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Wired: AT&T's "No Politics" Policy

Update: Free Press has a new post about this, outlining AT&T's previous shady tactics and linking this incident to the broader fight for Internet Freedom.
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Wired reports that, contrary to their previous public statements, censorship of political speech during Pearl Jam's Lollapalooza show are part of company policy:

A crew member who worked on a show webcast by AT&T confirmed that there was a policy in place to remove artists' political comments from shows before they were webcast.

"I can definitively say that at a previous event where AT&T was covering the show, the instructions were to shut it down if there was any swearing or if anybody starts getting political. Granted, they didn't say to shut down any Anti-Bush comments or anything specific to any point of view or party, but 'getting political' was mentioned."

They also draw the connection to Net Neutrality:

Randall L. Stephenson, the CEO of AT&T, is also the Vice-Chairman of the President's National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee, and has motivation to shield Bush from criticism. And as some readers of this blog have pointed out, AT&T is free to do whatever it wants to the audio on its webcasts.

But one has to wonder whether the same political filtering policy applied to AT&T's webcasts could eventually affect to the company's portion of the internet backbone, in the absence of the net neutrality legislation it actively opposes.

Hat tip to Matt Stoller at Open Left, who digs into the campaign finance records to reveal AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson is a hard core Republican donor.

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August 15th, 2007 11:47am
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Fuckin' a

Submitted by Josh Koenig on Wed, 2007-08-15 13:28.

This should be a tipping point.

Any idea how we can blow this up?

Blogging to Action

Submitted by Michael Connery on Wed, 2007-08-15 16:32.

Here are some preliminary thoughts.

This is the reason Rock the Vote was started - to protect the free speech of musicians and artists. Voter reg, etc. came later. They should message around it and partner with someone like Save the Internet. I will email them and see what they think . . .

My second thought is that you can promote it to folks like BoingBoing, or try to Digg it up or create awareness, but you're just preaching to the choir there. The point is to get new people to understand the issue and then take action through an issue group that is already working on this stuff like Free Press or Save the Internet or Free Culture (other potential partner org suggestions appreciated).

On the note of reaching that new audience, this is sort of one reason I really wish that all youth groups had blogs. It's not really "part of their plan" to exploit their email lists for something like this, but posting it on a well-read organizational blog would create a lot of awareness fast without posing any logistical question for the orgs. A few places do have blogs and it would be cool to see them all start flogging this:

Young Democrats
College Democrats
Rock the Vote
Campus Progress (and on their main website and weekly newsletter)
Young People For

Theoretically that's a lot of reach to many folks who are not necessarily already on the Net Neutrality or Media Reform bandwagons. Maybe it's worth it to put together a one sheet about why this is important, why this can be a winner among their audience (or bring in new audiences), and how they can move it forward, and then email that to all the ED and Communications Directors . . .

I'm also wondering if Pearl Jam is going to pursue this. More than anything if they pushed it to MTV News or Rolling Stone, Mojo, or alt-weeklies (or if the above groups orchestrated a grassroots campaign to push alt-weeklies to cover it), etc. - that would get a whole new group of people talking.

One Sheet

Submitted by Josh Koenig on Fri, 2007-08-17 02:18.

I could totally see the value in making some kind of document to promote this to organizations. I am inclined to think that artists are ready to step up on this kind of issue also, which is really why I think it could prove to be a real tipping point.