Head of FCC threatens broadcaster licenses over critical coverage of Iran war (opens in new tab)

Any suggestions for better system? What is best, is there an objective answer?

Your analysis is useless, irrespective of how correct it is. There are countries with a freer press that fare better. Throwing your hands in the air and saying "it's all pointless, only fools care about improving things" is detrimental to fixing this mess.

The distinction is important because at least private enterprises aren't directly controlled by the government. So they have the capacity for independence, and if they choose not to flex it then another private enterprise may.

Every accusation is an admission from the people running the united states right now

Right here, to name one. Needless to say I feel very bleak and despondent as I watch the America I thought I knew transform into something dark. I do not anticipate the next decade+ of life in America to be free and prosperous.

HN was such an interesting place in 2024, they’ve all disappeared, sadly.

I’ve been genuinely, deeply, curious where those posters went. It was the site at that point.

The most I’ve seen in months and months is a limp-wristed handwave at “but humans have gooned and been racist forever”, in response to someone saying they wouldn’t choose to work for X.ai because it accelerates those things.

My most substantive idea is it was an unsustainable coalition, and that’s why we’re not seeing it much. You need to be for an ugly conjunction of things instead of against “woke” and Columbia students, thus you won’t get coalition-wide social approval (upvotes) anymore.

So they’re almost certainly here, but, downvoted to the point of invisibility unless you scour every comment.

Another case study to ponder is our host’s CEO, Gary Tan. Full-on loud-throated American juche stuff at beginning of tariffs. Now he has his own political website he built with Claude. And it’s LLM-generated articles that are riffs on Free Press articles he liked and they’re really tediously boring niche stuff even if you’re full in on team red, even before the AI writing cringe effect on the reader. Ex. “Mackenzie bezos philanthropy is fake and destructive because one college that got money hired the college presidents son and also enrollment dropped the next year”

Broadcast TV (and cable TV too) has been whithering on the vine for a long time. What a network couldn't broadcast on TV could simply be put on YouTube or other social network. TV could become state-owned media at this point and I don't think anyone would really care as long as the Internet is the way it is.

The FCC has a number of extraordinary powers over the broadcast spectrum, but they do not include viewpoint discrimination, which has always been seen as uniquely odious and different than indecency restrictions. As held in Shurtleff v. Boston, even the much more limited medium of a government-owned flagpole in front of a government building cannot be subject to viewpoint discrimination. If the public is allowed to speak freely in a particular medium, the government may not rescind that permission based on whether their message is true or fair or in the public interest.

Why do airwaves matter? I get cable over the internet. Technology constraints shouldn’t me what allows laws to undermine democracy.

I’m excited about cell phones, pacemakers, and wifi no longer working.

Honestly the world might be a better place if the vast majority of spectrum were just ISM bands anyways.

I find it amusing that your last comment is preaching to someone about what politics is and isn't.

Your politics are clear. You have no problem with the modern Republican party embracing authoritarianism and fascism. In fact, you see it as an opportunity to erode trust in or otherwise destroy the institution responsible for regulating signals in the US. The very thing that makes it so that planes can safely fly or that things in space must respect terrestrial networks without disruption.

That is your politics, just an embarrassing set of politics. Not even a green account. Shame on you.

> They’ve been dead silent ever since the election. Their mission was accomplished successfully; nothing more to do.

A fair point, well made.

xcancel is like archive links, they prefer links to the original with bypasses/alternatives in comments.

Why "rightly"?

So is mainstream media, though. Maybe with a few more allegedlys thrown around.

That was already taken by the DHS and then dismantled in 2022.

You're probably right.

I assumed it would the the Ministry of Trump. He likes putting his name on things.

Ministry of Truth & Love.

Yes, because it is a backbone through which people trying to hold things together can communicate. Remember how the USSR supposedly held together and could not be defeated, and how the Nazi's overran Europe and there were many who figured the easy way out was to just give up and accept it? The free press held the line, in Western Europe through underground newspapers, which made a massive difference in keeping people informed and in the East between 45 and ~86 through the various - sometimes hand copied - smuggled literature.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_media_in_German-oc...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samizdat

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_press

Soldarity would have never gotten off the ground without that network and speaking for my own country I suspect that without de Volkskrant and Het Parool the war would have gotten much closer to completely eradicating the Jewish population here. It was bad enough as it was but the network that coordinated the distribution of the underground newspapers was also instrumental in keeping the underground resistance network going. The one fed off the other and vice versa, both as a training ground and as a messenger service. Lots of those stories will never be told (unfortunately) but there were a ton of very brave people that knew full well they risked a one-way trip to the dunes if discovered.

What free press? The mass media is controlled by a handful of billionaires who kowtow to the government in order to earn more billions.

They're Republicans. Every accusation is either a confession in disguise, a plan already in progress, or a fond wish.

Yes, they are no longer even pretending to hide, I think that's the thing that really changed. Up to a few years ago there would always be the figleaf. Now, they're just stating openly what they're up to and nobody bats an eye. It's an extreme case of the normalization of deviance. And in a way that is the answer to that age old question: "How could they let it happen?" when contemplating Germany ca. 1936.

Funny how many of the people who only a few years ago weregloating about how private companies can do what they want, and there's no issues with censoring people or spreading propaganda (in clandestine cooperation with the government) are now seeing it blow back in their faces. I mean everybody who isn't stupid knew it was coming, not everybody thought it would come so quickly.