Pearl Jam

I am starting to agree with Josh that the AT&T Pearl Jam incident may be reaching a tipping point. Maybe I've become too invested in it, but it is certainly starting to feel that way. Today, Down With Tyranny tipped me off to Trillium, a socially responsible investment firm with over 200,000 shares of AT&T common stock, who sent a letter to AT&T (pdf) inquiring about the incident:

As citizens we are alarmed whenever the free marketplace of ideas is impeded by political censorship. As shareholders we are most concerned about the impact such controversy can have on AT&T’s reputation among consumers and its good standing in regulatory and legislative communities.

This controversy arises at a particularly inopportune moment. The Company is
advocating against proposed laws and regulations that would limit its prerogatives as a gatekeeper of information flows across the internet. The Company’s defense of such prerogatives has always turned on assurances that the Company would never interfere with content passing through its pipes.

The fact that politically oriented lyrics were edited from a webcast by AT&T would appear to constitute precisely such interference and thereby cast doubt on the Company’s assurances to the contrary.

What's great about this is that Trillium is wielding its power as a stockholder and partner of AT&T to demand an accountability moment:

As a matter of risk management, we urge the Company to make a full review of and public report on the incident. Only in this way can shareholders, consumers, regulators and legislators understand why this incident occurred and be assured of the Company’s ability to prevent similar incidents in the future.

As part of that review we would like to know on what specific grounds Davey Brown Entertainment’s agent(s) decided to take the draconian step of depriving viewers of fully permissible content. We would also like to know if the Company was aware of Davey Brown Entertainment’s actions before this controversy became public. If so, do the Company’s policies require it to inform content providers such as Pearl Jam whenever such actions occur? It is our understanding that Pearl Jam was notified of the incident by fans rather than by the Company.

The company is also pursuing this through OpenMic, a Tides Center Project supported by Trillium, which seeks to establish a framework for shareholders to ensure that publicly held media companies uphold the public trust. I love the fact that we're seeing parts of a corporate social responsibility movement take a stand here (and honestly, their investments in AT&T make them a potentially powerful and effective ally). This would have been a great issue for Buy Blue.

On the music activist side, I mentioned Rock the Vote in my previous post (an no word yet on whether they will pursue this or any messaging around Internet Freedom in 2007/2008), but I neglected to call attention to the Future of Music Coalition, which has previously stood up for Network Neutrality. I've got emails out to their staff to see what action - if any - they will take on this issue. So far it's not on their site.

Putting together a one-sheet to pass around to folks might still be a good idea. Lots of information is out there, but as far as I can tell, there's no single repository that lays it all out in plain language. And certainly no one is making the argument for other musicians or youth organization to get involved. I got to thinking, though, that what we need even more than a one-sheet is a good piece of media that mashes-up some of the better stuff about Net Neutrality and Internet Freedom with contextual footage of the Pearl Jam incident. A hot, 2-minute video would go a long way to galvanizing support for this.

Matt Stoller just recorded a video with FCC Commissioner Michael Copps. It's not at all what I'm talking about, but it's all I got for now:

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.

Update: Lessig comes out of "retirement" to make a statement and explain what's going on.
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First an update: This weekend, the LA Times reported that the censorship by AT&T of the webcast of Pearl Jam's performance at Lollapalooza wasn't a glitch or even a one-time mistake, as AT&T alternately claimed. It's a habit. Both the Flaming Lips and John Butler Trio have reported that their political speech was censored during AT&T Live Webcasts.

Matt Stoller has more at Open Left:

At YearlyKos, I met FCC Commissioner Michael Copps. He's an amazing man, but he told us something very disturbing. He thinks that the signs are out there that the FCC is getting ready to loosen media ownership rules against the will of the public. They have already done this with the internet, and Congress has not acted to remedy the problem.

A few days ago, the problem because crystal clear. AT&T censored political speech over streaming video by Pearl Jam at a concert. This was overt censorship of political speech. With the flurry of outrage, it's increasingly clear that corporate control over our media system is not only a huge problem but a well-understood problem by the public. AT&T is trying to pass this off as a simple mistake, though there's no particular reason to trust what the company has to say, and Wired is reporting that the company may also have censored political speech by the Flaming Lips and the John Butler Trio. But whether this is a mistake or not is not really important. The question is whether there should be a gatekeeper in front of what we have the right to say. And the answer to that question is obviously no.

I don't think Stoller is right to say that the problem of corporate control over our media is a well understood problem by the public. I think people have a sense that the media today sucks, and consolidation is bad, but when it comes to something more abstract like Net Neutrality, or the full consequences of greater corporate control of the media, I'm guessing that 99% of the public either don't understand the extent problem or aren't even aware of the problem. In regards to young people, the question actually came up during the technology and politics panel at Yearly Kos, and I'll repeat what I said then: This issue doesn't even register among most young people.

What I think we have with this Pearly Jam incident (and more so now that other bands are reporting similar incidents) is a teaching moment - an opportunity for media activists and youth organizers to really educate their members about the problem.

To that end I would suggest that most youth organizations seize that opportunity. More after the jump.