American Latinos with its continued open casting calls around the country for Latino acting talent for both NBC and its
Spanish-language, sister-station, Telemundo. Additionally, NBC also reports positive developments for the 2008-2009 TV season that would include American Latino actors as series regulars on “The Listener” (Lisa Marcos), and “LAPD” (Kevin Alejandro). NBC also reports a talent holding deal with Jose Compre, the “Best Actor” winner in NBC’s Comedy Short Cuts competition. The NLMC is also pleased to report that NBC continues to strengthen its diverse work force with executive American Latino talent and has added Jackie Hernandez, the former editor of “People en Español” magazine, as COO for Telemundo. We congratulate NBC for its continued improvements and commitment to network diversity throughout the organization.
CBS
Under the leadership of Nina Tassler, President of CBS Entertainment, CBS is the only network that demonstrated an increase in American Latino actors in Scripted primetime programming over the past TV season. We applaud the 83% increase (22 actors in 2008 vs. 12 actors in 2007) and look forward to even more increases in the coming years. I am also pleased to tell you that CBS also increased its total number of American Latino actors in “Recurring” roles for primetime Scripted shows. However, the network fell short in its American Latino representation on its Unscripted “Reality” programming with no featured Latino actors reported. Once again, this is unfortunate considering the growing popularity of the “Reality” television genre. Like ABC and NBC, CBS also increased its total number of American Latino Writers/Producers by 50%, but came up short in its total number of Latino Directors. Once again, we attribute this shortfall of American Latino Directors to the Writers Strike and have full confidence that CBS will address this issue in the new TV season.
The overall grade of “B+” for CBS did not change from last year, but with the network’s current programming development we have high expectations that CBS will achieve an “A” next year. CBS is currently developing a project with Cynthia Cidre, a Latina, and the creator of “Cane.” The proposed series would have a Latina in one of the lead roles. Additionally, CBS is also developing a Miami-based project set in the 1960’s with a significant Cuban story-line.
CBS has the largest number of American Latino creative executives of all four networks. We believe that the important inclusion of these Latino creative executives has resulted in the addition of “Cane,” and the other Latino-themed programs that are currently under development. And despite the fact that “Cane” was cancelled due to low ratings, we would still like to take this opportunity to applaud Nina Tassler and her team at CBS for their vision and commitment to bring the Latino experience to the American consciousness during primetime. We are convinced that when Latino executives are part of a network, Latino projects have a more sympathetic ear, as wonderfully demonstrated by CBS this past year.
In Procurement, CBS improved their grade from a “B” to a “B+,” thanks to their VP of Diversity, who has made this category a priority for the network. We sincerely appreciate the network’s new frame of mind and for the speed with which they are increasing their procurement total spend as well as their pool of American Latino entrepreneurs.
FOX
Now we come to FOX. FOX is the only network that improved its “overall” grade from last year, earning a “B+” for its diversity efforts in the 2007-2008 TV season, versus its overall grade of “B-“ last season, and we happily applaud the effort. FOX achieved an 82% increase in its total number of American Latino actors in primetime, driven primarily by the 21 Latino actors featured in the FOX hit, “Prison Break” (5 Regular/16 Recurring). However, there was a decrease in the total amount of American Latino series regular actors in Scripted programming (7 this season, versus 10 last season). Like the other networks, FOX also increased its total number of American Latino Writers/Producers (+44%) and also “doubled” its total number of Latino Directors (10 this season, versus 5 last season)! This is a tremendous effort and I am also pleased to report that FOX significantly increased its total number of episodes directed by American Latino Directors – a whopping 68 episodes this season, versus only 7 episodes last year.
In terms of program development, FOX reports that one of its upcoming new dramas, “Lie to me,” will feature a Latino as a series regular cast member; and that 3 to 5 new FOX pilots have been cast with American Latino series regulars, including “The Emancipation of Ernesto.” The Emancipation of Ernesto is a comedy that follows the odyssey of a young Latino man born in a Mexican prison, who comes to the United States in search of his father. The series lead will be played by “That 70’s Show” star, Wilmer Valderrama, and the “Emancipation” cast if almost entirely Latino. FOX has also developed a comedy script with NHMC Impact Award winner and “Culture Clash” front man, Richard Montoya, that is currently under consideration and we hope this script comes to fruition.
As I’ve just reported, FOX Television has definitely stepped up its network diversity efforts, but we are still somewhat concerned about the network’s business procurement efforts. In fact, this is the only area of the report card that FOX decreased its grade, moving from a “C” last year to a “C-” this year. As such, we will continue to work with the network and closely monitor its efforts in the very important area of business procurement.
SUMMARY
In summary, the National Latino Media Council strongly believes that after nine years of assessing the diversity efforts of ABC, NBC, CBS and FOX, that network television diversity is finally taking hold. The number of American Latinos both in front and back of camera has increased, but we also realize that they are incremental numbers in proportion to the American Latino population. The network diversity programs that were begun seven and eight years ago are now bearing fruit and it is not unreasonable to expect that the present numbers will continue to climb and that there will be no backsliding. I also want to emphasize that diversity programs are fine, but we grade on performance, not simply on good intentions. Our confidence in the networks’ diversity efforts is also increased by the fact that each network still demonstrated diversity improvements, despite the devastating writers strike – so we have even greater expectations going into the 2008-2009 television season.
I would also like to take this opportunity to address our on-going efforts to combat hate speech in the media. We consistently receive reports about acts of violence against Latinos and the Latino immigrant community in particular; and we are certain that this is a direct result of the “immigration hysteria” fueled by irresponsible TV and Radio talk show hosts. More and more evidence suggests that the media has played a role in the rise of hate crimes against Latinos, documented by the FBI. As such, hate speech in the media continues to be an important issue for the NLMC and a top priority for the National Hispanic Media Coalition.
Because of the significant lack of positive media images of Latinos in the U.S., and because we do not have sufficient access to the airwaves, the American Latino community is at great risk. If hate speech is allowed to continue, it will continue to be a tremendous disservice to Latinos and non-Latinos across the country, who hear anti-Latino speech and assume the information being disseminated is correct.
Ladies and gentlemen, we simply need more Latinos on television and throughout the entertainment industry as well as on the News and Public Affairs programs. All Americans across this nation need to understand that we have the same aspirations and preoccupations as everyone else - we want to provide for our families, we want to keep them safe, and we want what every other American in this great nation of ours enjoys: equity, fairness and justice. I thank you very much for your presence this morning and your continued interest in this very important endeavor.
EXPLANATION
Actors: On-air Primetime “Scripted” Shows (Regular & Recurring)
The highest grade in this category will be based on the network’s ability to have increased significantly the employment of qualified minority actors from Fall of 2007 to Fall of 2008 primetime and scripted television programs. Actors who will be considered to have received employment by the network are “regulars”—actors who have a season contract with a series. Also considered will be “recurring” actors. Additionally, the network must show it explicitly and perceptibly conveyed the obligation of its casting directors to make diversity a priority in every casting call, every meeting with talent agents or agencies, production companies and in casting every show.
Networks will be given credit in the grading process for non-traditional casting decisions made during the 2007-08 Season (e.g., employing a minority actor to play the role of a character which was based on or specifically designated as a non-minority individual). The network must provide data, broken down by ethnic community, as to the number of minority actors employed or to be employed, including a breakdown of “regular” and “recurring” actors, as well as the total number of actors employed or to be employed by the network during the 2007-08 Season.
Actors: On-air Primetime “Reality” Programming (Regular & Recurring)
The highest grade in this category will be based on the network’s ability to have increased significantly the employment of qualified minority actors hosts and contestants/participants from Fall of 2007 to Fall of 2008 in primetime Reality programming. Actors/hosts who will be considered to have received employment by the network are “regulars”—actors who have a season contract with a series. Also considered will be contestants/participants. Additionally, the network must show it explicitly and perceptibly conveyed the obligation of its casting directors to make diversity a priority in every casting call, every meeting with talent agents or agencies, production companies and in casting every show.
The network must provide data, broken down by ethnic community, as to the number of minority actors employed or to be employed, including a breakdown of “regular” and “recurring” actors or contestants, as well as the total number of actors employed or to be employed by the network during the 2007-08 Season.
Writers & Producers
The highest grade in this category will be based on the network’s ability to have increased significantly the employment of qualified minority writers and/or producers in the production of network television series during the 2007-08 Season. At the time of the network’s year-end submission, there must be in place a program and/or initiative to increase the employment of ethnicminorities in each subcategory, (i.e., writers and/or producers for upcoming seasons). The network must provide data, broken down by ethnic community, as to the number of minority writers and/or producers employed or to be employed by the network during the 2007-08 Season.
Directors
The highest grade in this category will be based on the network’s ability to have increased significantly the employment of qualified minority directors in the production of network television series during the 2007-08 Season. At the time of the network’s year-end submission, there must be in place a program and/or initiative to increase the employment of ethnic minorities in directing positions for upcoming seasons. The network must provide data, broken down by ethnic community, as to the number of minority directors employed or to be employed by the network during the 2007-08 Season.
Program Development
The highest grade in this category will be given to the network that has shown significant improvement in increasing the number of development deals that include actors, writers and/or producers of diverse backgrounds in a variety of roles during the 2007-08 Season. The network must provide data, broken down by ethnic community, as to the number of development deals negotiated during the 2007-08 Season.
Procurement
The highest grade in this category will be given to the network that has contracted with a substantial number of qualified minority companies for procurement services and/or goods, and has contracted a substantial sum of its procurement dollars with said companies. The network must provide data, broken down by ethnic community, as to the number of contracts and the sum of the procurement agreements entered into by the network during the 2007-08 Season.
Entertainment Executives
The highest grade in this category will be given to the network that has instituted a minority recruitment and training program to significantly increase the employment of ethnic minorities in entertainment management and executive positions. The network also will have implemented programs which factor in progress toward improving the hiring and promotion process in the annual evaluation of management. The network must provide data, broken down by ethnic community, regarding the number of minority hires in entertainment management and executive positions during the 2007-08 Season.
Network Commitment to Diversity
An “A” grade in this category will be given to the network that has demonstrated a commitment to diversity in every aspect of its broadcast television business. Said commitment may be demonstrated by the following: (1) the placement of an infrastructure designed to accomplish the goals of greater inclusion and opportunities for qualified minorities that reaches every network division; (2) regular communication with the Coalition about the network’s progress; (3) the active participation of key creative executives in the application and achievement of those initiatives; (4) the sharing of all records regarding the categories above; and (5) the voluntary extension of the Memorandum of Understanding to include other network operating entities within the corporation.
A = Exceptional Results B = Very good effort and/or results C = Good effort and/or results D = Inadequate effort and/or results F/I = Fail/Incomplete information
Download PDFs of the: Report Card, Explanation
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