Media Action Center is a group of of concerned residents throughout the U.S. led by former Emmy-winning broadcaster turned media reformer Sue Wilson.

We have successfully influenced policy at the Federal Communications Commission and at local TV and Radio stations throughout the country for more than a decade to ensure We the People are truly served by the publicly owned airwaves.

MAC has joined a current Petition to Deny the broadcast licenses of DISNEY ABC at the FCC to ensure We the People have a seat at our Public Interest table. We have also commented to answer the FCC's question, "Is the View Bonafide News?" (See below.)

MAC earlier filed a successful Petition to Deny Entercom's license to broadcast on radio station KDND for killing a woman in a radio water drinking stunt; that forced Entercom to give up its $13.5 million license, and in 2000, educated the Supreme Court in FCC v Prometheus Radio on how multiple TV station with one corporate owner merely duplicate news stories on all its stations, a methodology currently being used in legal cases surrounding the Nexstar/TEGNA merger.

June 26, 2026 - The filing makes the organizations formal parties to the proceeding, granting them standing to participate in the case and appeal future FCC decisions.

Two public interest advocacy groups have filed a formal petition to deny in the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) ongoing proceeding involving ABC’s eight local television broadcast licenses, seeking to become formal parties in the matter with the hopes of ending in the investigation without an unfavorable decision against ABC.

The filing made by the Media Action Center and Frequency Forward takes an unusual position:

The area of satellite direct-to-device (D2D) communications is one of much change and uncertainty. At one extreme, the SNOs might all go out of business, or at least exit the D2D business – the track record in this space of Iridium and others is that so far all have gone bankrupt. At the other, they might become the owner of most mobile communications customers, demoting MNOs into wholesale providers of traffic. Both are entirely possible. With hundreds of billions of dollars at stake, there has perhaps never been a time of less certainty in the communications world.

There are so many questions:

• What will the revenue be?
• Will it be enough to make any satellite network operators (SNOs) profitable?
• What level of services will be available?
• Will it be “2G equivalent” or full mobile broadband?
• Will SpaceX dominate or can the likes of AST compete?
• etc.

Exposed records from the private group included the personal information of a senior White House intelligence official and an active-duty special operations officer.

Public Knowledge Senior Vice President Harold Feld testified before the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology.

His testimony in the hearing on “Where Are We?: Examining Positioning, Navigation, and Timing Capabilities (PNT) in the United States” urged Congress to preserve the current GPS system while ensuring a basic tier of PNT for free to the general public even as GPS continues to evolve.

Public Knowledge contends that next-generation GPS should serve the public interest. View the written testimony for more information.

ABC's fight with the FCC could redefine press freedom by testing whether regulators can pressure news organizations without directly censoring them.

ABC’s legal battle with the FCC may become one of the most important press freedom cases in decades.

Because the outcome could determine whether government agencies can use regulatory power to pressure news organizations over speech they don’t like.

For years, press freedom battles in America have usually involved direct government action: attempts to block publication, force disclosure of sources, or punish journalists for reporting. Courts have developed extensive First Amendment protections against them.

The dispute between ABC and the FCC is different.

WASHINGTON – US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick warned Anthropic in a letter that it would need government permission to grant foreign nationals access to its most advanced AI models and threatened criminal and civil penalties if the firm failed to comply, according to a copy seen by Bloomberg News.  

The letter, dated June 12, ordered Anthropic not to give its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 artificial intelligence models to foreign nationals anywhere in the world without a licence from the US Commerce Department. Lutnick gave no basis for why the restrictions were necessary, but his letter cited US laws that allow the government to impose export controls on civilian technology that could be used for intelligence purposes by an adversary’s military.

“Until further notice, you must submit an application for an individually-validated license prior to the export, re-export, or transfer (in-country), including deemed export or deemed re-export, of the Mythos or Fable models to any destination worldwide or to any ‘foreign person’ wherever located,” Lutnick wrote in the letter, addressed to Anthropic Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei.

The one thing you don't want to say when a data center is coming to your community is:

"It's inevitable. Get on board or get left behind."

Yet that's often the message communities hear.

Data Centers Have a PR Problem. It's Not the Building.

Texas is booming with data center projects. Few states can match the infrastructure, power availability, and development timelines that technology companies are seeking. State and federal leaders increasingly view data centers as critical infrastructure, and many see leadership in AI as a matter of economic competitiveness and national security.

At the local level, the appeal is obvious. Cities and economic development organizations see new tax revenue, infrastructure investment, and opportunities for long-term growth.

But if you've attended a public meeting on a proposed data center recently, you've probably noticed something interesting: People aren't reacting to the project like it's just another industrial development. And that's because, in many cases, they're not.

The mistake many developers make is believing they're communicating about a building. The public sees something else entirely.

Fox Corp's agreement to acquire Roku for $22 billion marked a notable strategic turn for one of the country’s largest owners of a broadcast network, local TV stations and a major cable news channel.

Fox’s $22 billion acquisition of the streaming giant yet another sign that a Big Four broadcast network sees its future online, not on free, over-the-air TV.

Bringing these two companies together really will help define the future of television in the United States and in many other markets around the world.”

Last August, Fox launched Fox One, a $19.99 a month streaming app providing access to Fox Sports, Fox News, FS1, FS2, and the Big Ten Network unbundled from the cable package.

SpaceXAI will resume construction of a Memphis wastewater treatment plant by Q1 2027, supporting its AI data center's cooling needs and local sustainability efforts.

Allen, Texas, put a few videos on its new YouTube channel in 2007 just to see what would happen. Today the channel has a subscriber base few local governments could match.

• Allen, Texas, launched its YouTube channel in 2007. At first, it was an experiment in sharing content from the city’s cable channel on the new platform.
• In the years since, it has attracted enough subscribers to place it in the top 1 percent of active YouTube channels.
• City commitment to building a national brand, and sustained leadership in the media department, have aided this success.

In this episode of LMC Cast, host Matt Sullivan sits down with Mike Wassenaar, President and CEO of the Alliance for Community Media (ACM), to discuss the importance of community media in today’s digital landscape.

As the leader of a national organization advocating for community media, Mike shares valuable insights on how local media centers empower communities, support free speech, and enhance civic engagement across the country.

Tune in for an engaging conversation about the challenges and opportunities facing community media and why it remains a vital resource for public discourse.

Ezee Fiber has opened a new regional operations facility in Troy, Michigan, establishing a dedicated hub for its growing broadband

network in the state as the company accelerates investment in high-speed fiber infrastructure and local workforce development.

The 30,000-square-foot facility includes office space, a warehouse and an outdoor storage yard and will serve exclusively as the operational center for Ezee Fiber’s Michigan business. The company said the site will support network construction, customer installations, maintenance operations and community engagement efforts as it expands fiber internet access across the state.

The announcement was made during Ezee Fiber’s Michigan VIP Day, an event that brought together elected officials, community leaders and local media to provide a detailed look at the company’s construction practices, permitting processes, customer service approach and community outreach initiatives.

Fact Sheet (draft item, June 4, 2026) Tentatively scheduled for consideration at the FCC’s June 25, 2026 Open Meeting; under consideration and subject to change.

This FCC Fact Sheet describes a draft Second Report and Order and Second Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that would significantly expand the Commission’s regulatory framework for undersea communications infrastructure while attempting to accelerate deployment timelines for new cable systems. The proceeding builds on the FCC’s 2025 Submarine Cable First Report and Order and reflects growing concern about the strategic importance of subsea connectivity for AI infrastructure, cloud computing, global Internet traffic, and national security.

It's a stretch to think that the continent can build a top-tier model, but it has an advantage: Donald Trump.

Earlier this month I attended Vivatech, a huge tech conference in Paris. One fear dominated the discussions: the prospect of ending up stuck using American AI, trained on American values. While the US and China are locked in an AI arms race, France and Germany, which consider their engineering talent second to none, feel boxed out. Not only are they demanding to be heard, but they are touting plans to address the situation. If “sovereignty” was your word in a drinking game, you’d be pickled within three hours.

In my decades of reporting on tech, I’ve covered multiple efforts by countries to replicate the Silicon Valley effect. While there have been plenty of individual success stories, no country or market has come close to matching the ecosystem and mindset that gave rise to companies such as Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. While investors throw boatloads of cash at American companies, Europeans get relative crumbs.

Criticism continues to pour in from a group of unlikely bedfellows, namely, several prominent progressive lawmakers and banking industry groups worried about the dangers shaky stablecoin regulation poses to the traditional financial system.

The wheels are in motion to frame legitimate backlash to extractive and racist technofascism as radical, dangerous, unAmerican criminality.

If you're one of these folks oddly surprised why the animosity against AI is so white hot, or why younger Americans have inextricably linked AI to the broader rotten body politic, I'd like to direct your attention to Memphis, Tennessee.

In south Memphis, Elon Musk Corp is building two massive new data centers: Colossus 1 and Colossus 2. These data centers are powered by 57 natural gas turbines that are pumping smog and toxic pollutants into minority Memphis neighborhoods that already see a disproportionate rate of pollution-fueled illness.

The pollution isn't meaningfully regulated because America, as I may have mentioned once or twice, is grotesquely corrupt. And our corporate press is too financially compromised to inform Americans that this corruption has completely hollowed out regulators Americans spent generations taking for granted.

The Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) notes that just Colossus 2’s 35 gas turbines alone have the potential to emit more than 2,000 tons of smog-forming nitrogen oxides (“NOx”), formaldehyde, and other carcinogenic HAPs (Hazardous AIR Pollutants) into predominantly poor, minority neighborhoods.

So last April the SELC, AARP, and Earthjustice filed a lawsuit against the effort, correctly pointing out the unpermitted pollution violated the Clean Air Act, and asked for an injunction pausing construction until something vaguely resembling compliance safeguards existed.

FCC refuses to provide messages, has "wasted a year" of court's time, filing says.

An advocacy group trying to investigate DOGE’s influence on the Federal Communications Commission accused the FCC of failing to comply with a public records request and of concealing Chairman Brendan Carr’s use of the Signal messaging service.

“The evidence clearly demonstrates that the FCC has acted in bad faith by withholding documents responsive to Plaintiffs’ FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] request,” journalist Nina Burleigh and advocacy group Frequency Forward said in a filing yesterday in US District Court for the District of Columbia. “The FCC acted in bad faith when it redefined the search criteria without notice to Plaintiffs or this Court. Further, the FCC acted in bad faith by concealing the fact that the Chairman Carr has a Signal account on a phone he uses to conduct government business.”

Burleigh and Frequency Forward sued the FCC last year, alleging that it violated the Freedom of Information Act by wrongfully withholding agency records. In August 2025, a federal judge ordered the FCC to produce documents and criticized it for a “vague and uninformative” response to the lawsuit.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that, if adopted, will dramatically impact local governments’ ability to manage their public rights-of-way. 

The NPRM proposes to unconstitutionally deprive local governments’ property rights by capping rental fees for a telecommunications providers’ occupation of the public right-of-way to “a reasonable approximation of the government’s actual, direct costs of managing the rights-of-way,” not market value or just compensation as is the current standard in most communities. Limiting rent to below market rates could prove to be a significant blow to many local government budgets. 

The Mythos controversy should not be viewed as a dispute about one firm's policies. It is better understood as an early warning signal, writes Andrew W. Reddie.

Late on Friday, Semafor reported that the United States government appears to have relaxed its restriction of Anthropic’s Mythos 5 model, allowing major US firms and government agencies access to its latest offering. In a letter to the company, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick indicated he had “determined that appropriate safeguards are in place to permit certain trusted partners to access the Claude Mythos 5 Model,” and that “a license will no longer be required to export, reexport, or in-country transfer” the technology to a list of specific entities, their foreign national employees, and Anthropic’s own foreign national employees.

The news suggests this latest dispute between the Trump administration and the AI firm is at least partially resolved. But Lutnick’s letter does little to answer deeper questions about the blunt tool the government used to restrict Mythos in the first place: export controls. How we got here.