What's the cost of the so-called "free" services we use online every day? What do you gain and what do you give up when you accept the Terms and Conditions of your favorite app? And why should you care?

In this online discussion: documentary filmmakers, media activists and tech workers talk about what we give up and why it matters.

Brought to you by Active Voice and NAMAC.

A discussion on Democracy Now of channel guides in TV cable systems and how they can make alternative TV programs really, really hard to find. And what media activists are trying to do about it.

This short video from the Open Technology Institute features community broadband projects: Brooklyn, Detroit, and Dharmasala.

The recently-deceased maverick reporter was a questioner of presidents for generations.

Here she is in 2006, in conversation with Belva Davis, at Media Alliance's 30th anniversary birthday party at the Herbst Theater Green Room in San Francisco.

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Ye Mengyuan and Wang Linjia, the two 16-year-old Chinese school girls who died in the Asiana Airlines crash this weekend, aren't around to experience the kind of knee-jerky modern racism toward Asians the tragedy inspired in both mainstream and social media.

They've been spared.

But 14-year-old Milena Clarke in Kentucky certainly has had an earful of the good old-fashioned kind face to face the last two years.

"Gook." "Nigger lover." "Chubby chink."

Straight from the Paula Deen lexicon, those were just some of the point-blank epithets Milena says her own basketball teammates at Russell Middle School in Russell, Kentucky spewed at her incessantly since the 6th grade.

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The toxic mix of bullying and racism isn't kid stuff. Milena, adopted as an infant from Kazakhstan, is nothing like the fictional Kazakh movie character, the jokey "Borat." Milena's features are more Asian, typical of the people from the country tucked between China and Russia in Central Asia. Indeed, Kazakhstan was the last of the Russian republics to declare independence in 1991. When Kentucky lawyer Terry Clarke and his family adopted Milena, he promised to help her never forget her ethnic roots.

He never figured her Asian-ness would bring out the intimidating racist taunts from her white teammates at Russell Middle School. Apparently ignorant of Jeremy Lin and Yao Ming, they'd harangue her about how "Asians can't play basketball."

"I'd say [to teammates] why are you saying that, and they'd just laugh and start talking about me more, and I couldn't do much about it," Milena said.

It's a real example of racism that may seem out of place in a diverse world when Asian Americans are common in urban enclaves like San Francisco or New York City.

But in Kentucky, Asians are just over one percent of the population of more than 4 million. As Asian Americans increasingly find themselves scattered throughout the U.S., they can often find themselves, like Milena, isolated and subjected to a fresh version of racism from a new generation.

When I talked to Milena this weekend, she said after two years, the impact of the racist taunting began to affect how she felt about herself.

"I just felt awful for being Asian because of them, because they were telling me how bad [Asians] were. It just really got to me," said Milena. "Everything they said made me think if I wasn't Asian, if I were white, it would be a lot less likely for this to happen."

What would be less likely, I asked?

"The harassment," she said.

Milena said along with the verbal abuse came actual physical abuse. Teammates would shove, push, and trip her. And not like the Miami Heat did in Game 7 of the NBA finals. This wasn't a game. It was an everyday occurrence.

Wasn't there ever a moment when there would be a time out? A break?

"No, not really," said Milena, who said she'd often pray that the taunting would stop.

It got to a point in 7th grade where after a practice, Milena finally had to tell her father.

"I went to the car and just broke down," she said.

Her father, an environmental lawyer, was angered. But first he reached out to the coach. And then to the school district. When nothing changed, he went to both the state and federal education departments. Finally, he sought legal help from AALDEF.

AALDEF, which has had success fighting racial bullying at South Philadelphia High School, is taking on the case. It has filed official complaints with both the Justice Department and the Office of Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education.

I put in a call to the Russell Independent School District, but Superintendent Sean Horne was unavailable for comment.

What's surprising to me is how long it took before Milena's family decided it was time to fight back. Indeed, for a while, the Clarkes took solace by having Milena, who at 5'-8" is a prized 8th grade center or power forward, play for one of the best travelling AAU teams in the area.

That team had mostly black players, which made the mostly white players on her school team call her "nigger lover."

That hurt Milena. But throughout it all, she said the most hurtful thing was when her school teammates went to the core of her being--her ethnic identity as a Central Asian from Russia.

"They said you speak Russian but you look Asian, you don't even know where you're from," Milena said. "That really hurt. Like the worst thing they could even say."

It hurts me as a parent to see someone like Milena go through this. It hurts even more to know that she's such an innocent, she didn't even know what the term "gook" meant.

That is until she went on the internet and got her definition.

This weekend she would have found much more.


Asiana Airlines Crash and the Internet's 21st Century Racism
If you thought the internet was colorblind and free of racism (it's all 1's and 0's, this digital world, right?), all it took was an Asian airline crash to prove that it doesn't take much to trigger a lot of suppressed racism.

After the Asiana Airlines crash, I was astonished to see so many examples of anti-Asian racism in both mainstream and social media (primarily on Twitter).

It remains one of the most underreported things about the crash of Asiana Flight 214.

And what was truly astonishing was how it became suddenly debatable whether an Asian slur was a slur at all. Even amongst Asian Americans.

Is racism really debatable?

Shouldn't we know it when we see it, like Milena Clarke?

Online, this headline was one of the most egregious examples:

Sun-Times Headline.jpgGet it? Fright 214. Asians often confuse "L"s and "R"s. I first thought it was a hoax. Who would be this blatant? Or maybe someone was playing around on the internet. Didn't matter really, it was still a racist thought.

Then Monday morning, Jim Kirk, the publisher and editor-in-chief of the Chicago Sun-Times, apologized.

"There was nothing intentional on our part to play off any stereotypes," Kirk said. "If anybody was offended by that, we are sorry."

Thanks for the cop-out apology..."if anybody was offended"?

And if you weren't, party on?

The Flight/Fright pun is no different from the "chink in the armor" racist double entendre we saw during the media's Linsanity frenzy last year.

One can plead innocence, as a pun does let you have it both ways, but there's no doubt that racism is present.

The bigger question: where's the sensitivity to diversity? To Asian Americans? A diverse staff of editors would have known better. A staff sensitive to Asians and Asian Americans would have caught that.

That's the digital mainstream. Chicago Sun-Times.com.

The Twitterverse is like the Wild West. But I still didn't expect to see the flat-out racist tweets on the same day as the crash.

Here are some examples posted by the folks at ChangeLab:

miriam.png
devin.pngDismiss the communications on Twitter at your own peril. It's a real reflection of the way racism exists today.

In fact, the digital world can at times provide just enough anonymity to embolden racists who would otherwise suppress their racism and keep it to themselves.

In that way, the internet is how some people can use the digital cloak as if slipping on an all new "white hood," where it's still "no eyeholes necessary."

As I said, I find it equally disturbing that some Asian Americans are debating whether these slights--by the Sun-Times or on Twitter--are a big deal at all.

Considering that most Twitter users are between the ages of 18-29, they may not be aware of how this all fits into the history of racism toward Asians and Asian Americans.

In that sense, a pun created by using an "L" over an "R" vs. a racist tweet may seem like nothing, especially in a world where nothing lasts and everyone's on to the next thing.

But it does all add up.

I noticed people on Twitter who were sensitive to what was happening were mostly not Asian Americans; they were African Americans like "This Week in Blackness" host Elon James White (@elonjames), who called out the racist tweeters and their lame Asian driver jokes.

That made it important for non-Asian Americans to be "first responders." And when the two deaths of the Chinese school girls became known, the jokey racism they alerted us to was exposed for what it was--obscene.

At that point, there should be no debate. You take a stand. You speak up.

Or as b-baller Milena Clarke might say, you post-up and go for it.

It's called justice.

It's definitely on the long side, but we wanted to archive the historic FCC hearing on interstate calls from prisons - 11 years after Martha Wright filed her petition seeking relief from unmanageable calling rates.

Watch here - all of it or as much as you'd like:

A video statement by filmmaker Oliver Stone on the surveillance state, sponsored by the ACLU.

"The question is whether we control the government or the government controls us"

Even when we win, we don't win. A DC law firm is claiming the 2010 Verizon consent decree, much celebrated as a sterling example of the FCC's dedication to consumer protection, collected barely a 5th of customer overcharges.

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In recent years the Commission has repeatedly characterized its mission as one of “consumer protection”. One prominent example: back in 2010, the Enforcement Bureau claimed to have “ma[de] things right and put customers back in the driver’s seat” with respect to “mystery fees” that Verizon Wireless had apparently been improperly imposing on its customers for years. Then-Chairman Genachowski said that the Bureau’s successful negotiation of a consent decree with Verizon demonstrated to American consumers that “the FCC has got your back”. Then-Commissioner (now Acting Chairwoman) Clyburn said that the “voluntary contribution” Verizon agreed to pay the government – $25 million, over and above the $50+ million in unlawful charges to be refunded – “sends a clear message as to how important this is to us”.

You’d think that the 2010 Verizon consent decree was a massive triumph of Good over Evil, with all innocent victims made whole and the wrong-doer brought totally to its knees.

Um, not exactly, according to the folks at Smithwick & Belendiuk (S&B), a D.C. communications law firm.

Art Belendiuk, one of S&B’s namesakes, has filed a Petition for Investigation with the FCC’s Inspector General that casts the Verizon consent decree in an entirely different light. According to the S&B Petition, the $50 million or so that Verizon agreed to refund was about $250 million short of the amount that Verizon had actually collected in wrongful charges. S&B also alleges that Verizon knew that it was overcharging its customers but, in its submissions to the Bureau, denied doing so. And S&B claims that the Bureau itself undertook no independent audit of Verizon’s claims, and instead simply took Verizon’s word that the $52 million would cover refunds to all overcharged customers.

If S&B is correct in its charges, somebody’s got some ’splainin’ to do.

S&B’s claims are based on a raft of documents S&B managed to wrangle out of the Commission through Freedom of Information Act requests – and some litigation in U.S. District Court when the FCC’s initial responses to those requests were less than satisfactory, in S&B’s eyes. Whether the Petition will get any traction remains to be seen. Invoking the office of the FCC’s Inspector General is somewhat unorthodox (although, under the circumstances, completely understandable), and it’s far from clear whether the IG will be eager to grab for this particularly hot potato.

But if nothing else, the Petition reminds us all of a couple of things.

First, despite any claims the FCC might make to “transparency”, there remain aspects of the agency’s regulatory activities which are anything but transparent. Indeed, the difficulties (described in the Petition) that S&B ran into in trying to get hold of the underlying documents supposedly considered by the Bureau in its investigation of Verizon scream “stonewall”. An inclination to withhold such materials from the public seems curiously inconsistent with the fanciful notion that the Commission is a “consumer protection” agency.

Second, it’s usually a good idea to take self-congratulatory governmental press releases with more than a grain of salt. Yes, the Commission doubtless felt good about shaking $75 million out of Verizon – but if the Bureau knew or should have known that Verizon’s real refund exposure may have been six or more times greater than what Verizon was claiming, who really got the better of whom here? If S&B is correct (and we emphasize that at this point we have no idea whether or not it is), what does that say about the thoroughness of the Bureau’s processes and/or the honesty and candor of Verizon?

Ellen Goodman writes about KCSM-TV for the Rutgers University Institute for Information Policy and Law

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This delightful video shows Capuchin monkeys reacting to unfairness and inequity when one gets compensated with cucumber bits for doing a task and another with the much better pay rate of a grape. We can all relate.

From a TED Talk by scientist Frans De Waals:

An important speech by the Guardian reporter and columnist on the Snowden leaks, the ongoing surveillance stories in the Guardian and what the past few weeks have revealed about journalism.

A 20-minute video identifying the use of damsel in distress imagery in video games. Great for schools or the young girl in your life.

A discussion of Prism and activism by Alfredo Lopex of May First/PeopleLink

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Recent coverage and public discussion of the government's Internet and telephone spying leaves a major question unanswered: How, given what we know, does this trashing of privacy affect activists, particularly women and people of color?

The question is important because privacy is at the heart of a free and democratic society and, like much of this stunning news, it has been framed in a frivolous way by our media and politicians. Given the dangers of the world -- their argument goes -- is your right to talk to your friends, shop, or read texts without surveillance more important than protecting your life?

That kind of personal privacy is important but it isn't the main issue. In the constitution, privacy goes hand in hand with the "right of petition" -- the right to demonstrate, organize and speak out against the government and its policies. You have the right to meet, plan and organize without having the government looking over your shoulder (or tracking your calls and stealing your email) because all power in the government's hands can and eventually will be abused without strong "checks and balances".

While the Obama Administration is working over-time to cloud the facts in disinformative smoke and partial information, we now know enough to say that privacy in this country has been completely suspended.

The revelations of whistle-blower Edward Snowden, still tumbling out every day, show that for several years the government has been capturing all our on-line and telephone communications. The National Security Agency has forced telephone giant Verizon to give up records of all phone calls -- people, places and times -- under a court order so secret the telephone giant can't even confirm it. It's probable that several other phone companies (land and cell) have gotten the same order.

It also operates a program called PRISM that's part of a long-running and much larger data collection program. PRISM uses a library of search terms to filter, read and analyze information being gathered from storage devices at nine major Internet companies (at least). It's not saying how much data it actually collects but this September it's opening a data center in Utah whose purpose is to store all the data on the Internet (and probably phone lines) in this country and most of the world. Where are they going to get it?

Part of the muddle in this story is the plethora "non-admission admissions". The companies say they only give up information that's subpeonaed (admitting that they receive tens of thousands of government requests each year) and the NSA insists it only listens to a few hundred phone calls linked to ongoing investigations. The President has assured us that no investigation "targets" U.S. citizens.

All of this is a diversion. In order to figure out if a "foreigner" is involved in something illegal, the NSA has to pull all communications with that person. Have you written something to or received something from someone in another country? Are you sure that person isn't being investigated or is a friend or associate of someone who is? What about videos, photos and even posts on message boards? All of that is being captured and stored and probably read because that's the only way the NSA can determine if it's relevant to an investigation.

Even if it's not read, it's held in storage probably permanently. Can you be sure that your currently legal organizing won't be deemed "illegal or dangerous" in the future? What about your support of movements in other countries?

To compound the damaging impact of this stunning intrusion, it comes at a time of massive entry of women and people of color into Internet use. By the tens of millions, people who have traditionally been marginalized from the use of on-line communications have now taken a premier place at the table of Social Networking. We're encouraged to use these services by their convenience, accessible design and the fact that they're free. In fact, most Social Justice organizations and activists rely so heavily on Facebook, Twitter and other social media that it's assumed that such technology will be included in our outreach and communications work. And many, if not most, of us use Gmail. Those are the very services PRISM targets and, intentionally or not, we are among the targets.

So what do we do? We still have choices. Here's a link for "PRISM-free" software and services you can choose to use. Consider making a switch. In general, be conscious of the surveillance situation and plan your communications and outreach accordingly. Finally, let's stop viewing the Internet as just a tool and start treating it as a right we have built. Let's make one of our main activities the ongoing fight to reconquer our right to privacy as the implement of change it can be.

Alfredo Lopez is Leadership Committee Co-Chair of May First/People Link, the progressive Internet organization. He's also technology writer for the online publication This Can't Be Happening.

A Center for Public Integrity look at how industry funding impacts the telecom policy positions presented in DC by a prominent minority media access organization: The MMTC (Minority Media Telecommunications Council)

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When the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission pitched a plan to allow more media mergers earlier this year, he received support from a curious source: the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council, once an ardent critic of industry consolidation.

Julius Genachowski wanted backing for a proposed loosening of a rule that bars the same company from owning a newspaper and a radio or television broadcast station in a top media market.

MMTC and its executive director, David Honig, have historically opposed relaxing ownership restrictions, saying they protect minority interests. Yet last week, the group released a key study arguing the opposite position.

So why the change of heart?

Critics say MMTC’s position may have something to do with its extensive industry funding. This includes more than $440,000 in luncheon sponsorships since 2010 from broadcast giants who favor the rule change.

In an 18-page response to questions for this article, Honig says the support does not influence the group’s positions.

“The most valuable asset that a nonprofit organization has is its integrity, and to imply that donations and fees influence our positions on issues is to suggest that we lack integrity, something we do not take lightly,” he wrote.

MMTC, which acts as a pro bono law firm on FCC issues for civil rights groups like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was vital if Genachowski was to get his plan approved.

Two previous attempts to change the rule were slapped down by the courts, in part because of concern that greater media consolidation would reduce the number of minority media owners.

MMTC offered to commission the study in February, after voicing its support for Genachowski’s proposal.

Once a shoestring operation dependent almost solely on the volunteer efforts of Honig, MMTC has evolved in recent years into a potent organization that exercises much influence on the commission through its ability to shape the positions of large civil rights organizations on relatively obscure FCC issues.

The media ownership rules passed in the 1970s stemmed in part from the FCC’s failure to take action against TV stations in the South that blacked out coverage of the civil rights movement. They were also inspired by the perceived failures of large media outlets to report on grievances of inner cities that led to the race riots of the late 1960s.

It was believed that restrictions on ownership would lead to greater competition, more locally focused programming and more opportunities for minority ownership.

Consolidation has long been favored by many large broadcasters and newspaper companies, which seek savings by combining advertising and newsroom operations.

After years of defending the rules, Honig, wrote in a blog post in December that the cross-ownership ban should be relaxed, citing concern in minority communities about the decline of newspapers.

What he didn't disclose was the hundreds of thousands of dollars his group had received from CBS Corp., radio giant Clear Channel Communications Inc., Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. and the National Association of Broadcasters, an industry lobby group. All four have previously gone to court in an effort to end the ban. News Corp., which Los Angeles Times and a rule-change would clear the way for such a deal.

Clear Channel and News Corp. did not respond to questions for this article. Spokesmen for the NAB and CBS say their organization’s donations weren’t intended to change MMTC’s positions on cross-ownership or other matters.

Honig said the Center’s calculation of sponsorship totals — which were taken from MMTC materials — were “inaccurate.” He said the group may bump up the level of sponsorship of donors “for good will purposes.”

He did not provide alternate figures.

MMTC took in just under $2 million in 2011. Of that, $1.7 million was derived from sponsorships, donations and fees from companies, lobbyists, lawyers and religious broadcasters with interests before the FCC, according to an IRS filing.

“It is important to look at David’s source of funding to determine who David really represents,” says Mark Lloyd, a former associate general counsel and chief diversity officer at the FCC from 2009 until last year. “I think that would tell you a great deal.”

The MMTC ownership study, released last week, concluded the impact of greater consolidation in media ownership on women and minority ownership can’t be a “material justification for tightening or retaining the rules.”

Critics argue that other studies have shown that more media concentration harms small broadcasters, and that most women- and minority-owned broadcasting companies control just a few stations each.

Net neutrality position raises eyebrows

MMTC has also received support from telecommunications and cable firms and its position on broadband regulation and other issues has dovetailed with theirs.

“He’s making arguments that are no different than those made by the big companies and yet they’re presented as those of the civil rights community,” says Craig Aaron, the executive director of Free Press, a group that opposes media consolidation. “Those are his views, but it’s curious how often they’re in line with the filings of Comcast and AT&T.”

Honig says MMTC aims to promote equal opportunity in broadcasting, telecommunications and broadband and that its positions are often in conflict with those of its donors. He pointed to a letter accompanying the ownership study which noted there was "an indication that an especially extensive" cross-media merger could hurt minority ownership in smaller markets."

MMTC’s position on “network neutrality” early in President Barack Obama’s first term angered consumer groups and many technology companies that wanted the government to force Internet service providers to treat all traffic equally.

Proponents of an open Web were concerned that without strong network neutrality rules, broadband providers would be free to offer preferential treatment to deep-pocketed media outlets.

Honig sided with the Internet service providers, arguing that new rules would hurt the ability of cable and telecommunications companies to expand broadband in poor, minority neighborhoods.

"We think that closing the digital divide should be the top priority and that net neutrality should be second," he told the Los Angeles Times.

From 2009 through 2011 MMTC received at least $725,000 in contributions and sponsorships from network neutrality foes including Verizon, Time Warner, and the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, according to MMTC tax filings and sponsorship lists.

MMTC’s relationship with Verizon demonstrates the group’s various methods of obtaining industry revenue. In 2009, at the height of the net neutrality debate, Verizon made a direct $40,000 contribution to MMTC. From 2010 to 2013, MMTC documents list Verizon as funding at least $160,000 in MMTC conference sponsorships.

Additionally, MMTC worked with Verizon on a $189 million sale of wireless spectrum licenses to minority-owned Grain Management this year — a deal announced in conjunction with a larger $1.9 billion license sale to AT&T. A spokesman for Verizon says money paid to MMTC wasn’t intended to influence its policies but to support its mission of promoting inclusion in the industry.

Some saw Honig playing a key role in organizing traditional civil rights groups like the National Urban League and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) to sign on to anti-network neutrality filings with the FCC.

Honig is “the nerve center for much of the action we've seen on the part of the civil rights groups,” blogged James Rucker, then the executive director of ColorOfChange.org, a technology-oriented civil rights group that supported network neutrality.

“In my opinion, Honig is leading many of the respected civil rights groups he is advising off of the digital cliff,” he added.

Rucker isn’t alone in the view that Honig uses his credibility with civil rights organizations and expertise in communications law to influence them to take positions on complex issues that primarily benefit industry players.

Honig “undermines trust in his organization’s legacy” when he urges groups to join his advocacy campaign and they later find out the issues aren’t quite what they expected, says Cheryl Leanza, co-chairwoman of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights’ media and telecommunications task force.

“He does a disservice to his past work when other organizations take his advice and they don’t know the consequences or implications of that advice.”

Leanza says her views are her own, not those of the LCCR.

Civil rights activist

Honig began his civil rights activism in the 1960s as a high school student, when he became a youth leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Rochester, New York.

He earned a law degree from Georgetown in 1983, and after the FCC under President Ronald Reagan suspended key minority broadcast ownership rules, he co-founded MMTC on a shoestring budget.

He mixed MMTC’s advocacy with litigation on behalf of civil rights groups. In the 1990s he led a high profile but unsuccessful legal battle representing the N.A.A.C.P. in its effort to prevent Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., the parent of Fox Broadcasting Co. and the owner of a New York City television station, from gaining a waiver from the cross-ownership rule to buy the New York Post—the same rule Honig now favors eliminating.

In 1991, on behalf of LULAC, the N.A.A.C.P. and other civil rights groups, his legal work helped spur an FCC investigation and long-running legal fight with the country’s largest Christian television network, Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN).

Known for its broadcasts of televangelists like Jimmy Swaggart and network founders Paul and Jan Crouch, Honig accused TBN of setting up a sham minority corporation to win additional FCC broadcast licenses.

Honig helped spur the FCC to restore equal employment rules to the cable and broadcast industry in 2002 and pass a 2007 rule preventing advertisers from instructing their agencies not to place spots on radio stations with large black and Hispanic audiences.

By the late 1990s, Honig had also found a way to successfully fund MMTC. In 1998, MMTC began collecting fees from broadcasters in return for helping them sell stations to minority buyers — earning $450,000 that year alone by helping Clear Channel sell a Boston station for $5 million, according to a report in the trade newspaper Broadcasting & Cable. The story noted that Honig was able to begin paying himself a $41,125 salary.

The report also said that rival brokers were complaining that one MMTC client, CBS Corp., did not typically use brokers and had retained Honig “only to curry favor with the diversity-minded FCC.”

In 2002, the group added an annual “Access to Capital” fundraising luncheon, which helped net it $22,806. Honig’s compensation had risen to $161,000, according to tax filings.

By 2006, the luncheon had become so successful at attracting industry interest it had been expanded to two days and was addressed by three of the FCC’s five sitting commissioners — MMTC raised $291,334.

Station donations

Additionally, the non-profit MMTC began accepting donated broadcast properties.

In 2008, Mega Communications, a Spanish radio network owned by New York art collector Adam Lindemann, donated a Tampa Bay area AM station to MMTC. Honig says the station was used to train women and minorities. MMTC sold the station for $1.15 million last year to Christian broadcaster Salem Communications.

In 2010, Trinity Broadcasting Network donated 147 low-power television stations to MMTC. That year MMTC awarded TBN, along with Clear Channel, its “Extraordinary Service Award,” an annual prize given for those “who have far exceeded the call of duty in the service of the civil rights cause,” according to MMTC’s website.

The FCC soon reclaimed the licenses of many of the TBN stations, but in 2011 MMTC sold 78 of the stations for $390,000 to a Tennessee company run by broadcast entrepreneur Henry Luken, whose holdings include The Nashville Network and the male-oriented Tuff TV.

TBN declined to comment on the donation. Honig says MMTC did not solicit the donation from TBN, and that Luken has pledged to enact a training program for women and minorities as part of the deal.

By the time of the sale of the former TBN stations, MMTC had grown substantially. In 2011, the last year for which tax forms are available, it reported almost $2.8 million in net assets.

Honig’s salary had also increased to $212,072. His addresses included a waterfront home on Maryland’s Eastern Shore assessed at $856,700, according to Maryland property records.

Today its website lists eight lawyers, two researchers and a communications director. Its brokerage team includes three others, two of whom are former Clear Channel staffers. MMTC ranked as the seventh-largest broadcast broker in the U.S. in 2011, and has worked on deals valued at $1.8 billion over the past 15 years. Honig, 63, says he plans to semi-retire next year.

Comcast and AT&T

Among the group’s most generous donors is cable giant Comcast, which, according to MMTC documents has spent at least $375,000 on fundraising luncheons and conferences in Washington hosted by MMTC between 2009 and this year.

In addition to taking Comcast's side on Net Neutrality, Honig publicly hailed its 2011 buyout of NBC Universal.

Honig publicly hailed Comcast’s 2011 buyout of NBC Universal saying the $16.7 billion merger was “a win for all Americans, especially minority and low-income consumers who have largely been left out of the digital equation.” The deal required Comcast to expand broadband to low-income Americans and create 10 new television channels in partnership with minorities.

NBC Universal contributed $150,000 to MMTC in 2010, and retained MMTC’s brokerage arm to help it sell a Los Angeles TV station as required under terms of the deal.

“We supported MMTC's work for years prior to the NBC Universal transaction,” said Sena Fitzmaurice, a spokeswoman for Comcast, in an email response to questions about the relationship. “We support a wide variety of organizations and they don't always support all of our policy positions just as we don't always support all of their policy positions.”

MMTC also supported a failed attempt by AT&T to buy T-Mobile in 2011 for $39 billion, the group’s first endorsement of a media and telecom merger in its 25-year history. The combination would benefit minority broadband consumers by allowing AT&T to expand service to more than 97 percent of consumers, Honig wrote in a brief to the FCC.

Groups such as the National Hispanic Media Center and the Center for Media Justice disagreed, arguing that T-Mobile was the low-cost carrier and that its elimination would not only harm consumers but disproportionately affect minority customers.

In 2010 and 2011, AT&T and T-Mobile provided $240,000 in sponsorships to MMTC fundraising events, according to MMTC documents. A number of other civil rights groups such as the NAACP and Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation also backed the proposed merger and also received AT&T funding.

At the time the chairman of MMTC’s board, former FCC Commissioner Henry Rivera, worked at law firm Wiley Rein, which represented T-Mobile in the merger. Julia Johnson, then MMTC’s treasurer and its current board president, runs a public relations firm whose clients have included AT&T, according to the Tampa Bay Times.

Ari Fitzgerald, a communications lawyer at Hogan Lovells and secretary of the board at MMTC, has done FCC work for T-Mobile both before and after the failed merger proposal.

AT&T relayed questions about the relationship to Honig, who defends MMTC’s stance in the merger, citing AT&T’s record of hiring minority staff and suppliers. Johnson, Fitzgerald and Rivera recused themselves from voting on MMTC’s position on the merger, he said.

“MMTC’s officers and directors are highly skilled, experienced individuals, and they all serve pro bono,” said Honig, adding: “No MMTC officer or director would tolerate attempts at ‘purse-string advocacy.’”

Growing Entity

Long-time public interest lawyer and MMTC board member Andrew Schwartzman says a turning point for the group came when it entered telecom advocacy. He says Honig is “well-motivated” but on some telecom issues “misguided rather than improperly influenced.”

Schwartzman’s own organization, the Media Access Project, closed its doors last year due to a lack of funds. He does not see MMTC’s positions as being “dictated by specific corporate contributions.”

“I don’t see these as a sudden transactional relationship but something longstanding,” he added, in reference to the donations.

Alex Nogales, the director of the National Hispanic Media Coalition, is less forgiving.

"We're disappointed in David," said Nogales. "He's gotten a bit too chummy with the industry and he's tried to drag us into those machinations and I don't appreciate it."

He says he resigned his spot as a member of MMTC’s board because of concerns about its growing corporate ties.

Whether the MMTC’s cross-media ownership study will lead to a relaxation of media ownership rules is a matter that will be decided under its next chairman.

Either way, the MMTC is looking to remain a key player at the FCC under the new regime.

President Obama’s pick for the spot, Tom Wheeler, a former cable and wireless industry lobbyist, was endorsed by the group just hours after news of his selection was leaked to the media.

A short documentary film on the years of protests against military-training academy that has seeded a half a century of militaristic imperialism in Central and South America.

A blog on the distance between mainstream media anti-bullying campaigns and the "hatertainment" broadcast all too regularly from Emily Long at The Lamp in NYC.

**

In the years since the issue of bullying has garnered national attention and increasing concern, most big media companies have created campaigns designed to prevent bullying or to otherwise give people an opportunity to speak against it and raise awareness.

MTV has A Thin Line, ABC Family has Delete Digital Drama, NBC airs anti-bullying spots via its public service campaign The More You Know, Nickelodeon has anti-bullying activities on The Big Help, and Cartoon Network has a Stop Bullying Speak Up campaign.

With efforts like these, it would seem as though big media has truly taken a step forward in reaching young people to stop the bullying epidemic.

That is, until you turn on the TV. On ABC’s The Bachelor, women snipe at each other as they compete for one man’s heart. All of these insults are captured on the Smack Tracker, thus cataloging an episode-by-episode breakdown of who said what about whom. In spin-off specials like The Bachelor: Women Tell All, snarky tweets from fans of the show are broadcast live, courting a dangerous game of one-upmanship as to which members of the viewing public can be the cruelest. All of this comes courtesy of the same company that puts stars from its scripted shows front-and-center in PSAs saying that it’s time to delete digital drama.

Tune into any one of The Real Housewives series on Bravo, and you’ll see more fighting and backstabbing. Check out Teen Mom or Jersey Shore on MTV for more of the same; perhaps you’ll also catch spots for A Thin Line. Watch E! or Access Hollywood for celebrity gossip, and ESPN for occasional glorification of athletes behaving badly. In the case of some of these shows, the connection to big media’s Astroturf anti-bullying campaigns might be harder to find, but they’re all there. Bravo is owned by NBC Universal, which also owns E! and Access Hollywood. Both ABC and ESPN are owned by The Walt Disney Company, whose Friends for Change celebrity ambassadors want you to become an ‘accountabili-buddy’ and report bullying.

Big media profits from shows that promote hateful messages disguised as entertainment, also called ‘hatertainment.’ Their various attempts at ending bullying are moot when their own networks glorify, normalize, and reward the same type of behavior that most of us recognize as bullying and destructive. We cannot count big media as an ally when these companies are responsible for messages that can be so harmful for kids: in a 2011 study, the Girl Scout Research Institute found that 78 percent of girls who watch reality television believe that “gossiping is a normal part of a relationship between girls,” while only 54 percent of girls who do not watch reality TV agree.

In far too many documentaries and news stories, the blame for bullying has fallen squarely on the shoulders of parents, teachers, and school administrators, who are frequently accused of not taking enough preventative action. Big media companies need to also be held accountable for their role in fostering bullying behavior, and we must teach the basic media literacy concept of media as construction and an industry with a bottom line.

When watching reality television, ask your kids about what might have been left out, or how producers decide which portions of footage to use for a show. Talk to them about news, and why there is an entire industry devoted to reporting on celebrity gossip. Perhaps most importantly, ask them how they feel when they watch these shows. Moderating screen time is also a good step, as is being a positive role model—adults are not immune to hatertainment. Much like second-hand smoke has an indirect but powerful effect on our family’s health, hateful media also pollute homes in ways that may not be immediately recognizable. Yes, big media companies are powerful, but the real power lies in our own ability to filter their product.

Emily Long is Director of Communications and Development for The LAMP (Learning About Multimedia Project), a nonprofit organization bringing critical media fluency education to youth, parents and educators in New York City. For more on this subject, click here.


Additional Resources on Media Literacy

Center for Social Media at American University is an excellent place to learn more about public media, and especially the fair use of media.

Media Education Foundation is a nonprofit organization producing media and study guides to help people of all ages increase their media literacy skills.

Media Education Lab at Temple University is a great place to start learning more about media literacy.

ParentingTeensOnline is a great resource aimed specifically for parents of adolescents.

The Smart Television Alliance is a group of national nonprofit organizations committed to improving what children see on television. (Disclaimer: this site is funded by Tivo.)

Common Sense Media is a nonprofit that rates current movies and television shows based on content appropriate for a given age group.

The Media Literacy Clearinghouse is Frank W. Baker’s treasure trove of resources about K-12 media literacy and state education standards.

A look at the sad state of of Internet service in the Sandy hurricane zone ... six months later:

***

I'm sitting in a high ceiling parlor in an aged brownstone at the E.9th Street Block Association meeting. People are telling me, somewhat muting their anger, that some have had no phone service since Sandy, October 28th 2012 ---- over 6 months, over half a year. Some had their service restored over the last month, only being out for about 5 months.

I’m in a roomful of people in the middle of Manhattan, New York City, and I can't believe my ears. I've been a telecom analyst for 31 years and thought I’d heard everything before - but this?

Mayor Bloomberg, with claims that New York City is a world center for technology announced his new campaign, “We Are Made in NY” in 2013, stating we’re “strengthening the city as a global hub for innovation.”

Being out of service is only one of the Manhattenites’ problems. Almost all of those without Verizon service have continued to be billed for services that THEY DO NOT RECEIVE.

But over the last few weeks we find that other places throughout the tri-state areas, such as Fire Island in New York or Mantoloking in New Jersey are simply being abandoned and Verizon telling customers that they're not fixing the copper and they are being offered wireless services.

What’s the problem – how could this be happening in America?

The problem started when Sandy took out Verizon’s network equipment and network wiring, including the copper wiring. Verizon decided that it wouldn’t replace its copper infrastructure since it’s being replaced with fiber optics as part of their FiOS deployment; fiber carries phone, broadband, Internet and cable television service.

So folks were told to go to FiOS, Verizon's fiber optic solution, except that some residences on the block aren’t even wired with FiOS yet so, for many, FiOS isn’t even an option. Others were offered a wireless substitute.

One woman said that she was a Verizon DSL and phone service customer and both were out since Sandy. (DSL uses the copper wires to offer broadband and Internet.) Verizon sent her a wireless box to use -- but the box didn't have Internet broadband connectivity. So it was not a substitute.

Moreover, as I explained, if she did decide to get the Verizon Wireless ‘Home Fusion' box, which is a wireless service to replace wired broadband, it would cost her extra since wireless broadband service has bandwidth caps.

DSL on copper lines costs about $40 a month and doesn't have the same caps. Thus, using Verizon’s Home Fusion wireless Internet service could cost hundreds of dollars extra a month.

Some of the group’s stories were of small businesses that lost income as they depended on their phone and fax lines for orders.

Forget the storm damage to their homes and lives; this was an ongoing telecom nightmare.

While some customer service representatives were nice and attempted to be helpful, others were not sympathetic and threatened disconnection, which means in Verizon internal customer jargon that the resident’s phone account would be permanently terminated and the customer would have to pay additional fees for reconnection.

Customers electing not to pay for no service – odd as this sounds -- ran the risk of losing long held phone numbers, and could even end up in collections, thus harming their credit rating, to boot. Verizon expects its customers to continue to keep their accounts open and pay for services, just for the privilege of keeping their phone number, avoiding reconnection fees and protecting credit ratings while still not receiving service.

Worse, after being on hold for hours, over the course of a few months; and spending days on the phone to fix problems, Verizon repeatedly misled almost all of them about when service would be restored.

As I pointed out during the meeting, the customer service staff is simply reading scripts and following procedures set by the company. Reps have little, if any control, over what would happen to service. But, what is clear is that the reps were not trained to solve these customers’ problems. Customer service reps claimed to have submitted an internal company ‘trouble ticket’ to fix the problem, which was then never acted on or resolved.

And as the meeting continued, I asked questions:

“Why didn't you just leave Verizon?” Because a number of them had been told by Verizon that service would fixed soon. One woman even had the dates on a piece of paper, which she handed out.

Why didn’t they go to the cable company? Some had cable in the area and it had service problems as well. Some didn’t know that the cable company even offered phone as a stand alone service. They certainly don’t advertise it. And some hated the cable company more than the phone company, though by this time it was clear they’d be hard pressed to pick which one was worse.

Moreover, like anything else – some people prefer Pepsi, some prefer Coke – but in this case, there isn’t a choice. There aren’t any other providers. Private companies have total, unregulated control over the wires. Now phone and cable companies have created a monopoly for Internet and even stand alone, local telephone service.

Competitors? One woman said she was going to go to Vonage but when I explained that it still required a broadband connection she was pissed. “Why didn’t they say that in their advertisement?”

Another problem is that wireless reception in the city can be problematic. A number of the people spoke of not being able to use mobile phones in their apartments or that it just didn’t sound as good. “I have to stand by my window and hold it just right.”

The Regulators and Politicians -- Shame on You.

Where's the state public utility commission in all of this? Where is the Mayor’s Office or the other politicians? Under state law customers are supposed to have their service repaired, even after a disaster. Being without service for almost 6 months is unconscionable.

In April 2012, the State Attorney General petitioned the New York State Board of Public Service to ”modify the Verizon Service Quality Improvement Plan” as the State had relaxed its quality of service requirements, an abdication of regulatory oversight which allowed the company to provide “below standard service to 92% of customers”.

As the AG wrote:

“Despite receiving this substantial deregulation of its service quality requirements, Verizon nevertheless failed to meet four repair service measurements in 2011, the first year of the plan. Moreover, by limiting the scope of Verizon’s performance measurements to the 8% of all New York customers defined as Core, the Commission allowed the company to provide below standard service to 92% of its customers with impunity.”

In January 2013, the State, after reviewing the AG’s complaint, issued a notice for comments claiming that “We find that Verizon’s service quality performance needs to be improved going forward, and to propose modifications to the existing regulatory regime”. Verizon’s response: “No modification of the Commission’s current regulatory framework is… necessary to ensure the continuing provision of high quality service by Verizon New York” and “requiring Verizon to implement those changes would be both unlawful and bad public policy.” And in February, 2013, Verizon has also filed for a waiver of any quality of service issues surrounding Sandy.

I need to stress -- this isn't some rural area or some mountain top. This is NEW YORK CITY.

One thing is clear – No one is tracking the problems experienced by un-connected customers. Each customer ends up having to deal individually with the phone companies, engaging in months long series of conversations without getting any resolution.

Meanwhile, the union guys we spoke to said that Verizon is ‘declining to fix the copper’ and that they’ve cut back staff so far that it’s hard for them to do the normal work.

Although, this is could be construed as typical, uncaring phone company behavior –I was surprised it was still a problem for such an unusual length of time. WNYC radio ran a story and developed a map showing areas of Manhattan where customers that were either still out of service or having problems post-Sandy. But this coverage was generated by only one radio station collecting data for Manhattan. In February, 2013, Huffington Post also ran something about small businesses also being out of service because of Sandy.

All of this also brings up an interesting question – Verizon has a cable franchise to have 100% of New York City upgraded to FiOS by July 2014. Did Verizon claim that these areas were already properly upgraded even though it’s clear that the deployment is spotty at best?

Or is this more sinister? Is Verizon, instead of dealing with emergency outages, waiting to give these people a FiOS option in New York – and not repairing these customers’s lines which are copper

Stay Tuned -- This article and the unserved resident’s letter will be sent to every official until service is restored.

A Foreboding Glimpse into Your Future Communications Service.

I’ve written about AT&T and Verizon’s plans to turn half of the country into digital dead zones, -- where there are no requirements to fix phone lines or upgrade them. We’re not talking sparsely populated rural areas. I’m predicting that people throughout the entire U.S of A will be impacted by rogue telecom companies.

In state after state, Verizon, AT&T and Centurylink, working with the American Legislative Exchange Council, (ALEC) are attempting to remove any oversight by the public utility commissions—their goal is to eliminate requirements for quality of service, or worse, remove any obligations to provide service to people who have no communications carriers at all. Twenty six states have passed ALEC-based bills, gutting customer protections (though it varies in degree, state by state)

On the federal level, AT&T petitioned the FCC, using the same ALEC-based principles, to close down whole areas of their 22 state territories.

Besides this legislative maneuvering to eliminate government guarantees that everyone is able to communicate, Verizon and AT&T have announced that they are going to stop maintaining copper wire plant, even though AT&T’s entire 22 state U-Verse is based on copper wires;

Verizon has stopped upgrading FiOS – so entire areas of the country will not be upgraded All this denial of landline service has a subplot, which is to push customers onto purchasing exorbitantly, expensive, usage priced wireless services. What this means is that American’s ability to speak and communicate in the 21st Century will depend exclusively on how much money people have.

Fire Island, in New York, which got hit heavily by the storm, has been told that Verizon is going to abandon their copper wire plant, and will not deploy FiOS. Instead all of Fire Island will be forced to use wireless networks.

The irony in New York is that all of these wired customers received multiple rate increases for upgrades to the utility plant over the last two decades. In June 2009 the NY State Department of Public Service specifically points out that the ‘fiber optic’ services are being paid for by rate increases.

“We are always concerned about the impacts on ratepayers of any rate increase, especially in times of economic stress,” said Commission Chairman Garry Brown. “Nevertheless, there are certain increases in Verizon’s costs that have to be recognized. This is especially important given the magnitude of the company's capital investment program, including its massive deployment of fiber optics in New York. We encourage Verizon to make appropriate investments in New York, and these minor rate increases will allow those investments to continue.”

And, as we’ve written, almost every state had requirements to upgrade telecommunications networks as customers paid for these upgrades. In New Jersey, Verizon was required, by law, to have 100% of the state upgraded with a fiber optic service capable of 45 Mbps in both directions and completed by 2010. Two small communities, Greenwich and Stow Creek, complained and the State issued a ‘show cause order’ to explain why they were not upgraded, and why even their basic phone service had quality of service issues.

And in New Jersey, Verizon appears to be doing the same thing as Fire Island and has decided to not fix the Sandy damage of Mantoloking but give them a wireless substitute. They, too, never got FiOS or upgraded.

The writing is on the wall. What’s happening in New York City to these customers is a failure of the entire telecommunications regulatory system to care about customers. It’s going to get worse if the FCC and states continue to favor Verizon, AT&T et al over those they are supposed to be serving and who are paying for the companies capital investments.

Let these customers’ stories of people who are still waiting for service for six months be a clarion call to reverse direction and bring back real competition, quality of service requirements, and to make sure someone is not only watching but holding our communications companies responsible to their customers – you, your family and your business.

One day you may wake up to find your service not working. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

A sharp critique of President Obama's appointment of former telecom lobbyist Tom Wheeler as FCC Chair by former FCC commissioner Nicholas Johnson, who served from 1966-1973 and was appointed by Lyndon Johnson. From Canada's Real News Network.

Kaiser archivist Lincoln Cushing sends this story about KFOG and Kaiser: once an owner and now a sponsor. A little Bay Area radio history on the album rock station of many people's youths.

**

Radio listeners in the San Francisco Bay Area can tune into KFOG-FM every Friday evening beginning at 6 for Kaiser Permanente-sponsored Thrive Time, a commercial-free hour intended “to take the stress out of your Friday commute.” They can also enjoy “Acoustic Sunrise” on Sunday mornings for more Thriving goodness.

Thrive Time seems like a great new pop culture connection for Kaiser Permanente; in fact, the Health Plan’s link with KFOG (104.5) was first forged a half century ago.

Although Henry J. Kaiser’s longest-lasting legacy is Kaiser Permanente, he was at the helm of a giant complex of industries from the late 1930s until his death in 1967. That empire included the Kaiser Broadcasting Corporation, which developed a string of radio and TV stations starting in 1957 with KHVH-TV 13 and KHVH AM 1040 in Honolulu.


Kaiser Broadcasting studios in San Francisco.

The Hawaii stations were built from scratch at Henry J. Kaiser’s Hawaiian Village Hotel, thus the “HVH” in the call signs. The next year Kaiser Broadcasting dropped KHVH-TV to buy KULA-TV 4, which was an ABC affiliate and included extended island service through Maui’s KMVI-TV, channel 12.

Kaiser begins in SF Bay Area in 1963
Kaiser’s media ownership in the San Francisco Bay Area, Kaiser Permanente’s initial home base, began when the broadcasting corporation acquired the former KBAY radio station and renamed it KFOG.

On March 1, 1963, with its foghorn blaring, KFOG hit the airwaves with a soothing format consisting of soft middle-of-the road music during the day and periods of block programming at night aimed at particular audiences.


Pete Taylor, KFOG-FM, head disc jockey in the 1960s. Kaiser Permanente Heritage Resources Archives photo.

Dick Block was Kaiser Broadcasting’s vice president and general manager, and Pete Taylor was the head disc jockey. Taylor left for Boston in 1966 to work at Kaiser-owned WJIB-FM radio station, which had a format similar to KFOG’s and WCAS-AM, a “hyper-local” station serving the Boston-area communities of Watertown, Cambridge, Arlington, and Somerville.

In 1975 Kaiser Broadcasting sold KFOG and Boston radio station WJIB to General Electric. The sale of the two stations set a record, estimated at well over $2 million.

UHF approval broadens TV markets
In the early 1960s, Kaiser took advantage of a new wave of television broadcasting.

During the first decade of television, TV sets only received VHF (very-high frequency band) signals, and the existing airwaves became saturated with stations. The Federal Communications Commission recognized the problem and endorsed legislation to broaden TV broadcasting to include UHF (ultra-high frequency band).

“We have concluded that the public interest clearly requires expanded use of the 70 UHF channels for television broadcasting; receiver incompatibility is a major factor inhibiting such expanded use,” the FCC stated in a letter to the House of Representatives. “. . . we have earnestly recommended enactment of this legislation as being of utmost importance to the national welfare.”[i]

In 1962, Congress passed House Bill 8031, the All-Channel Receiver Act, which required TV manufacturers to equip new sets to receive UHF channels. UHF was a major breakthrough in expanding television access.

An internal Kaiser Broadcasting film explained the challenge – and opportunity – this way:

“In 1962 only 15 American cities have more than three TV stations . . . At Kaiser world headquarters the passage of the All-Channel Bill set a plan into motion that (will) result in one of the largest programs for the construction and operation of new TV stations in the history of the industry.”[ii]

Kaiser Broadcasting expands reach across nation
Under Dick Block, Kaiser Broadcasting’s first mainland television foray involved licenses for the newly-opened UHF market. The corporation started two UHF stations in 1965 – WKBD-TV in Detroit and WKBS-TV in Philadelphia.

In the next three years, Kaiser’s corporation added television stations in Los Angeles, KBSC, and Cleveland, WKBF, and radio and television stations in Boston, WKBG, and San Francisco, KBHK, channel 44, which originally carried the KHJK moniker that reflected Henry Kaiser’s initials.[iii]

Chicago came into the fold in 1974 when Field Communications partnered with Kaiser to create WFLD-TV. In most markets, Kaiser Broadcasting was among the first to start an independent station; the Bay Area was the exception. By this time the corporation’s holdings included seven TV stations - San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Detroit, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Chicago.

When Kaiser Industries split up in 1977, all the media holdings were liquidated as part of what was described as “the largest voluntary corporate dismantling in U.S. history.”[iv]

Today, KFOG listeners can request via email a song that makes them feel good – in keeping with the Kaiser Permanente advertising “Thrive” campaign. The station selects one suggested song and plays it along with similar music during the commercial-free hours.

The Kaiser Broadcasting Corporation no longer exists, but the current Kaiser Permanente-KFOG connection restores a link established 50 years ago.

Enjoy this fun article on a pioneer in low-power formerly "pirate" radio from the Illinois Times.

*****

Mbanna Kantako is on a roll.

From his rental house just off North Grand Avenue in Enos Park, the 54-year-old blind man talks about the advent of spring and the need to till the soil. He speaks of pollution, the Great Spirit, expectations that people gain responsibility with age and the Boston Marathon bombing, not knowing how many people might be listening via a radio signal that covers just a tiny portion of the city.

“You know the government set this shit up,” he intones. “It’s the government. They the ones that did 9/11. They the ones that did the Oklahoma City bombing. You have every reason not to believe what the government says.”

The program segment Kantako calls Notes On The Devil’s News continues with a tape of Springfield police tasing a pregnant woman in the parking lot, a recent in-broad-daylight incident that police say was justified because the woman had inserted herself into a physical altercation between an officer and her boyfriend while a bystander videotaped everything. Then it’s back to the bombing.

“And you’re going to believe what happened in Boston?” he asks sarcastically at the conclusion of the tasing tape. “You’re out of your damn mind. For real, these devils have issues.”

Moving right along, Kantako delves robotic surgery, which some say is no improvement over work performed by human surgeons and might actually be worse in some circumstances.

“Ain’t no medicine better than the Lord,” Kantako says.

In the space of less than 15 minutes, Kantako covers all of this and more in stream-of-consciousness style. He doesn’t sound a bit winded. He’s been doing this more than quarter-century, and this broadcast last Saturday marks his 8,697th show “from the criminal enterprise that is Springfield, Illinois, located in the criminal enterprise that is the United States.” Or so says Kantako from the far end of your FM dial, much to the consternation of the Federal Communications Commission that wants him to get a license or shut up. The signal reaches barely a mile. By the time you travel south to city hall or the federal building or downtown law firms, it fades considerably. In more ways than one.

“Is he still around?” asks Bruce Stratton, an attorney and former Kantako nemesis who knew the man decades ago when he was still known by his birth name, Dewayne Readus. “I haven’t thought about him for years. Mostly, I remember that he was some kind of activist.”

Indeed.

Back in the day, Kantako was a fixture in the pages of the State Journal-Register and a leading figure in the long-since-demolished John Hay Homes, where the city’s black population was concentrated in a crumbling 600-unit public housing project. He had a zest for organizing, and if he didn’t always get his way, the activist who became a broadcaster certainly made a lot of noise.

Nearly 30 years ago, he pushed for the Springfield School District to bus children from the Hay Homes to school instead of making them walk. He was a controversial figure even within the projects, where he formed the John Hay Tenants Rights Association after resigning from the existing resident council over a spat about the busing issue. Some resident council leaders thought him too radical.

He fought against both sides in the late 1980s when the city, after being sued under the federal Voting Rights Act, reluctantly changed its form of government, establishing 10 wards and replacing commissioners with aldermen to help ensure black representation on the city council. He led marches to protest police brutality. He was a constant at Springfield Housing Authority board meetings when Stratton was board chairman.

“He would have banners and placards,” Stratton recalls. “There was one large one I wish I’d kept. It was a placard with a picture of me dressed up as some sort of banana republic dictator. It was really well done. In many ways, he was kind of the perfect activist and the perfect advocate. He could get a lot of attention and yet he was a really nice guy.”

Engaging. Charming. Pleasant. Not the sort of adjectives one would expect from a man whom Kantako painted as the enemy. But Stratton says that Kantako never got under his skin. He remembers off-the-record conversations outside the limelight when Kantako would outline plans for future protests and ask for thoughts.

“He just infuriated lots of people,” Stratton says. “I wasn’t among them. I liked the guy. I really did.”

Black, poor and blind

For an archetypical angry black man, Mbanna Kantako is a great conversationalist.

He easily recalls his childhood, saying he can remember the car ride up from Memphis where he was born to Springfield when he was less than three years old in the early 1960s. He has five brothers, ten sisters and no clue as to why his family ended up here.

“I think a lot of people really believe in that Lincoln stuff, and I think that might have been why,” he guesses. “Nobody in my family has ever made it clear why they chose Springfield. Maybe someone got paroled here. I don’t know. It doesn’t seem like it makes a lot of sense to stop here.”

Kantako was nine when he transferred from Springfield public schools to the Illinois School for the Visually Impaired in Jacksonville. He could still see, but just barely, owing to congenital glaucoma. But he knew black from white. His first day at the school for the blind, he befriended a student from Collinsville. Both Cardinals fans, they were swapping baseball cards at bedtime when he heard a staff member outside the room say that his new friend’s father wouldn’t appreciate his son being in the same room with a nigger.

“Nine years old, night time, you know – it was a hell of a thing to think about,” Kantako says. “I think I was about the nicest cat they’d probably ever met the next morning. I didn’t want to piss off nobody. There was nothing I could do. I couldn’t run home.”

Kantako became an athlete at the Jacksonville school, setting a national record in the high jump by clearing five-foot-eight-inches with a two-step approach. He also wrestled at 112 pounds. Initially, he professes that there was nothing he liked about being a wrestler, having to spend hours in the gym while his friends goofed off. He is not convincing.

“It really helped me shape my attitude about different things,” he allows. “It had a big influence on me. … There’s a confidence I think it gives you. Once you get a joker in your hands, your hands are like your eyes. You can tell by grabbing a person by the wrist what’s going on – you grab them by the arm, you can tell, once you learn a few techniques. That was, in fact, my way of evening the playing field with the sighted world. OK, you can outrun me, you can definitely outdrive me, but let’s go to the ground. Let’s see what we can do down here.”

After graduation, Kantako returned to Springfield. He studied computers at Lincoln Land Community College, then switched to courses aimed at becoming a probation officer, a short-lived plan that ended, he says, when he was beaten by police and lost his remaining eyesight. He next tried communications, but the classes didn’t make sense.

“I went out there (to Lincoln Land) and they were trying to make me listen to Beethoven and shit,” he says. “I didn’t feel that was very important for me to be learning that stuff. That’s when I drifted away from school.”

He was young, living in the projects and very much sure of himself. He DJ’d at parties and rapped a bit: Reagan economics won’t you stand aside/Because there’s unemployed people trying to stay alive. His first brush with political activism was born from ulterior motive: One of his sisters had promised him $2 if he would attend a neighborhood meeting at the Hay Homes the night before a city council meeting. He doesn’t recall the issue.

“I’ll be honest with you: I went to get $2 so I could get me a beer,” Kantako recalls. “And she wouldn’t give me the $2 until the meeting was over. I was just agreeing with everything to get the meeting over – ‘Oh, yeah, that’s a great idea, that’s a good idea, sounds good to me.’ Finally, one of the older ladies there who was a real good friend of my mom said to me ‘Wayne, you know how to talk on the microphone, you-all go with us.’”

The thirsty young man agreed, having no intention of actually following through, but he was in the audience at the next day’s city council meeting. He says he went because he didn’t want his mother to find out that he hadn’t kept a promise. He didn’t plan on going back.

“I heard the way the mayor was talking to people – Mike Houston, he’s the same mayor today,” Kantako recalls. “He’s crazy. He was just talking down to these people like they was stupid and shit like that, you know. I guess that’s when my time in the gym kind of got to me. In the gym, you just don’t do that. You’ve got someone that’s on your level, bang with him. But he was just tossing up weak people. So I got up and said something to him. He started off the same way with me. So I just said, ‘First of all, I’m not your nigger.’”

For Kantako, it was a point of no return, even if Houston today says that he doesn’t recall ever talking to the man who became the face of black radicalism in Springfield. The mayor, however, does recall the man.

“He was against whatever we were doing,” Houston says.

Exactly right.

A proud rabble rouser

Springfield was deeply torn as Kantako turned radical during the Reagan Revolution.

The city gained national attention when a lawsuit filed under the federal Voting Rights Act, the first of its kind north of the Mason-Dixon Line, sought to change the form of government in a town where no black had been elected to the city council for 75 years. The case laid bare backroom dealings in a place where Democratic and Republican leaders agreed on who should run for mayor and how jobs should be filled. Blacks had no chance.

At first, Kantako tried working within the system, running for Democratic precinct committeeman. He lost, and badly. He says the election was rigged.

“I went over to the Democratic headquarters that night, Dick Durbin was there,” Kantako says. “He comes over to me and says ‘Are you ready to play?’ Me, being a little cocky fool, I said, ‘Play? Man, we got the votes. We don’t play with you motherfuckers.’ Shit, I got fifth place.”

After that, Kantako and others who supported his views began picketing polling places, urging blacks to boycott elections and passing out fliers headlined, “Have You Ever Felt More Like A Nigger?” The voting rights lawsuit, he decided, was a “pacification program.” The plaintiffs were educated black males, not anyone who represented the average Springfield black resident. And so Kantako became a thorn, intent on embarrassing the powers that be by any means necessary.

He came to relish city council meetings and led protestors from the Hay Homes to 26 consecutive council meetings, recalls Michael Townsend, a retired University of Illinois Springfield professor of social work.

“It was absolutely amazing that he could get anyone to go down there,” Townsend says. “Trying to organize anyone in public housing is practically an impossible task.”

Townsend recalls Kantako once sitting a four-year-old girl in the front row of a council meeting with a sign reading “Pat Ward Is A Big Fat Slob,” right in front of Ward, who served on the council as the city’s public safety commissioner. Kantako smiles at the memory.

“It became a game with us,” Kantako says. “We would ask (former Mayor Ossie) Langfelder if racism was a mortal or venal sin. … After awhile, it got to be fun to go down there and send the streets commissioner up, make him jump up and slam his shit down on the table. Boy, they would get so mad.”

The point, he says, was to prove that city fathers had clay feet.

“I wanted to show people that they weren’t like the Wizard of Oz – people go down there and they’re like, ‘These guys breathe fire and shit,’” Kantako says. “I wanted to show them that they’re not that tough.”

So far as Kantako was concerned, neither the plaintiffs nor the defendants in the voting rights lawsuit had the best interests of black people in mind and so he skewered both sides. His vitriol for James and Don Craven, the father-and-son legal team that handled the voting-rights case for the plaintiffs, matches his disdain for Houston.

The printer who created the fliers with the n-word had charged a considerable amount, Kantako says, and an old copying machine at the Craven law office represented a chance to save money in the future. A new machine was being delivered, with the vendor offering the Cravens a $100 discount if they turned in the old one, recalls Kantako, who initially supported the lawsuit and was attending meetings with the plaintiffs at the law office. He says that he and his supporters offered to buy the old machine for $100.

“They wouldn’t give us that machine for nothing in the world,” Kantako says. “That’s when the shit hit the fan, right there. I went from East Side activist family man to radical, all that shit. After that copying machine thing, we just broke off from everything.”

Don Craven says he doesn’t remember anything about a copying machine, nor does his father.

“Trust me on that,” Craven says. “But if it was that event that propelled him into his activist-radical days, I am proud to have been a part of it.”

Going live

The idea for a do-it-yourself radio station generated with Townsend, who suggested that Kantako start an underground newspaper.

“I can’t read, first of all, so I’m not very enthusiastic about it,” Kantako says. “Half the people I know can’t read, so that was just not viable.”

Given his experience as a DJ, Kantako decided a radio station would be better than a newspaper, so, with Townsend’s help, he got a mail-order transmitter for a few hundred bucks and plugged in. Some money for equipment came from the Catholic church, which had given a grant to the tenants rights association.

They could not have picked a better time than the fall of 1987.

With a substantial percentage of the city’s black population clustered in the Hay Homes, Kantako’s audience was within reach of the tiny transmitter. There were few, if any, radio stations that catered to a black audience, and certainly none that played uncensored songs by Ice T, NWA, Public Enemy and other then-controversial hip-hop groups that spiced messages of defiance with plenty of four-letter words. Over-the-air television with just a few stations was still dominant, and there was no Internet. And so Kantako’s pirate radio station became popular in the projects as much for jams that couldn’t be heard anywhere else as for the political proselytizing.

It wasn’t long before Kantako was in the headlines for a new reason.

Shortly after Kantako took to the airwaves, Springfield police complained to the Federal Communications Commission. They insisted they weren’t motivated by Kantako’s near-constant criticism and use of the word “pigs.” Rather, they were simply passing along complaints from citizens upset by naughty words.

“There were people in the Hay Homes complaining about him,” recalls former police chief Mike Walton, who now works for the Sangamon County sheriff’s office. “It’s his right to broadcast. He just shouldn’t use language that’s not acceptable to children.”

In 1989, police and an FCC official paid a visit and ordered him to unplug. He did, but only for a week. Then he sent a statement to the press and invited reporters to attend the reopening of his radio station.

“Mr. Readus will make a statement to the press and will respond to questions prior to his being taken into police custody,” reads the press release typed on tenants rights association stationary.

After speaking to reporters, Kantako went back on the air and called police, with a tape recorder rolling. Come and arrest me, he told an officer. He was put on hold, then told that local police didn’t have jurisdiction over violations of federal law. So he went to the federal building and tried to surrender himself, but no one was interested in locking him up. He has been daring authorities to arrest him ever since.

“On several occasions, I’ve tried to set them up, but they won’t go for it – ‘Nah, you have a nice day, sir,’” says Kantako, who dropped his birth name in the early 1990s and made it official by having a judge sign paperwork in 2003.

A letter campaign aimed at building support after his first confrontation with the FCC met with mixed results. The NAACP said no thanks, as did Bill Cosby. Noam Chomsky, however, provided advice and wrote a check for $50. The Catholic church held back the final check of a grant awarded to the tenants rights association after expressing concerns about illegal broadcasts.

But Kantako became a darling of the underground, with articles appearing in alternative newspapers as far away as Germany. Major newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch sent reporters to Springfield to write about the blind man who defied the FCC and proved an inspiration to other pirate radio broadcasters throughout the nation. Pump Up The Volume, a 1990 movie starring Christian Slater as a high school student who starts his own radio station, fueled interest, and there were mentions of Kantako in Playboy, Spin, Mother Jones and The Utne Reader. He even made mainstream airwaves with a segment on All Things Considered broadcast on National Public Radio. Dozens of people around the country wrote letters voicing support and asking Kantako for advice on how to set up pirate radio stations.

“He started a whole movement that’s never been acknowledged or recognized in Springfield,” Townsend said.

He has proven unstoppable. Federal agents seized his equipment in 2000 after air traffic controllers at Abraham Lincoln Capital Airport said that his signals were reaching pilots who could, potentially, believe that Kantako was providing directions. No planes fell from the sky, however, and Kantako has refused to pay fines levied by the FCC.

Interest and controversy has faded with the advent of the Internet. Now, anyone with a laptop can say most anything they want, and the message goes considerably farther than a mile or so. But there are still sprouts of celebrity in unexpected places. In 2011, a Danish hip-hop group with anarchist appeal released Viva Kantako Destroy Sony, an album anchored by a track called “Mbanna Kantako Radio” that features clips from Kantako broadcasts.

While pirate radio might seem a throwback, Kantako isn’t about to quit. Perhaps he is stubborn – he and his wife were, after all, the last people to move out of the Hay Homes before they were demolished in 1997.

Has he made a difference?

That’s hard to measure, Stratton says. It is hard to point out a concrete accomplishment, the former housing authority board chairman says, but Kantako raised awareness about important issues.

“I think he was effective in that,” Stratton allows.

Kantako wouldn’t necessarily disagree. We’re better off than we were 25 years ago, he says – if nothing else, people today cannot hide from the truth, and he hopes that he has helped educate people.

“I think we’re better off because that gives us a chance to get our act together,” he states.

Kantako still gets threatening letters from the FCC, most recently in 2011. But he is most proud of a 2000 restraining order signed by former U.S. District Court Judge Jeanne Scott, who commanded him to get a license or get off the air. He has it framed, hanging at the entrance to his living room.

“It says I will ‘cause immediate and irreparable damage to the United States,’” Kantako says. “I thought that was so cool.”