Is FCC chairman Julius Genachowski spicing up his resumé for a future career with one of the companies he used to regulate or does Rupert Murdoch deserve an extra special Christmas gift this year?

Mr. Genachowski has breathed new life into an industry-friendly plan that would allow a handful of companies to own or control even more media outlets  — the same kind of knuckle-headed thinking that brought us companies like Clear Channel that own more than 800 radio stations you can’t tell apart and an integrated media and telecom empire growing at the expense of competition.

Whether Genachowski considers “diversity” a dirty word or whether he is nostalgic for the days of William Randolph Hearst, his sudden interest in a twice-rejected harebrained scheme to allow one company to own even more is a stupendously bad idea. This is particularly true when the guy ready to benefit the most is running a company that looked the other way when its reporters hacked ordinary citizens’ phones and then used what was heard as the basis for scandalous tabloid reporting.

Would you be comfortable allowing Rupert Murdoch to own and control virtually all of your local news?

Phillip “Ask yourself if your interests or theirs are served by more media consolidation” Dampier

Regardless of Murdoch’s personal politics, the concept of a small handful of companies or media moguls reinforcing their media oligopoly with even more consolidation hardly has a track record of success for consumers. One need only look at what the 1996 Telecommunications Act and subsequent deregulation foolishness did for local radio and television stations. Do you even listen to local radio any longer? If not, why not?

• Is it the fact the people on your “local” radio station strangely mispronounce streets and local towns because, in fact, they pre-record those messages from a city several hundred miles away?
• Does your local radio station even bother with news any longer, or is it simply easier to rely on a national radio newscast picked off a satellite for three minutes an hour?
• Do you have a trigger finger on the dial when the station stops playing music and starts playing endless ads?
• Do you get the feeling any DJ that plays something not on the focus-group tested and pre-analyzed 50 song playlist will automatically be electrocuted in his chair?
• Does your local television station run six hours a day of infomercials and practically no local programming?
• Do you mind that some of your local stations have slashed local news budgets and may have even handed over their newscast to a competing TV station (or doesn’t bother with one any longer?)

What the FCC used to demand from local stations to demonstrate “local commitment” has been relegated to the rubbish bin. Today, local stations are mere pawns to be bought, sold or traded by well-consolidated media groups. It’s all about the money, not so much about the programming.

Radio created its problems adopting cookie-cutter, ad-infested formats that deliver no diversity and little to no local flavor. You might as well create your own ad-free playlist with an iPod or smartphone and be done with it. That is exactly what many former listeners do.

Local television lost viewers after programming budgets were slashed and local news operations were cut or contracted out. The quest for fatter profits for the corporate parent come at the expense of appealing programming. Remember when your local station ran movies or syndicated entertainment shows overnight, in the afternoon or on weekends? No more. Thanks to deregulation and capitulation to basic cable, your local station now runs program length commercials for the Skin Tag Remover, mineral makeup that involved putting ground up rocks on your face, or the Lint Lizard. Compelling viewing this isn’t.

Now the FCC wants to bring this same “success story” in spades by allowing consolidation to accelerate. Only instead of one company owning a bunch of local radio and television stations, it now wants to permit that same company to own your local newspaper, too.

Happy days these are for the likes of media baron Murdoch, who already owns local media in cities like Los Angeles and Chicago, but now wants the local newspaper in both cities as well. It represents an expansion of Murdoch’s media echo chamber the free flow of information required in a democracy cannot afford.

But Murdoch isn’t the only one prepping the champagne. Companies like Comcast-NBC could end up owning your newspaper, two major local television stations, eight local radio stations, and of course also provide your overpriced Internet access, phone and cable-TV service.

Chinese Central Radio & Television in Beijing doesn’t get this level of control, but under the latest FCC plan, Fox, Disney, Viacom, Comcast, Time Warner, and Clear Channel each would.

Murdoch and his supporters argue that allowing greater media consolidation will lead to a rescue of the ailing newspaper industry which is losing readers and subscribers in the Internet age.

I would argue the fate of newspapers, like local radio and television, is at the hands of their corporate owners who have slashed budgets to maximize profits at the expense of readers. Murdoch’s ownership would not change this, but would allow him to further influence the media landscape for his own personal and professional agenda. Great Britain learned this first hand with Murdoch’s tabloid newspapers. The pervasive illegal phone hacking and other abuses under Murdoch’s watch became so bad, an independent report regarding the tawdry affair now advocates the need for an independent body to review media excesses and start bringing abusers to account.

Real competition used to manage that pretty well. Those days are dwindling back home in the United States.

For at least 20 years, journalism advocates have complained local newsrooms have been gutted in cost-cutting maneuvers to allow media groups to buy and sell newspapers like they were baseball cards. After every sale, more cost-cutting. First to go were local consumer reporters and investigative journalists who antagonized local advertisers with their accounts of abusive car dealers or incompetent repair companies. Many took their ad business elsewhere.

Reporters remaining on the payroll were given more stories to cover and little time to investigate. With looming deadlines, the result all-too-often is superficial reporting that relies on “he said, she said” coverage. Many newspapers also reduced local coverage in favor of cheaper wire service reports, often outdated by the time readers saw them.

Some editors counted the days until a popular columnist decided to retire. That’s one more person off the payroll. The local movie reviewer is an endangered species, now replaced with a national columnist who covers the same movies for a lot less money. In some newspapers, some local reporting comes courtesy of local bloggers that work for free or for a pittance.

Copps

With reporting like this, many newspapers are at risk of becoming irrelevant and are already a poor value for money. Those that have a chance have learned investing in local reporting can make the difference, especially if those reading the newspaper online are asked to help contribute to the cost of gathering and disseminating the news.

One thing we have learned watching 20 years of deregulation: the larger media companies get, the less innovative they become. The proof is available on your radio dial today, if you still even listen.

That isn’t just me saying it. Former FCC Commissioner Michael Copps said much the same thing:

“[America’s news and information ecosystem] has suffered the same kind of collapse as so much of America’s physical infrastructure—witness the sorry state of our bridges, highways, streets, public transportation, airports and public utilities. So, too, in media. Private sector consolidation led to the closing of hundreds of newsrooms and the firing of thousands of investigative reporters who should be combing the beats to hold the powerful accountable. Instead journalism has been hollowed out as badly as those rust-belt steel mills. Investigative journalism hangs by a slender thread, replaced by vapid infotainment, bloviating talking heads, and a dry well of facts and real-world analysis.

The public sector is at least equally culpable because government—especially the FCC where I served for more than a decade—blessed just about every media merger and acquisition that came before it. Then it proceeded, over the better part of a generation, to eviscerate almost all of the specific public interest guidelines that had been put in place over many years to ensure that the people’s airwaves actually serve the people.

[…] Instead of hurrying in the wrong direction, wouldn’t the Commission’s time be better utilized by considering (and actually voting on) some of the dozens of recommendations that have been put before it by civil rights and public interest groups to establish programs and incentives to encourage minority and female ownership? It is time for the FCC to take a deep breath, change direction, and get on with the huge challenge of encouraging a diverse media environment that serves all of our citizens and that nourishes a thriving civic dialogue.”

Readers can take action by clicking on the infographic above and sign the petition from Free Press to send a clear message to the FCC more is less. Demand media diversity and a return to local accountability from those occupying the public airwaves.

For the third year in a row, AT&T is celebrating the holidays by telling more than 100 New Haven-area employees they will be spending a lot more time with their families this Christmas, without a job.

In mid-November, AT&T announced it was cutting 100 telephone operators. Now the company is back for more — telling 106 employees, many hard at work cleaning up storm damage from Hurricane Sandy, their services as AT&T technicians are no longer required.

As shell-shocked employees left AT&T’s New Haven headquarters with “early retirement” papers, the local union representing many of the technicians vowed to fight the layoffs.

“Many of the guys losing their jobs are the ones who go out in trucks and restore your service after a storm,” CWA Local 1298 president Bill Henderson told WTNH-TV. Henderson says the next time your U-verse or phone service goes out in Connecticut, you better be very patient because it could take a lot longer for service to be restored.

AT&T says many of the workers involved were no longer needed as consumers move away from traditional landline and wired service in favor of wireless, but Henderson wondered if that were the case, why were many of his workers forced to work mandatory overtime through much of November restoring service after Hurricane Sandy.

State regulators are already reviewing the performance of utility companies that left many residents with extended outages. Some communities said utilities were woefully unprepared to deal with the storm. Now the union wants the state’s telecommunications regulator to review the layoffs to determine if AT&T’s service in the state will decline further. The impact could be much more than an inconvenience to customers.

Off to the unemployment office we go, unless we’re willing to work elsewhere in the state.

“When we had hurricane Irene, it took our state down economically for a week and a half, and we can’t afford to do that going into the future,” Henderson argues. “We have to do better, we can’t do worse.”

An AT&T spokesman denied the company was laying off any worker, and claimed the company is offering employees access to other positions in other parts of Connecticut.

“The affected employees all have a guaranteed job offer that ensures they will be offered another job in Connecticut,” said spokesman Marty Richter. “All employees declared surplus in Connecticut in the last two years have either found other jobs with the company, continued to work in their current job while awaiting a guaranteed job offer, or elected to take a voluntary retirement package.”

Richter suggested some the affected technicians probably won’t be moved too far away.

“It’s likely that many will be offered jobs as U-verse technicians, in which case they could still be pulled in if needed for network restoration in extreme circumstances like a big storm,” Richter said.

AT&T used to employee at least 4,000 operators in the state of Connecticut alone. Today that number is down to less than 100. When telecommunications companies look for “cost savings,” getting rid of workers or slashing salaries and benefits remain favorite targets.

“It seems like they do it every year at this time,” Henderson said. “This is a company that made $13 billion last year and is on pace to make $17 billion this year and just gave a $2 million bonus to its CEO. They’re important jobs to keep. This is a corporation that only cares about the bottom line.”

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WTNH New Haven ATT announces major job cuts 11-30-12.mp4[/flv]

WTNH in New Haven says more than 100 AT&T employees will lose their jobs right before the holidays. It could ultimately affect the quality of your AT&T service, union officials warn.  (2 minutes)

Areas in yellow are Wireless ISP projects seeking funding to expand. Most of them are in the panhandle region of northern W.V. The areas shaded in purple are grant proposals to promote the benefit of subscribing to broadband service.

Frontier Communications has forced a West Virginia broadband improvement council to temporarily suspend plans to distribute $4 million in funding to independent ISPs planning to expand service in rural areas after a company official objected that the funding would duplicate broadband service Frontier already provides itself or through its satellite broadband partner.

The West Virginia Broadband Deployment Council ended up postponing its broadband awards program after Frontier Communications executive Dana Waldo, who serves on the Council, objected to the money being distributed.

Waldo noted state code prohibits the board from awarding grants for projects in areas already provided service.

That state code, passed by the West Virginia legislature in 2008, came courtesy of a coalition of phone, cable, and broadband equipment companies like Cisco working with then-Gov. Joe Manchin to push the broadband bill into law. Verizon was the most influential supporter, serving as West Virginia’s largest telecommunications company before selling its landline network to Frontier.

The code Waldo refers to:

The council shall exercise its powers and authority to bring broadband service to those areas without broadband service. The council may not duplicate or displace broadband service in areas already served or where private industry feasibly can be expected to offer services in the reasonably foreseeable future. In no event may projects or actions undertaken pursuant to this article be used to finance or support broadband or other services in competition with private industry.

The Council relied on broadband map data provided by Frontier Communications to help score and rank projects that appeared to be outside of Frontier’s broadband service area. When the project rankings were first announced in September, Frontier executives immediately claimed their map data was outdated and subsequently updated map data voluntarily supplied by Frontier, not independently verified, showed many of the high-ranking independent projects would compete with Frontier’s DSL service, disqualifying them from further consideration.

Waldo

Waldo declared he was not comfortable with the broadband awards because “many of those areas are currently served or can be reasonably served by Frontier.”

State officials were hopeful a new list of qualifying projects could be developed in accordance with the latest Frontier map data and were scheduled to be announced on Dec. 12.

But Waldo noted that Frontier could end up unhappy with many of those projects as well.

He noted Frontier technically already offers every household in West Virginia broadband access through its new partnership with a satellite Internet Service Provider. Frontier began offering rural customers satellite Internet service earlier this year.

“If our mission is to increase broadband access, we need to consider satellite,” he told the Council. “We have hundreds of [satellite] customers.”

While Frontier considers satellite broadband a solution in the most rural areas where it is unlikely to provide service anytime soon, it could prove even more valuable as a weapon against potential competition in a state that prohibits public funding of competing services.

The biggest losers should Frontier prove its case are rural Wireless Internet Service Providers, who have requested $3.1 million in grants to build antenna towers. An additional $923,000 was expected to fund programs that promote the benefits of signing up for high speed service. Frontier has ties to four of those projects, and has stated no objections to them.

Frontier has also not objected to the much larger $126 million federal grant to construct an institutional statewide fiber broadband network. Frontier is the primary vendor that will sell access on that network.

Still keeping their fingers on the pulse of West Virginia’s broadband.

The state of West Virginia has a money problem.

In 2009, the state applied for and won a $126 million federal Broadband Technologies Opportunity Program (BTOP) grant to expand broadband service in a state plagued with some of the worst Internet access around. That grant will expire Jan. 31, without all of the money spent and equipment in place.

Whatever money is left unspent will be returned to the federal treasury and lost for good. That represents the absolute worst-case nightmare scenario for government officials loathe to leave money on the table. As a result, the state continues to hurry depleting the remaining grant funds before the clock runs out, even if it results in controversial spending decisions.

Last week, the chairman of the West Virginia Broadband Deployment Council openly admitted the state does not have a unified, coherent broadband deployment plan and has been running the broadband expansion effort on an ad hoc basis. That’s a big mistake in the eyes of Dan O’Hanlon, a retired Cabell County circuit judge who leads the Council.

It should not be this difficult. Ask virtually any consumer in rural West Virginia about what needs to be done and the answer is always the same: expand access in unserved areas and raise speeds for those who already have the service.

Unfortunately, $126 million of consumers’ tax dollars will be spent without really doing either.

The Obama Administration’s efforts to expand rural broadband came with lofty rhetoric, but far too often failed to directly address the problem. Consumers and small businesses want Internet access, and the local phone company simply won’t deliver it. Forget about cable broadband — most rural areas without Internet access are not served by any cable operator.

Phillip “Verizon and Frontier have built West Virginia’s taxpayer-funded broadband network in their own image” Dampier

That leaves the federal government in the position of trying to fund rural Internet connections in ways that don’t appear as blatant corporate welfare — paying off phone companies to provide service where they have simply refused for revenue and cost reasons. Competitors are also outraged at the precedent of directly subsidizing certain players but not others, and a lot of taxpayers might question why their tax dollars are going to the phone company.

As a result, the government has discovered a politically palatable alternative: throwing money at non-controversial “institutional” networks built to serve local governments, hospitals, public safety agencies, libraries, and schools. They also have political cover funding obscure “middle mile” networks that interconnect telecommunications company offices, but don’t directly serve any homes or businesses.

Since most people don’t understand the differences between these types of networks and the services they actually provide, broadband expansion projects offer politicians headache-free ribbon cutting ceremonies, applause, and positive publicity from local media reports that mistake institutional and middle mile networks with broadband finally coming to rural towns and villages. Long after the cartoon-sized ribbon-cutting scissors are put away, rural residents still find themselves stuck with dial-up or satellite fraudband.

Last week, the Joint Committee on Technology overseeing the BTOP grant learned the state lacks a plan to get the most broadband bang for the buck, despite hiring some big dollar Verizon subcontractor-consultants that are supposed to be experts at this kind of thing.

As Stop the Cap! reported in May, the state decided to spend $24 million of taxpayer money to buy 1,064 overpowered Cisco routers built (and priced) for big city university use. Imagine the surprise of rural schools and libraries when routers valued at $22,000 each arrived to serve a handful of concurrent users that would have been just as well-served with equipment you can find at Best Buy. Those routers were coincidentally supplied by a familiar vendor: Verizon Network Integration.

Two years later, more than 300 of those routers were in storage, unused. As of this week, 175 are still there.

This $22,000 router, paid for at taxpayer expense…

Two rural librarians in May told Stop the Cap! they were in a quandary over the equipment installed in their tiny libraries because they had no idea how to switch them on, much less maintain them over the long term. Even worse, both told us, they cannot begin to afford the ongoing monthly service fees that are required to participate in the new broadband network.

“We are getting a Hummer network on a Kia operating budget,” one librarian told Stop the Cap! last spring. “The network sounds great, but in our case we have to find the money to pay the bill to run it every month, and that money is hard to find in a library with five outdated public terminals.”

Seven months later and not a lot has changed.

“We have complained to our local leaders this has created more problems for us than it solved,” that same librarian, who could not use his name because of local politics, told Stop the Cap! “If you have worked in government or community service as long as I have, you cringe whenever you have one of these grants because you have to follow the federal government’s rules and you end up spending the money where it least needs to be spent.”

…will provide service for this rural library’s four public terminals. (Image: West Virginia Gazette)

Committee members echoed that sentiment, observing facilities are ending up with equipment they don’t know how to use or cannot afford because monthly service charges for upgraded broadband from Frontier Communications, the state’s largest phone company, are unaffordable.

One proposed solution to cut further taxpayer expense would be to sell the excess network capacity, deemed significant in many communities, to third party Internet Service Providers to directly resell to individual homes and businesses. After all, taxpayers are footing the bill for the $126 million grant that largely paid for the network and independent ISPs would help solve the problem of extending broadband to the unserved.

No deal. Frontier claims it is selling the project broadband access far below normal commercial rates, offering high capacity speeds at an unspecified “entry-level” price. Allowing third party companies to resell that service would put independent ISPs in direct competition with Frontier.

Unfortunately, well-intentioned members the West Virginia Broadband Deployment Council, the Joint Committee on Technology, and other government officials are in over their heads and increasingly appear captive to the design, recommendations, and implementation of a network plan heavily influenced by high-paid Verizon consultants and implemented on a broadband network owned and operated by Frontier Communications.

That left Gale Given, the state’s chief technology officer claiming critics of earlier spending decisions were engaged in “second guessing.” With the expensive routers mostly already in place, Given offered it was better for schools and other institutions to have more capacity than they need now so they won’t be hamstrung if they ever want to expand.

“Only one problem: Ms. Given assumes we can afford to turn the key on the network they are building us now,” said one librarian this week. “Only we can’t. Worrying about what we can do tomorrow is pointless when we can’t even afford to do it today.”

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s cowardly lion act. The rhetoric rarely matched the results.

Washington insiders are predicting Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski will leave his position early in President Obama’s second term.

It cannot come soon enough, as far as we’re concerned.

One of the biggest disappointments of the Obama Administration has been the poor performance of a chairman that originally promised a departure from the rubber stamp-mentality that allowed Big Telecom providers to win near-instant approval of just about anything asked from the Republican-dominated FCC of the Bush Administration. If only to underline that point, former FCC Chairman Michael Powell joined Republican ex-commissioner Meredith Atwell-Baker on a trip through the D.C. revolving door, taking lucrative jobs with the same cable industry both used to oversee.

We had high hopes for Mr. Genachowski when he took the helm at the FCC — particularly over Net Neutrality, media consolidation, and predatory abuse of consumers at the hands of the comfortable cable-telco duopoly. Genachowski promised strong Net Neutrality protections, better broadband — especially in rural areas, an end to rubber stamping competition killing mergers and acquisitions, and more aggressive oversight of the broadband industry generally.

What we got was the reincarnation of the Cowardly Lion.

The Washington Post reviews Genachowski’s tenure during the first term of the Obama Administration and reports he has few unabashed supporters left. Telecom companies loathe Genachowski’s more cautious approach and consumer groups hate his penchant for caving in when lobbyists come calling. In short, another Democrat that talks tough and caves in at the first sign of trouble.

“His tenure has been nothing but a huge disappointment because he’s squandered an opportunity to give consumers the competitive communications market they deserve,” Derek Turner, head of policy analysis at public interest group Free Press told the Post. “If someone like him upholds compromise, it quickly leads to capitulation, which is what he’s done. He folds…to the pressure of big companies.”

Genachowski’s Record:

• Heavily promoted rural broadband and oversaw a review program measuring actual broadband speeds against those claimed by providers. But much of the money available for improving rural broadband has been separately awarded to “middle mile” and “institutional networks” that are not accessible to most consumers or businesses. Genachowki has heaped automatic praise on many of the phone companies winning broadband funding, despite the fact many of them are satisfied giving consumers no better than 4Mbps service;
• Reformed the outdated Universal Service Fund, which long outlived much of its usefulness, into a broadband expansion fund. But some unintended consequences have led to some rural providers suspending network upgrades because of funding uncertainties still unresolved;
• Approved a blockbuster merger deal between Comcast and NBC-Universal that included temporary “hard-won” concessions Comcast later admitted they were going to offer anyway – merger or not. The result is a new high bar for tolerating super-sized media consolidation with no serious consideration of the impact on consumers. The latest evidence: support for Rupert “Phone Hacker” Murdoch’s latest efforts to buy more newspapers in the United States;
• Rejected an AT&T/T-Mobile merger deal, but only after the Justice Dept. took the lead dismissing it as an anti-consumer, anti-competition nightmare. Within hours, Genachowski’s office issued a “me, too” press release condemning the deal he said little about earlier;
• Demanded a strong Net Neutrality framework to protect the open Internet, but utterly caved under pressure from politicians receiving hefty corporate contributions from AT&T and others. The resulting loophole-ridden “protections” do not apply to wireless, and the industry-approved compromise is now the subject of a lawsuit filed by some of the same companies that earlier applauded Genachowski’s flexibility;
• Genachowski handed out his direct phone numbers to the CEO’s of the top Big Telecom companies, and has been directly lobbied by those “super-citizens,” while ordinary consumers are stuck filing comments with the FCC’s arcane Electronic Comment Filing System. Genachowski also directed closed-door meetings be held on the subject of Net Neutrality with large telecom companies. These meetings were closed to the public with no consumer representatives on hand;
• Genachowski refused to reclassify broadband as a “telecommunications service,” which would give the agency clear-cut authority to oversee the service. Instead, he has stuck with former FCC Chairman Michael Powell’s odd interpretation of broadband as “an information service,” not subject to much review by the agency;
• Appropriately nixed Philip Falcone’s LightSquared venture, the biggest threat to GPS navigation around. But Genachowski’s controversial early boosting of the venture, including support for expedited special permission to launch the network without the usual scrutiny, resulted in an embarrassing about-face after long-standing critics’ fears of navigation interference were vindicated;
• In 2012, Genachowski’s cozy relationship with the industry reached whole new levels with unabashed support for Internet Overcharging schemes like usage caps and consumption billing, despite no evidence justifying them. The FCC has continued to ignore repeated requests for a review of these pricing schemes.