New documentary #killswitch exposes media consolidation and government collusion

#killswitch The Battle over the Internet Educator and Writer Chris Dollar is teaming with filmmakers Ali Akbarzadeh and Jeff Horn of Akorn Entertainment to create the full-length documentary #killswitch. They are raising funds on KickStarter.com to produce the documentary so they can educate the Western world about the fact that big corporations will continue to have more and more control over our news and Internet… unless we do something now. Check out the trailer and learn how to become involved in this project here: (#killswitch trailer) (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/akorn/killswitch-a-documentary-film?ref=live) ____________________________________________

Everyone who is a regular to Hacker News knows we have a culture of corruption in Washington and are in desperate need of media reform and legislation protecting Net Neutrality. So, why does mainstream media ignore the massive amounts of corruption and collusion between large corporations and big government, while also ignoring the issues of Net Neutrality and media reform? Simply put, the mainstream media has much to lose and nothing to gain in opening up this can of worms. In fact, the largest media conglomerates in the United States are among the most influential players in American government and benefit substantially from their political connections and an American public that’s generally unaware of what’s going on behind the media curtain.

One of the biggest corruptive practices in American policy over the past 30 years has been the unregulated merging of the media conglomerates. The Big Six (General Electric, News Corp, Time Warner, Viacom, and CBS) have become so large that the vast majority of what most Americans see, hear, or read has either been produced in their film studios, broadcast on their television stations, printed in their magazines, heard on their radio stations, transported through their broadband, or read on their websites. This monopolization of media power has not only been unchecked by the U.S. government, it is actually promoted. It wasn’t always this way. Our founding fathers knew that an independent and diverse media was essential to a functioning democracy. They knew that in a democracy, knowledge and information couldn’t be controlled by only a handful of professional print makers. Instead, there needed to be dozens of different venues where Americans could report and receive the news. The U.S. government promoted this diversity and vitality by heavily subsidizing the media in the first 100 years after the birth of our country. In fact, there was great consensus in support of these massive subsidies, regardless of political party. Political leaders from Jefferson and Madison to Hamilton and Adams all agreed that government-funded subsidies were essential to a vibrant and diverse media. The U.S. government did not favor one form of political content over another. All newspapers, regardless of political content (conservative or liberal), were treated equally by the U.S. Post Office (which was essentially the Internet of the late 18th and 19th centuries), and all news was delivered throughout the nation at a special subsidized rate, costing the print makers next to nothing to send information out to the broad American electorate. As a result of the Post Office subsidies, news papers flourished in our nation’s first 100 years. It was quite common in this era to have dozens of independent newspapers delivered to every major town across the country. American citizens were well informed and possessed many choices for news content and political perspective.

Flash forward to the year 2011. Most cities and towns are fortunate to have two competing newspapers, much less two dozen. Television and radio ownership is even more alarmingly concentrated in the United States. It is simply not in the interests of the Big Six to spend any time discussing the moral hazards of this monopolization. Instead, they continue to merge without much debate, dialogue, or criticism in congress, amongst the American pe...