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FCC Commissioner Copps: “Getting Media Right: A Call To Action”

Getting Media Right: A Call To Action, FCC Commissioner Michael J. Copps, Columbia University School Of Journalism, New York City (December 2, 2010).

Libraries and Journalism have a lot in common. Copps presents specific recommendations to deal with what he calls the “hour of grave peril” of American Journalism.

The place where I work — the Federal Communications Commission — blessed it all, encouraged the consolidation mania, and went beyond even that to eviscerate just about every public interest responsibility that generations of reformers had fought for and won in radio and TV. One FCC Chairman summed up the agency’s attitude that there was nothing special about the media by saying, “a television set is nothing but a toaster with pictures.” So much for the people’s airwaves and for any semblance of concern for the fragile news and information infrastructure that is the lifeblood of society’s conversation with itself.

Hat tip to Kevin Taglang!

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.


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