Tag Archives: free press

Weather-related blackouts in U.S. doubled in 10 years

by wqds234der Posted on April 11, 2014

Weather-related blackouts in U.S. doubled in 10 years

By

Shutterstock

The current U.S. electrical grid is a far cry from smart. Climate change and aging infrastructure are leading to an increasing number of blackouts across the country.

A new analysis by the nonprofit Climate Central found that the number of outages affecting 50,000 or more people for at least an hour doubled during the decade up to 2012.  Most of the blackouts were triggered when extreme weather damaged large transmission lines and substations. Michigan had the most outages, followed by Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.

Climate CentralClick to embiggen.

Severe rainstorms, which are growing more tempestuous as the globe warms, were blamed for the majority of the weather-related outages.

Climate CentralClick to embiggen.

The researchers listed two main drivers of the trend:

Climate change is, at most, partially responsible for this recent increase in major power outages, which is a product of an aging grid serving greater electricity demand, and an increase in storms and extreme weather events that damage this system. But a warming planet provides more fuel for increasingly intense and violent storms, heat waves, and wildfires, which in turn will continue to strain, and too often breach, our highly vulnerable electrical infrastructure. …

Since 1990, heavy downpours and flooding have increased in most parts of the country, and the trend is most dramatic in the Northeast and Midwest. Some of this heavy rain is likely to be associated with high winds and thunderstorm activity. Researchers have found that these regions have already seen a 30 percent increase in heavy downpours compared to the 1901-1960 average.

Climate CentralClick to embiggen.

Solutions to the problem include more small wind and solar power installations built close to where the electricity is needed — and an overhaul of the country’s overburdened and outmoded grid system.

This research won’t come as a surprise inside the White House. The Obama administration put out a call for more spending on grid infrastructure last year when it published similar findings in its own report.


Source
Weather-Related Blackouts Doubled Since 2003: Report, Climate Central

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Climate & Energy

Original link:

Weather-related blackouts in U.S. doubled in 10 years

Posted in Anchor, FF, Free Press, GE, Landmark, ONA, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Weather-related blackouts in U.S. doubled in 10 years

GMO labeling would be outlawed by new bill in Congress

by EsmeraldaYarnol Posted on April 11, 2014

GMO labeling would be outlawed by new bill in Congress

By

mikescottnz

State-led efforts to mandate GMO labels are blossoming like a field of organic tulips, but members of Congress are trying to mow them down with legislative herbicide.

Maine and Connecticut recently passed laws that will require foods containing GMO ingredients to be clearly marked as such — after enough other states follow suit. And lawmakers in other states are considering doing the same thing. The trend makes large food producers nervous — nervous enough to spend millions defeating ballot initiatives in California and Washington that also would have mandated such labels. They worry that the labels might scare people off, eating into companies’ sales and profits.

So a band of corporate-friendly members of Congress has come riding in to try to save the day for their donors. A bipartisan group led by Reps. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) and G.K. Butterfield (D-N.C.) has signed onto legislation introduced Wednesday that would run roughshod over states’ rules on GMO labels. Reuters reports:

The bill, dubbed the “Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act,” was drafted by U.S. Rep. Mike Pompeo from Kansas, and is aimed at overriding bills in roughly two dozen states that would require foods made with genetically engineered crops to be labeled as such.

The bill specifically prohibits any mandatory labeling of foods developed using bioengineering.

Large business groups cheered the legislation, which could receive its first hearings in the summer. “The GMO labeling ballot initiatives and legislative efforts that many state lawmakers and voters are facing are geared toward making people wrongly fear what they’re eating and feeding their children,” said the American Farm Bureau Federation’s president.

But groups that believe Americans have a right to know what they’re eating and which farming technologies they’re supporting are of course opposed, characterizing the bill as a desperate salvo by Big Food in the face of overwhelming support for GMO labels. The opponents have dubbed the bill the Deny Americans the Right to Know Act.

“If the DARK Act becomes law, a veil of secrecy will cloak ingredients, leaving consumers with no way to know what’s in their food,” said the Environmental Working Group’s Scott Faber. “Consumers in 64 countries, including Saudi Arabia and China, have the right to know if their food contains GMOs. Why shouldn’t Americans have the same right?”

Whatever you choose to call it, the bill is unlikely to have success beyond the GOP-controlled House.


Source
U.S. bill seeks to block mandatory GMO food labeling by states, Reuters
GMO labeling bill would trump states, Politico

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Business & Technology

,

Food

,

Politics

From:

GMO labeling would be outlawed by new bill in Congress

Posted in Anchor, FF, Free Press, G & F, GE, Landmark, ONA, organic, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on GMO labeling would be outlawed by new bill in Congress

Droughts push beef prices to record highs

by MollieUrquhart Posted on April 10, 2014

Droughts push beef prices to record highs

By

Shutterstock

A cost-saving barbecue.

Mo’ drought, moo problems. Hamburger and sirloins are becoming more expensive than ever in the wake of drought-driven herd thinning.

Herd thinning isn’t a bovine diet and calisthenics regime. It’s a euphemism for unplanned cow slaughtering — though the end result of the unfortunate practice could literally lower your meat and cholesterol intake. The L.A. Times reports that the retail price of choice-grade beef hit a record $5.28 a pound last month, up from $4.91 a year ago:

Soaring beef prices are being blamed on years of drought throughout the western and southern U.S. The dry weather has driven up the price of feed such as corn and hay to record highs, forcing many ranchers to sell off their cattle. That briefly created a glut of beef cows for slaughter that has now run dry.

The nation’s cattle population has fallen to 87.7 million, the lowest since 1951, when there were 82.1 million on hand, according to the USDA. (The peak was 1975, with 132 million heads of cattle, but the animals then were less meaty and required more feed.)

“We’re dealing with chronically low herds,” said Richard Volpe, an economist for the USDA. “Beef prices should remain at near-record highs this year and into 2015.”

Even vegetarians aren’t being spared from repercussions of herd thinning. Cattle munch on tumbleweeds, and Colorado’s dwindling cattle population has contributed to a choking outbreak. The AP reports that the freewheeling weeds are so thick in some places that firefighters had to cut through them to help a pregnant woman reach the hospital.

“The frustrating part is once you get the first wave beat down, packed down and out of the road, the wind comes up and here comes the next batch,” said county road worker Russell Bennett.


Source
Beef prices hit all-time high in U.S., Los Angeles Times
Colorado tumbleweeds overrun drought areas, Associated Press

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Climate & Energy

,

Food

This article:

Droughts push beef prices to record highs

Posted in Anchor, FF, Free Press, GE, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Droughts push beef prices to record highs

U.N. climate report offers lots of bummer news plus a few dollops of encouragement

by WilliamMLXG Posted on March 31, 2014

U.N. climate report offers lots of bummer news plus a few dollops of encouragement

By

NASA

Climate change has broken down the floodgates, pervading every corner of the globe and affecting every inhabitant. That was perhaps the clearest message from the newest report of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — the latest in a conga line of warnings about the need to radically and immediately reduce our use of fossil fuels.

Published Sunday, it’s the second installment of the IPCC’s fifth climate report. The first installment was released last September; the third comes out next month. (If you’re wondering WTF the IPCC even is, here’s an explainer.) This latest installment catalogues climate impacts that are already being felt around the world, including floods, heat waves, rising seas, and a slowing in the growth of crop yields:

IPCCClick to embiggen.

As we reported when a draft of key parts of the document was leaked in November, the IPCC says current risks will only worsen – risks such as food crises and starvation, extinctions, heat waves, floods, droughts, violent protests, and wars.

Natural Resources Defense Council President Frances Beinecke called the report an “S.O.S. to the world,” reminding us that failure to “sharply curb carbon pollution” will mean more “punishing rainfall, heat waves, scorching drought, and fierce storm surges,” and that the “toll on our health and economy will skyrocket.”

But the report doesn’t just focus on climate change’s risks and threats – it looks at ways in which national and local governments, communities, and the private sector can work to reduce those threats. And some of the news on climate adaptation is actually, gasp, slightly encouraging!

“Adaptation to climate change is transitioning from a phase of awareness to the construction of actual strategies and plans,” chapter 15 says. “The combined efforts of a broad range of international organizations, scientific reports, and media coverage have raised awareness of the importance of adaptation to climate change, fostering a growing number of adaptation responses in developed and developing countries.”

Farmers are adjusting their growing times as they adapt to changing local climates, for example. Wetlands and sand dunes are being restored to protect against storm surges and flooding, drought early-warning systems are being established, and governments are turning to the traditional knowledge held by their indigenous communities for clues on how best to cope with the increasingly hostile weather.

But the report highlights a depressingly unjust fissure between the world’s rich, who have caused most of the global warming but can afford to adapt to some of it, and the world’s poorest countries and communities, where countless lives can be ruined en masse by a single unseasonably powerful storm or drought.

“Climate change is expected to have a relatively greater impact on the poor as a consequence of their lack of financial resources, poor quality of shelter, reliance on local ecosystem services, exposure to the elements, and limited provision of basic services and their limited resources to recover from an increasing frequency of losses through climate events,” chapter 14 says.

And the report highlights the yawning gap between the amount of money that needs to be spent on climate adaptation and how much is actually being spent. Chapter 17 cites a World Bank estimate that it will cost the world $70 billion to $100 billion a year to adapt to the changing climate by 2050 (but notes that these figures are “highly preliminary”). Yet actual spending in 2012 was estimated to be around $400 million.

Those high adaptation costs will be out of reach for many of the world’s poorest countries — something that IPCC delegates from the U.S. and other Western countries don’t want you to think about. The New York Times reports that the World Bank’s $100 billion figure was scrubbed from the report’s 44-page summary at the last minute under pressure from rich countries, which have been spooked by poor countries’ calls during recent negotiations for climate compensation and far-reaching adaptation assistance.


Source
WGII AR5 Final Drafts, IPCC

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Climate & Energy

,

Food

,

Politics

Continued here: 

U.N. climate report offers lots of bummer news plus a few dollops of encouragement

Posted in alo, Anchor, Citizen, FF, Free Press, GE, LAI, ONA, Oster, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on U.N. climate report offers lots of bummer news plus a few dollops of encouragement

Oil workers and Jewish grandmas driving American metropolitan growth

by HFOSpencer Posted on March 28, 2014

The Villages People

Oil workers and Jewish grandmas driving American metropolitan growth

By

Shutterstock

Looking for the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the United States? Follow the fracking – or, alternatively, search for the top-rated golf club brunches on Yelp. The most recent U.S. census data, measuring urban growth between July 1, 2012 and July 1, 2013, showed that oil boomtowns and Southern retirement communities now get to sit at the popular table. The irony here, of course, is that there were never more unlikely candidates for said table than The Villages, Fla., or Fargo, N.D. This list paints a pretty bizarre picture of America’s future, but at least it’s interesting.

A couple of cities on this list – Austin, for example – actually seem like fun places to live for young people, but what’s most striking is that with the exception of The Villages, all of the top spots are filled by oil towns. That’s no coincidence. Last July, the New York Times published a study examining social mobility in metro areas across the United States. The places of greatest economic opportunity, according to the results, were concentrated in oil-rich regions: North Dakota, eastern Montana, western Texas.

Here’s a list of the top 10 fastest-growing metro areas, with the most likely reasons for their growth:

1. The Villages, Fla. – 5.2 percent

Awkwardly named The Villages is literally just a retirement community in the dead center of Florida, about an hour northwest of Orlando. No one under the age of 65 is moving there.

2 & 3. Odessa and Midland, Texas – tied at 3.3 percent

Odessa and Midland, about 20 miles apart, lie on the oil-rich Permian Basin in western Texas, which is expected to produce 1.41 million barrels this month. Both towns have experienced housing shortages in recent years due to an oil boom in the region.

4 & 5. Fargo and Bismarck, N.D. – tied at 3.1 percent

Fargo and Bismarck have both seen unprecedented growth due to workers flocking to high-paying jobs on the Bakken shale. This influx — and its attendant problems, including high real-estate prices, increased crime rates, and a really tough dating scene – have been well-documented.

6. Casper, Wyo. – 2.9 percent

Casper, nicknamed The Oil City, is bringing recent high school grads to work in the region’s oil fields in droves. A city full of 18-year-olds with tens of thousands of dollars in disposable income? Pretty sick, brah!

7. Myrtle Beach, S.C. – 2.7 percent

It turns out everyone you’ve ever met wearing a Myrtle Beach sweatshirt is finally making their sartorially expressed dreams a reality and moving to Myrtle Beach. There is no other explanation.

8. Austin, Texas – 2.6 percent

Have you ever been to Austin? There is pretty much nowhere within the city limits that you can’t get a delicious taco. That’s just part of the reason that 110 people move to Austin each day – the city’s economy expanded by 5.9 percent last year, more than twice the growth rate for the national economy.

9. Daphne, Ala. – 2.6 percent

Fairhope, in the Daphne metro area on the Gulf Coast of Alabama, was founded as an experimental utopian society by a group of rare Iowan socialists, and continues to pride itself on being a weird little resort town. Fairhope’s current mayor started out as the city’s horticulturist, and the town is committed to being bike- and pedestrian-friendly. This one doesn’t sound so bad, y’all.

10. Cape Coral, Fla. – 2.5 percent

In 2012, Forbes named Cape Coral among its 25 top places to retire in the U.S. It seems that the publication’s target audience took that recommendation to heart.

Eve Andrews is a Grist fellow and new Seattle transplant via the mean streets of Chicago, Poughkeepsie, and Pittsburgh, respectively and in order of meanness. Follow her on Twitter.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Cities

,

Climate & Energy

,

Living

Taken from: 

Oil workers and Jewish grandmas driving American metropolitan growth

Posted in Anchor, ATTRA, FF, Free Press, GE, LAI, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Oil workers and Jewish grandmas driving American metropolitan growth

Congress successfully took the wind out of wind energy’s sails last year

by JacelynZ96 Posted on March 27, 2014

Congress successfully took the wind out of wind energy’s sails last year

By

Kaj Iversön

America’s fossil fuel-smitten Congress helped China blow the U.S. out of the water last year when it came to installing new wind energy farms.

A little more than 16 gigawatts of new wind capacity came online in China in 2013 — nearly half of the 36 gigawatts installed around the world. Compare that with a little more than 1 gigawatt that was installed in the U.S. — down alarmingly from 13 gigawatts the year before.

That means American wind installations plummeted in a single year despite the falling price of wind energy, which is becoming lower than the price of electricity produced by burning natural gas in some parts of the country.

Dude, where’s our wind? Well, the latest figures were calculated by Navigant Research, and it blamed a “politically divided Congress” in a new paywalled report for the faltering wind growth in the U.S.

Congress allowed wind energy tax credits to blow away at the end of 2013 — so why would 2013′s installation figures be so bleak? According to the report, it was all about uncertainty. Lawmakers ”failed to extend tax incentives in time to positively impact the 2013 development and construction cycle.”

(Needless to say, Congress, which failed to extend the tax credits amid fossil fuel lobbyist whining that the wind energy industry needs to stand on its own feet, failed to do anything about the billions of dollars in subsidies doled out to fossil fuel companies every year.)

The new report contains some bleak news for those accustomed to reading about runaway growth in renewables. Less wind capacity was installed around the world in 2013 than had been the case in 2012 — the first time that such a decline has been recorded in eight years.

Still, thing are looking bright — particularly for the emerging offshore wind sector. Thirteen new offshore projects added 1.7 gigawatts of capacity last year — up by 50 percent compared with 2012. And 6.6 gigawatts of new offshore capacity is currently under construction.

The researchers forecast that the sector will rebound globally this year, with new installations expected to better last year’s effort by 30 percent. By the end of 2014, the researchers say wind energy will be meeting 2.9 percent of the world’s demand for electricity — a figure they expect to rise to 7.3 percent by 2018.

Navigant ResearchClick to embiggen.


Source
World Market Update 2013, Navigant Research

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Business & Technology

,

Climate & Energy

Source:  

Congress successfully took the wind out of wind energy’s sails last year

Posted in Anchor, FF, Free Press, G & F, GE, Keurig, LG, ONA, solar, TOTO, Uncategorized, wind energy | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Congress successfully took the wind out of wind energy’s sails last year

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder Will Shutter His Dark-Money Fund

by 4ko9dra Posted on October 22, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

For months, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder has been under fire for a nonprofit his administration has used to pay the salary of a top lieutenant, as well as housing and travel costs for Kevyn Orr, the emergency manager appointed by Snyder to shore up Detroit’s finances. On Monday, Snyder announced he would soon dissolve the nonprofit, known as the New Energy to Reinvent and Diversify (NERD) Fund.

Snyder told reporters, according to the Detroit Free Press, that the NERD Fund—which has never disclosed its donors—was becoming a distraction. “I think it is appropriate to say, ‘Let’s wind it down and go forward in a fund where all the donors will be disclosed and the information will be online,'” he said.

Allies of the governor incorporated the NERD fund in February 2011, shortly after Snyder took office, to offset the costs of certain employees and initiatives. Its goal, as the fund’s directors put it, to “advance good government in Michigan while easing the burden on taxpayers.” The NERD Fund raised $1.3 million in unlimited donations from anonymous sources in 2011, but just $368,000 in 2012, according to tax filings. The only publicly revealed donor to the NERD Fund is the pharmaceutical chain CVS, which gave $1,000 in March 2012, according to a company disclosure.

Earlier this month, Snyder testified under oath that he didn’t know who the NERD Fund’s donors were. That hasn’t stopped Snyder’s critics, mainly the state’s labor unions, from raising questions about the influence gained by the fund’s donors.

A spokeswoman for Snyder said the NERD Fund will not reveal its previous donors even after dissolving—a decision that raised fresh questions about the fund’s backers. “Closing the NERD Fund without full disclosure of past donors only begs the question: What is Gov. Snyder hiding?” Karla Swift, president of the Michigan state AFL-CIO, told the Detroit News.

Continued here:  

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder Will Shutter His Dark-Money Fund

Posted in FF, Free Press, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder Will Shutter His Dark-Money Fund

Kanye West Performs for a Dictator’s Family, and Human Rights Activists Are Livid

by Abe Johnson Posted on September 3, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Trying to steal Taylor Swift’s thunder is no longer the most cringeworthy thing Kanye West has ever done.

Over the weekend, the hip-hop artist performed for a dictator’s kin. On Saturday, West was in Almaty (Kazakhstan’s largest city) performing at the wedding reception of Aisultan Nazarbayev, the 23-year-old grandson of Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev.

Nazarbayev has ruled the central Asian country for 23 years since its independence from the dissolved Soviet Union, and has come under fire by human rights organizations for his authoritarian tactics, including attacks on a free press, torture, torpedoing workers’ rights, and jailing the political opposition. (In 2011, Sting canceled a gig in Kazakhstan after Amnesty International got in touch with him about the human rights abuses.)

For his performance (which included a rendition of “Can’t Tell Me Nothing“), West reportedly received $3 million. Here’s a brief clip from the event:

A news agency in Kazakhstan reported that West was a personal guest of the controversial strongman. As you can imagine, human rights advocates aren’t thrilled about any of this.

“Kazakhstan is a human rights wasteland,” Thor Halvorssen, president of the Human Rights Foundation (HRF), said in a statement sent to Mother Jones. “The regime crushes freedom of speech and association; someone like Kanye, who makes a living expressing his views, would find himself in a prison under Nazarbayev’s rule.”

“The millions of dollars paid to West came from the loot stolen from the Kazakhstan treasury,” said Garry Kasparov, a noted critic of Vladimir Putin and chairman of HRF. “West has supported numerous charities throughout his career, including a few specifically focused on international human rights work. Kanye has entertained a brutal killer and his entourage…It’s up to the public to hold him accountable.”

West is now in the growing club of celebrities caught getting chummy with despots. In 2012, Kim Kardashian, the reality-TV socialite and mother of West’s child, is in it, too. In 2012, she traveled to Bahrain and generated positive press for a regime that was still taking heat for its bloody crackdown on political dissidents. (Following her arrival, Bahrain police were deployed to control “hard-line” Islamic protesters enraged at her presence.)

Earlier this summer, Jennifer Lopez was slammed by human rights groups for her paid performance at the lavish birthday bash of 56-year-old Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, the human-rights-quashing dictator of Turkmenistan. Mariah Carey, Beyoncé, Lionel Richie, and Usher had all danced and sung for relatives of the deceased Libyan dictator Moammar Qaddafi. Godfather of Soul James Brown and blues guitar legend B.B. King performed for Zaire president Mobutu Sese Seko, a vicious anti-communist tyrant. British supermodel Naomi Campbell was caught hanging out with Charles Taylor, a convicted war criminal and ex-president of Liberia. And the list goes on.

The human rights violations and internationally denounced actions of all the above can be found in five seconds on Google. Maybe famous people who don’t need the money—and the people they hire to vet their appearances—should use it more.

West’s publicist did not respond to Mother Jones‘ request for comment.

See the article here: 

Kanye West Performs for a Dictator’s Family, and Human Rights Activists Are Livid

Posted in FF, Free Press, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Kanye West Performs for a Dictator’s Family, and Human Rights Activists Are Livid

“Super-PACs May Be Bad for America, But They’re Very Good for CBS”

by donkorleone842 Posted on July 8, 2013

Mother Jones

Ask the average American about super-PACs and I’d venture to guess he or she thinks of: those incessant negative political ads during the evening news, something about the Obama-Romney race, or the sheer amount of spending ($7 billion!) during the last election season. (That is, if they even know what a super-PAC is.) For the broadcasting business, though, super-PACs have come to stand for something altogether different: a big, fat payday.

The title of this post refers to something Les Moonves, the CEO of CBS Corporation, said at an entertainment law conference last year. Moonves was understandably over the moon about the rise of super-PACs: In 2012, he explained, the network’s profits were expected to soar by $180 million thanks to political ads.

And it’s not just CBS that’s riding high thanks to political ad spending. TV stations in battleground states are magnets for ad spending, and they’re driving a new wave of consolidation in the broadcast industry, leaving a handful of big media companies well-positioned to reap hundreds of millions during the 2014 midterm elections and, especially, the 2016 presidential race. Just in the past month, the Gannett company bought 20 TV stations for $1.5 billion, and the Tribune Company inked a $2.7 billion deal for 19 stations. Those deals included stations in battleground states.

Washington, DC’s WJLA, owned by the Allbritton media company, the New York Times notes, which serves both the DC and the northern Virginia markets, banked $33 million in ad spending on campaigns and issues last year. Columbus’ WBNS, owned by the Dispatch Broadcast Group, booked $20 million in campaign ad spending out of $50 million in total ad buys. Ad spending was also up at TV stations in Wisconsin and Colorado. Wherever there was a political fight, campaigns and consultants were gobbling up ads. According to the Times, WJLA could by bring in $300 million if the Allbritton media company decided to sell it (which, earlier this year, Allbritton said it planned to do).

So all this political ad spending is making the owners of these stations mighty happy. But someone’s getting the shaft, right? Yep: local viewers and businesses. From the Times:

Analysts say the surge in station consolidation this year has also been driven by low interest rates and by an enormous rise in retransmission fees for stations, which are the equivalent of per-subscriber fees for cable channels like ESPN and MTV. Some stations now earn 40 to 50 cents a month from each cable and satellite subscriber.

But those fees currently account for about 10 percent of station revenue, and even if they double in the next five years, as the research firm SNL Kagan predicts, advertising revenue will remain the most important part of the station business. Thus, political advertising is a lifeline, even if the sheer volume of ads sometimes makes viewers want to hurl the remotes at their sets.

“We get complaints from viewers,” Michael J. Fiorile, the chief executive of WBNS’s owner, the Dispatch Broadcast Group, acknowledged. “The bigger complaints are from regular advertisers who really get pushed off the air.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” he added with a chuckle. “It’s a good problem for us to have.”

There are a number of worries with the escalation of the TV political ad wars and the broadcast industry’s consolidation. For starters, it’s far less likely that TV stations will fact-check super-PAC ads, let alone yank misleading ads off the air, which political analyst Kathleen Hall Jamieson is trying to do with her FlackCheck.org project. (By law, TV stations can’t censor candidates’ ads, but they can vet and reject those of outside groups.) After all, super-PACs and dark-money nonprofits are a cash cow for broadcasters. Why bite the hand that feeds? When the public interest group Free Press analyzed political ads and newscast stories in six TV markets in battleground states, it found “a near-complete station blackout on local reporting about the political ads they aired.”

The consolidation of the TV industry, meanwhile, can result in less local reporting and more shared content between various stations. And the decline in original, local reporting could worsen with more consolidation expected this year. “With the consolidation of ownership there’s generally a decline in the quality in local news,” Free Press’ Tim Karr told the Columbia Journalism Review in May. “It is directly related to the staffing of local newsrooms.”

Read More:  

“Super-PACs May Be Bad for America, But They’re Very Good for CBS”

Posted in alo, FF, Free Press, GE, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on “Super-PACs May Be Bad for America, But They’re Very Good for CBS”

The Obama Administration Has a Long Record of Prosecuting Leakers

by neogrom Posted on May 15, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The Associated Press announced on Monday that federal agents had secretly seized two months of its phone records in what the organization called a “serious interference with the A.P.’s constitutional rights to gather and report news.” Although much of the resulting furor has focused on the rights of a free press, the sweeping move by the Department of Justice also highlights the Obama administration’s rough treatment of leakers and whistleblowers within its ranks.

The Obama administration has used the 1917 Espionage Act, which was originally designed to prosecute spies, to indict twice as many government officials for leaks than all other administrations combined. The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas has assembled a list of the six current and former government officials that the Obama administration has indicted under the law:

1. Shamai K. Leibowitz, 2009

Leibowitz, a former-FBI Hebrew translator, pleaded guilty to leaking classified information to Richard Silverstein who blogs at Tikun Olam, reported AlterNet. The translator passed 200 pages of transcribed conversations recorded by FBI wiretaps of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. Leibowitz was sentenced to up to 20 months in prison, according to The Washington Post.

2. Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, 2010

Kim was a nuclear proliferation expert working on a contract basis for the U.S. State Department when he was accused of leaking information about North Korea to Fox News.

The Justice Department claimed that Kim was the source behind Fox News journalist James Rosen’s 2009 report suggesting that the North would likely test another nuclear bomb in reaction to a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning its tests, reported AlterNet.

Kim pleaded not guilty to the charges. A Federal Grand Jury indicted him but the case has not gone to trial, according to The New York Times.

3. Thomas Drake, 2010

Drake worked as a senior executive at the National Security Agency when he was charged with “willful retention” of classified documents under the Espionage Act. He leaked information about government waste on digital data gathering technology to The Baltimore Sun, according to AlterNet.

At one point Drake faced up to 35 years in prison for several charges. Eventually, most of the charges were dropped and he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for “exceeding authorized use of a computer.” He was sentenced to one-year probation and community service.

4. Pfc. Bradley Manning, 2010

Probably the best known of the six under indictment, Manning was the source behind the WikiLeaks and CableGate information dumps. Critics accuse the government of dragging its feet and aggressively redacting requests for public information about the trial. One journalist opined that the Guantanamo military tribunals were more transparent.

Manning faces a court martial and a harsher sentence that could include life in prison without parole, reported The New York Times. AlterNet pointed out, however, that prosecutors would have to prove Manning released the documents with the intention of harming the U.S. to win those harsher charges, something Manning denies. His trial is set for next month, June 3.

5. Jeffery Sterling, 2010

Sterling, a former-CIA official, pleaded not guilty to leaking information to New York Times journalist James Risen regarding a failed U.S. attempt to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program. The information in question was published in Risen’s book “State of War.”

Risen successfully fought several subpoenas from the federal government to reveal his sources during Sterling’s trial, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. The Justice Department announced in the summer of 2012 that it has “effectively terminated” the case, according to the Times.

6. John C. Kiriakou, 2012

One of the few prosecuted under the Espionage act to serve jail time, Kiriakou was sentenced to 30 months in prison on Jan. 25, 2013, for leaking classified information to the media. Kiriakou pleaded not guilty to releasing the name of an undercover CIA agent to a reporter and information about the intelligence agency’s use of waterboarding, a controversial interrogation technique.

Kiriakou is the first person successfully prosecuted under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act in 27 years, according to the Times. The reporter the ex-CIA official spoke to did not publish the undercover agent’s name, although the Times pointed out that the agent’s identity appeared in a sealed legal filing and on an “obscure” website.

Jump to original:  

The Obama Administration Has a Long Record of Prosecuting Leakers

Posted in FF, Free Press, G & F, GE, ONA, Sterling, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Obama Administration Has a Long Record of Prosecuting Leakers