FCC chief, Obama law school friend, visited White House at least 11 times. Intellectuals are rightly threatened by the internet.

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12/22/10, "The 'Net Neutrality' coup," WSJ.com, John Fund

"FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, a former law school friend of Mr. Obama, has worked closely with the White House on the issue.

• Official visitor logs show he's had at least 11 personal meetings with the president."...

(Thomas Lifson wonders: "What possibly could have required the FCC Chairman to meet personally with the President 11 times? And is the White House willing to release any transcripts or information that was recorded during those meetings. Did the topic of net neutrality come up and if yes, why? I thought independence meant not being influenced by another's opinion or thought?

• Are we to believe that Mr. Obama did not express his opinion or thoughts on the issue of net neutrality?"...)

(continuing, John Fund): "The net neutrality vision for government regulation of the Internet began with the work of Robert McChesney, a University of Illinois communications professor who founded the liberal lobby Free Press in 2002. Mr. McChesney's agenda? "At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies," he told the website SocialistProject in 2009. "But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies

• and to divest them from control."...

For a man with such radical views, Mr. McChesney and his Free Press group have had astonishing influence. Mr. Genachowski's press secretary at the FCC, Jen Howard, used to handle media relations at Free Press. The FCC's chief diversity officer, Mark Lloyd, co-authored a Free Press report calling for regulation of political talk radio.

• Free Press has been funded by a network of liberal foundations that helped the lobby invent the
  
• purported problem that net neutrality is supposed to solve.
  

They then fashioned a political strategy similar to the one employed by activists behind the political speech restrictions of the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform bill. The methods of that earlier campaign were discussed in 2004 by Sean Treglia, a former program officer for the Pew Charitable Trusts, during a talk at the University of Southern California. Far from being the efforts of genuine grass-roots activists, Mr. Treglia noted,

• the campaign-finance reform lobby was controlled and funded by foundations like Pew.

"The idea was to create an impression that a mass movement was afoot," he told his audience.

He noted that "If Congress thought this was a Pew effort, it'd be worthless." A study by the Political Money Line, a nonpartisan website dealing with issues of campaign funding, found that of the $140 million spent to directly promote campaign-finance reform in the last decade,

• $123 million came from eight liberal foundations.
  

After McCain-Feingold passed, several of the foundations involved in the effort began shifting their attention to "media reform"—a movement to impose government controls on Internet companies somewhat related to the long-defunct "Fairness Doctrine" that used to regulate TV and radio companies. In a 2005 interview with the progressive website Buzzflash, Mr. McChesney said that campaign-finance reform advocate Josh Silver approached him and "said let's get to work on getting popular involvement in media policy making." Together the two founded Free Press.

Free Press and allied groups such as MoveOn.org quickly got funding. Of the eight major foundations that provided the vast bulk of money for campaign-finance reform, six became major funders of the media-reform movement. (They are the Pew Charitable Trusts, Bill Moyers's Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, the Joyce Foundation,

• George Soros's Open Society Institute,
  

the Ford Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.) Free Press today has 40 staffers and an annual budget of $4 million.

These wealthy funders pay for more than publicity and conferences. In 2009, Free Press commissioned a poll, released by the Harmony Institute, on net neutrality. Harmony reported that "more than 50% of the public argued that, as a private resource, the Internet should not be regulated by the federal government."

• The poll went on to say that since "currently the public likes the way the Internet works . . . messaging should target supporters by asking them to act vigilantly"
  
• to prevent a "centrally controlled Internet."
  

To that end, Free Press and other groups helped manufacture "research" on net neutrality. In 2009, for example, the FCC commissioned Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society to conduct an "independent review of existing information" for the agency in order to "lay the foundation for enlightened, data-driven decision making."

Considering how openly activist the Berkman Center has been on these issues, it was an odd decision for the FCC to delegate its broadband research to this outfit.

• Unless, of course, the FCC already knew the answer it wanted to get.

The Berkman Center's FCC- commissioned report, "Next Generation Connectivity," wound up being funded in large part by the Ford and MacArthur foundations.

• So some of the same foundations that have spent years funding net neutrality advocacy research ended up funding the FCC-commissioned study that evaluated net neutrality research.

The FCC's "National Broadband Plan," released last spring, included only five citations of respected think tanks such as the International Technology and Innovation Foundation or the Brookings Institution. But the report cited research from liberal groups such as Free Press, Public Knowledge, Pew and the New America Foundation more than 50 times.

So the "media reform" movement paid for research that backed its views,

• paid activists to promote the research,
  

• saw its allies installed in the FCC and other key agencies,
  

• and paid for the FCC research that evaluated the research
  

they had already paid for. Now they have their policy. That's quite a coup."

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• From Thomas Lifson American Thinker article:

"Thomas Sowell has written:

"Intellectuals and their followers have often been overly impressed by the fact that intellectuals tend, on average, to have more knowledge than other individuals in their society. What they have overlooked is that intellectuals have far less knowledge than the total knowledge possessed by the millions of other people whom they disdain and whose decisions they seek to override."

"Intellectuals" feel threatened by the internet because it has become the tool by which the "total knowledge possessed by the millions" and is able to be shared on an international scale. People at an internet café in Macedonia can read your grandmother's cinnamon bread recipe and the whole world can watch as Iranians post YouTube videos of the violence that racked their country following the 2009 elections.

• The World Wide Web is truly an unprecedented phenomenon in history -- perhaps even more monumental than the invention of the printing press. Books can be burned, but ideas posted on the internet can remain there indefinitely.

The internet gives a power to the masses which they have never before possessed and, as such, it is an influence that inevitably serves to decentralize the

• grasp of the intelligentsia worldwide."...

Obama sees the internet as 'very powerful:' "“The internet has a powerful effect these ways,” he told Walters, “so the way rumors can take up a life of their own ends up being

• very powerful.”" from Barbara Walters interview, reported on Mediaite, 11/27/10

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