Court lifts ban on pubcasters airing political ads. Romney speaks at NRA. FDA tries to limit antibiotics in animals. KPCC film critics Wade Major and Henry Sheehan join guest host David Lazarus to discuss this week’s new movies, including The Three Stooges, The Cabin in the Woods, Lockout and more. We’ll also be previewing the upcoming ColCoa Film Festival happening in Los Angeles, which consists of a week’s worth of French film premieres. TGI-FilmWeek! Good confession, bad confession.
Will 'Sesame Street' turn into K Street?
A decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals could bring a sea change to the world of public broadcasting. Yesterday, the court ruled 2-1 that the federal ban on political and issue-oriented ads on the likes of KPCC and PBS violates the first amendment.
The case centers around a small radio station in San Francisco. As it struggled with funding, it ran commercials for Chevrolet, State Farm Insurance and more. The Federal Communications Commissions fined the pubcaster $10,000, so the radio station challenged federal rules for funding — including the long-held tradition prohibiting advocacy advertising.
The court upheld that commercials for goods and services are illegal, but not political ads. Judge Carols Bea wrote, “Public issue and political advertisements pose no threat of ‘commercialization’.... [S]uch advertisements do not encourage viewers to buy commercial goods and services. A ban on such advertising therefore cannot be narrowly tailored to serve the interest of preventing the ‘commercialization.’”
KPCC CEO Bill Davis says that the station has no plans to start including underwriting from political campaigns. “It undermines the ‘no rant, no slant’ approach that we’re trying to bring in the first place," he said. "So if a Super PAC said ‘here’s $5 million, run these ads,’ I would say ‘no.’”
Reacting to the decision, Norman Ornstein, a scholar with a conservative think tank, told Reuters, “This is just going to move us further away from what remains of a public square... To be truthful, it scares me to death.” Ornstein previously served on the board of PBS. The FCC, PBS and other public broadcasters have yet to comment on the decision.
This ruling does not mean public radio and television stations will be required to run these ads, but simply they'll have the option of doing so if they deemed it appropriate.
“In difficult financial times, in which some stations have actually had to sell real estate, in which fundraising is always an issue, stations need to ask, ‘should we do this and what are the tradeoffs?’” said University of Pennsylvania communications professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson during an interview on “The Madeleine Brand Show.”
The ruling could be appealed to a higher court.
Weigh In
Will “The Madeleine Brand Show” be sponsored by a Super PAC? Could “Sesame Street” be brought to you by the letter K Street? Do you agree with the court's decision? Why haven't political ads been allowed in the past? Would a new source of revenue for pubcasters lead to a cut in federal funding?
Guest:
Bill Davis, President & CEO, Southern California Public Radio
The politics of guns and the 2012 election
Mitt Romney is meeting with the National Rifle Association in St Louis today but he has some shoring up to do with the gun lobby. In the past, Romney has been in favor of a five-day waiting period to buy a fire arm but in 2007 while running for president he withdrew his support for that measure.
“Today, we can check instantly on backgrounds. I don't want to cause a waiting period that's not necessary based upon today's technology.” said the prospective Republican presidential candidate.
On the other side of the campaign aisle President Obama has been fairly mum on the gun issue to the disappointment of gun control activists who thought Mr. Obama would promote anti-gun legislation especially after the Gabrielle Giffords shooting in Arizona.
Since Obama’s election in 2008, 2nd amendment advocacy groups have told their constituents that the president intends to curb the rights of gun owners and now claim that he will do so in his second term if re-elected.
How will the gun issue play into the next presidential election?
GUEST
Lisa Lerer, Bloomberg News reporter
FDA tries to limit antibiotics in animals
The Food and Drug Administration laid out new rules on Wednesday aimed at reducing the use of antibiotics in livestock. But consumer groups are blasting the plan because it relies mostly on letting the meat and drug industries voluntarily cut their use.
Many scientists and medical experts are concerned about the growing threat to public health posed by the widespread use of antibiotics in animals.
In the United States, 70-80 percent of the antibiotics sold each year are used not in people, but in animals. They’re mostly given to healthy animals to fatten them up and protect them from the bad conditions in which they’re raised.
As a result, drug resistant bacteria can then be passed to humans, leaving them at risk of getting infections that can’t be controlled. The FDA has been promising for decades to do more to address this issue.
The agency’s new guidelines ask companies to start phasing out the use of antibiotics for non-medical purposes, a process that could take three years. The drugs can still be used to prevent, control or treat illnesses in food-producing animals, under the supervision of a veterinarian.
Avinash Kar, public health staff attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said he's concerned voluntary measures won't work.
"We've essentially had a voluntary measure in place for 35 years since FDA first acknowledged the risks of using antibiotics in livestock feed, and we have seen the use of antibiotics grow exponentially in that period," he said.
According to Kar, the Centers for Disease Control has said that the use of antibiotics in animals results in resistant bacteria in food animals, that resistant bacteria are present in the food supply and transmitted to humans, and that resistant bacteria result in adverse human health consequences.
National Pork Producers Council Chief Veterinarian Dr. Liz Wagstrom said that with antibiotics, their animals probably grow faster because even low doses of antibiotic prevent sub-clinical disease. She added that concern about resistance should not be caused by the antibiotics, but the farm where the antibiotics are used.
"It's up to everybody to carefully use these antibiotics. We have not only guidelines in place to carefully use these drugs, we also have third party assessments to go through the farm and determine if antibiotics are going according to guidelines," she said.
Weigh In
Does FDA’s plan go far enough to protect public health? Can the livestock industry be counted on to self-regulate in the public’s interest? Could they afford stricter regulations? How worried should people be about the ongoing use of antibiotics making us more vulnerable to infection?
Guests:
Avinash Kar, Public Health Staff Attorney, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC)
Dr. Liz Wagstrom, Chief Veterinarian, National Pork Producers Council (NPPC)
FilmWeek: The Three Stooges, The Cabin in the Woods, Lockout and more
KPCC film critics Wade Major and Henry Sheehan join guest host David Lazarus to discuss this week’s new movies, including The Three Stooges, The Cabin in the Woods, Lockout and more. We’ll also be previewing the upcoming ColCoa Film Festival happening in Los Angeles, which consists of a week’s worth of French film premieres. TGI-FilmWeek!
"Cabin in the Woods" trailer:
"Three Stooges" trailer:
"Lockout" trailer:
Guests:
Wade Major, film critic for KPCC and boxoffice.com
Henry Sheehan, film critic for KPCC and henrysheehan.com
Scenes of a Crime: good confession, bad confession
Perhaps the most pivotal phase of a crime, more so than the arrest or trial by jury, is the police interrogation of a suspect. Using verbal techniques such as psychological coercion, hypothetical scenarios, outright lies and threats, law enforcement officials attempt to pressure guilty parties to admit their wrongdoings.
These techniques are deemed legal, and have been institutionalized for decades as appropriate practices for parsing out the truth in a case. However, the interrogations are so effective, that oftentimes an innocent suspect will end up confessing to a crime he or she did not commit. This can be due to fatigue, ignorance or fear on behalf of those being interrogated.
One such example of this situation is seen in the upcoming documentary “Scenes of a Crime.” Filmmakers Grover Babcock and Blue Hadeagh take a look at the case of Adrian Thomas, a man who was suspected of foul play when his infant son wound up brain dead in a hospital.
Thomas was subjected to two rounds of interrogation, both lasting several hours long. Thomas denied ever harming his son, but police were suspicious due to their injury reports (which the defense later found to be misdiagnosed). Due to this belief, they persisted, and eventually Thomas demonstrated throwing his child against a mattress, which became his official confession. Babcock and Hadeagh focus on the ensuing trial and Thomas’s current situation, but the main focus is on the interrogation itself.
What went wrong for Thomas during the course of questioning? What tactics did the police employ that caused a man to recant his admission of never abusing his child? How can these types of situations be avoided in the future? What is the fate of Adrian Thomas and others like him?
Guests:
Grover Babcock, one half of the producer-director team behind “Scenes of a Crime,” winner of the Grand Jury Award at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, the Grand Jury Prize at DOC Nyc in the “Viewfinders” section and an IFP Gotham Independent Film Award
Blue Hadeagh, one half of the producer-director team behind “Scenes of a Crime,” winner of the Grand Jury Award at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, the Grand Jury Prize at DOC Nyc in the “Viewfinders” section and an IFP Gotham Independent Film Award