President Obama appointed Mark Lloyd as the FCC Diversity Official. In 2009 some absolutely frightening audio and video has surfaced of this man’s beliefs. They show that he in no way coincides with someone who should be in control of our airwaves or hold any office in our government.
Mark Lloyd’s network according to DiscovertheNetworks.org.
More information on Mark Lloyd:
- Views on Free Speech
- Articles at the Center For American Progress written by Mark Lloyd .
- Mark Lloyd’s article “Forget the Fairness Doctrine”
- Mark Lloyd’s report from the Center For American Progress called “Local Media Diversity Matters.”
- Mark Lloyd’s report from the Center For American Progress called The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio.”
- An Article by CNSNews.com making references to Mark Lloyd’s agreement with the beliefs of Saul Alinsky & the Rules For Radicals. Commentary by Rush Limbaugh on this subject.
- Video from 2008 National Conference for Media Reform in Minneapolis, MN.:
Part 1 & 2:
“In Venezuela, with Chavez, really an incredible revolution, a democratic revolution to begin to put in place saying that we are going to have impact on the people of Venezuela. The property owners and the folks who were then controlling the media in Venezuela rebelled [...] folks here in the U.S. government worked to oust him and came back and had another revolution and Chavez then started to take seriously the media in this country.”
Mark Lloyd has been a broadcast journalist for NBC and CNN, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, served as a consultant for George Soro’s Open Society.
In 2006 in his book entitled, “Prologue to a Farce: Communications and Democracy in America,” he describes that radio stations should an annual licensing fee in an amount equivalent to their total yearly operating costs. That money should in turn be turned over and redistributed to public broadcasting stations, which under Lloyd’s belief are more in-tune to the audience’s needs. This would ensure that the operating budgets of such public stations would be as large as their private counterparts. When private stations cannot afford this expensive licensing fee, the stations would then be sold off to minority broadcasters.
From Mark Lloyd’s book:
“Federal and regional broadcast operations and local stations should be funded at levels commensurate with or above those spending levels at which commercial operations are funded. This funding should come from license fees charged to commercial broadcasters.”
CNS News reported on Aug. 25, 2009 on Mark Lloyd’s book:
Lloyd proposes six initial goals for wresting control of communications from the corporate interests he claims control it. As his book details:
1. “End the federal subsidy of commercial media, particularly cable and broadcast television. Broadcasters should pay for the great privileges of a federally protected license to operate a business by using the publicly owned [radio or television] spectrum.”2. “The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) must be reformed along democratic lines and funded at a substantial level. The CPB board should be elected, [with] eight members representing eight regions of the country (New England, Mid-Atlantic, Southeast, Midwest, Plains States, Southwest, Mountain States, and the Pacific Coast) and a chairman appointed by the president, with the advice and consent of the Senate.”
“Federal and regional broadcast operations and local stations should be funded at levels commensurate with or above those spending levels at which commercial operations are funded,” said Lloyd.
“This funding should come from license fees charged to commercial broadcasters. … Local public broadcasters and regional and national communications operations should be required to encourage and broadcast diverse views and programs. … Spectrum allocations should be established that create clear preferences for public broadcasters ensuring that regional, local, and neighborhood communities are well served,” he added.
3. “The FCC should be fully funded with regulatory fees from broadcast, cable, satellite, and telecommunications companies. The FCC should be staffed at regional offices, matching those CPB regions, at levels sufficient to monitor and enforce communication regulation.
“Clear federal regulations over commercial broadcast and cable programs regarding political advertising and commentary, educational programming for children, the number of commercials, ratings information about programs before they are broadcast, and the accessibility of services to the disabled should be established and widely promoted.”
4. “Universal service support provided by all commercial telecommunications providers (whether they are classified as information services or not) to fund access to advanced telecommunications services should be expanded to all nonprofit organizations, including higher-level academic and vocational schools, community centers, and 501(c) (3) organizations unaffiliated with either business or government.”
5. “Postal subsidies should be fully restored to small independent nonprofits presses. Postal subsidies should be reduced for commercial and business operations. The postal service should be returned to congressional control with the central mission of ensuring that all Americans have access to the post.”
6. “Public secondary schools should be required to include civics and media literacy as part of their core curriculum. Testing on civic, media, and computer literacy should be required and national standards set.”
For those who think any or all of these recommendations might infringe on the free speech rights of broadcasters, Lloyd says his concern is not the “exaggerated” concerns over the First Amendment.
“It should be clear by now that my focus here is not freedom of speech or the press,” he said. “This freedom is all too often an exaggeration. At the very least, blind references to freedom of speech or the press serve as a distraction from the critical examination of other communications policies.”
“[T]he purpose of free speech is warped to protect global corporations and block rules that would promote democratic governance,” said Lloyd. “[T]he problem is not only the warp to our public philosophy of free speech, but that the government has abandoned its role of advancing the communications capabilities of real people.”
