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May 16, 2006

black commentator on net neutrality

I was mistaken when I said earlier that there was no black web media coverage of net neutrality. I should have checked The Black Commentator before I typed, since - lo and behold! - last week's issue included a thorough (and typically feisty) piece on the issue by BC editor Bruce Dixon:

America's black misleadership class, which is nearly indistinguishable from its black business class, has struck again. In a stunning coup, a mainline African American voting rights group has been enlisted on the side of AT&T and other telecom monopolies in their legislative push to privatize the Internet and roll back hundreds of agreements with local communities that force these monopolies to extend Internet and cable service to poor and rural communities around the country. [full story]

It's a good piece, well reported and effective in eviscerating a number of talking androids working for the telcos, and it follows up previous coverage by Dixon. I shouldn't be surprised by the article: my lapse in attention aside, BC has always been a great source of black political POV and I've always been a fan. The site provides exactly the sort of aggressive, independent, smart black media I naively kept trying to build in my various previous lives under corporate umbrellas. Which is to say it's precisely the kind of thing that can't be done when the people above you are white folks who understand "black" as being synonymous with "entertainment," or the people below you are mediocrities who couldn't hack it in other parts of the company and thus cling to the black division as a life-preserver / HR-run bantustand. (Sure, white companies do black media in order to reach back audiences, but it's also a great way for them to manage their own internal diversity problems by giving scads of disaffected, glass-ceiling prone negro employees something to do.)

But about BC: knowing a few things about the economics of this biz I have always been slightly afeared that one day I'd wake up and BC would be gone. Concerned that my slack, do-nothing worry in many ways reproduced the various apathetic horrors I have beheld, I just went and subscribed to the site and urge you to do the same. It's a painless buck a week and your kharmic debt to all the late-great black media you didn't previously support will be considered paid in full.

Posted by ebogjonson in internet tubes, politricknal sciences, talking androids, on May 16, 2006 10:36 AM