From Accuracy in Media:

"You may not have noticed that the Obama Administration, in addition to trying to seize control of the health care and energy sectors, is implementing a national "broadband plan" to redefine the media and transform America's system of government. It's designed, they say, to provide "open government and civic engagement." But it looks increasingly like an excuse for the federal government to control the Internet and access to information and even tell us what is truth."

A one-sided public funded radio show hosted by Robert W. McChesney, a socialist professor from the University of Illinois with a restrictive leftist guest list, may be the start up model for what they have in mind.

McChesney told AIM that his program "is very popular in our community" and that "The free market has spoken." But his show is not dependent on the free market. Rather, it is supported by tax dollars and on-air fundraisers hosted by McChesney and guests such as Noam Chomsky of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, a Communist Party spin-off.

New Socialist Media

While the McChesney show has a very small listening audience, its format and themes may give us some insight into the kind of "new media" we could expect from passage of the $50 billion "Public Media Trust Fund," a Free Press proposal which is supposed to be financed by a tax on home electronic devices. This would be on top of the $8 billion from taxpayers that has been provided to the CPB for public TV and radio since 1967. (The CPB currently receives about $400 million a year.)

A professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, McChesney has said that "media reform" should be part of the march toward socialism in America and that capitalism has to be dismantled "brick by brick." Van Jones, the ousted communist "Green Jobs Czar" of the Obama Administration, served on the Free Press board with McChesney in 2007 and 2008.

Read AIM's entire  The $50 Billion New Socialist Media  report here.

H/T:  Joe Lima