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from: Open Left

Comcast Manipulating NAACP on Net Neutrality

By now you've probably heard that Comcast hired a crowd to sit in an FCC hearing on net neutrality so interested citizens couldn't get a spot to speak. The gist of Comcast's excuse is that they hired people to hold spots for Comcast employees, though those people accidentally fell asleep and stayed in their seats throughout the entire hearing. Nuts.

Interestingly, there's a bit more to the story, and it involves the cozy relationship between the NAACP and Comcast. Corporate funding of civil rights groups has been a quiet and dank hallmark of liberal politics for decades. Most of the time these partnerships are innocent, but they lead to some coincidentally problematic situations. For example, here's what else was going on in Boston around the FCC the day before the rent-a-crowd incident.

On the same day and location of the hearing, the Boston and Cambridge, Mass., branches of the NAACP plan to host a "take back our media" rally, according to a flier that was circulated on the Internet.

The flier includes quotations from several civil rights groups criticizing Martin's policies on media ownership. The Rev. Jesse Jackson was quoted as claiming Martin supports a "massive new and unjustified welfare for the rich program."

But in a statement Friday, Jackson denied making such a comment and said it does not reflect his position or that of his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition. "We have always enjoyed a constructive relationship with the FCC and look forward to continuing it," the statement said.

Martin defended his efforts as FCC chairman, saying the agency has been "active and proactive in taking steps to increase minority ownership."

Most of the quotations took issue at Martin's efforts to push cable operators to offer channels on an a la carte basis. His proposal has met with opposition from the industry, which says it would hurt minority programming.

The flier initially did not include the rally sponsors. A later version, supplied to the AP by a public relations firm, included the NAACP's Boston and Cambridge branches as organizers.

According to Karen Payne, president of the Boston branch of the civil rights group, the rally was sparked by the sale of Boston radio station WILD-FM in 2006. The station's urban format was popular in the black community.

Payne said the NAACP had not authorized the release of the flier, and that as of Friday night, it was still in the draft stages.

So a flyer calling for a rally protesting the FCC under the NAACP's name, put out by a PR firm, and disavowed by the local NAACP as simply a 'draft', was going around on the same day as a net neutrality hearing that Comcast packed with a crowd they hired to prevent net neutrality advocates from attending. And on that very same day, this letter to the editor in the Washington Post attacking net neutrality shows up, from Jose Marquez of the Latinos in Information Sciences and Technology, an astroturf group sponsored by Sprint, the cell phone carrier most aligned with Comcast and the cable industry. In addition, the founder of the National Black Chamber of Commerce, a right-wing group that pushed for the privatization of Social Security in 2005, wrote this piece attacking FCC Chair Kevin Martin for being a racist.

A cynic might say that Comcast, caught red-handed blocking and manipulating the internet traffic of their users is trying to divert attention from the FCC investigation and possible subpoena threat by state AG's by doing a PR campaign around cries of racism. I just think that the NAACP should be a lot more careful in how and when their name shows up when large conservative corporations would want to use their name to distract from their lawbreaking.

It's a thought.

Matt Stoller