"Transparency" seems to be the new keyword in the Motion Picture Association of America's quest to gain larger support for its anti-piracy campaign.

The MPAA moved on Thursday to try to diffuse some of the public interest group opposition to the Obama administration's pursuit of anti-counterfeiting trade agreements with other countries by making details of what is being sought in the agreements more public.

Public Knowledge and other groups have questioned the need for the pacts and the secrecy around the exact curbs being sought. They have warned that this could have “draconian” impacts on consumers.

In letters to Congess Thursday, MPAA chairman-CEO Dan Glickman strongly defended the stepped-up enforcement its is seeking ... but conceded that the secrecy around them has fostered “apprehension” and created “a distraction.”

He urged additional steps be taken to make the exact anti-piracy language being sought far more public.

“Outcries on the lack of transparency are a distraction,” he said in the letters. “They distract from the substance and the ambition of the [trade agreement] which are to work with key trading partners to combat piracy and counterfeiting across the global marketplace.”

Glickman wrote that while the U.S. government has already taken some steps to become more transparent on the enforcement language it wants, it needs to go even futher.

“We appreciate the U.S. government’s efforts thus far to broaden its consultative process," he wrote. "Despite these exceptional efforts, the protests persist, fostering apprehension over the agreement’s substance. We understand that the parties agree on the desirability to provide meaningful opportunities for the public to provide input. We support this objective and encourage the U.S. government to direct that process so that we can engage in a meaningful dialogue on substance rather than procedural matters."

Glickman also questioned the motives of those opposing action.

“The ability to finance, create and distribute entertainment, and the livelihood of the talented and dedicated men and women who work in our industry are dependent upon our ability to protect the intellectual property that is the lifeblood of our industry. Opponents are either indifferent to this situation, or actively hostile toward efforts to improve copyright enforcement worldwide.”

He suggested they are trying to portray enforcement as “anti-consumer and anti-innovation.”

Art Brodsky. a spokesman for Public Knowledge, urged the MPAA to contact the U.S. Trade Representative rather than Congress to open the discussion. He also questioned whether more details will show the MPAA wanting “draconian” and unneeded restrictions.

“Secret negotiations on behalf of special interests are unacceptable,” he said.

The Writers Guild of America, East, is endorsing a proposed New York City Council resolution urging the Federal Communications Commission to adopt net neutrality standards for internet service providers.
The FCC is considering a rule that would bar generally bar internet service providers from giving video and other content from favored providers a faster path to consumers' desktops than other legal content.
In prepared testimony for a New York City Council hearing Friday, Lowell Peterson, executive director of WGAE, warns that without a “net neutrality” guarantee, a relatively small number of “mega companies” might come to control access to content on the internet not because they provide better content “people prefer, but because they control the flow of data on the net.”
He claims that if the internet is controlled “by powerful corporate entities” writers “creative voices” could be lost.”
“Open access to the internet gives people many more opportunities to learn, laugh and to understand,” he says in the testimony.
Writers and independent producers have been concerned about maintaining the internet as a distribution alternative for content that they suggest is getting more difficult to get aired on TV networks and cable.
Some internet service providers and legislators have opposed any FCC action, arguing that it represents regulation of an internet that has thrived by being open and that there is little evidence of problems with internet service providers favoring some content over other content.  

President Obama Wednesday announced his intent to nominate former Time magazine editor and CNN chairman-CEO Walter Isaacson to chair the Broadcast Board of Governors that oversees the Voice of America, Radio Sawa, Alhurra TV and other U.S. overseas broadcasting services.

The president also named Michael Lynton, chairman-CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment, and former Bush administration White House press secretary Dana Perino as among members of the broadcast board.

Isaacson is now president of the Aspen Institute and serves as chair of the board of Teach for America. Lynton is the former chairman of AOL Europe and is a member of the board of the Council on Foreign Relations. Perino is a the chief issues counselor for the United States at public relations firm Burson-Marsteller.

The president also made several other nominations today to the Broadcasting Board of Governors even as he visited Korea as part of an Asian trip.

The others were Susan McCue, president of  Message Global, a strategic advocacy firm; Michael P. Meehan, president of Blue Line Strategic Communications, Inc. and senior vice president at Virilion, a digital media company; Victor H. Ashe, a former U.S. ambassador to Poland and former Knoxville, Tenn. mayor; Dennis Mulhaupt,  founder and managing director of Commonwealth Partners, Inc. which providing advisory services to philanthropic institutions and families; and S. Enders Wimbush, senior vice president for international programs and policy at the Hudson Institute.

McCue was the founding President and CEO of The ONE Campaign to combat global poverty.
The posts need Senate confirmation. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is an ex-officio member of the board.
Under the Bush administration, the Broadcast Board of Governors recast some of the U.S. services to aim them towards younger audience. It also added Alhurra, a satellite TV channel.

If there were any doubts about whether a December workshop of the Federal Trade Commission on the future of journalism was going to get serious attention from the media industry, they ended Monday with the release of a listing of participants.

Slated for the two-day event, beginning Dec. 1: News Corp. chairman-CEO Rupert Murdoch, Wall Street Journal Managing Editor Robert Thomson, Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor in chief of the Huffington Post, former Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie, former Wall Street Journal Managing Editor Paul Steiger (now president and CEO of Pro Publica) and executives of Google and Yahoo.

The FTC announced plans for the workshop this past summer as a part of areexamination of the new economics in the media marketplace and how they affect news and reporting

The workshop will consider, “a wide range of issues, including: the economics of journalism in print and online; the wide variety of new business and non-profit models for journalism online; factors relevant to the new economic realities for news organizations, such as behavioral and other targeted online advertising, online news aggregators, and bloggers; and the ways in which the costs of journalism could be reduced without reducing quality,” the commission said in a statement.

Chairman Jon Leibowitz said in an earlier interview with TheWrap  that he hopes the workshop will examine how the government should deal with changes in the economics and technology of journalism. The FTC shares anti-trust enforcement with the Justice Department and reviews media deals.

Comcast and NBC Universal have yet to formally announce their deal, but consumer groups and a union are already announcing a major campaign to oppose it.

Representatives of Free Press, the Consumer Federation of America, the Communications Workers of America and the video-download website Fuze told a news conference Friday that any deal would be bad for consumers, independent programmers and journalists and give the combined company way too much power.

They said they would oppose the deal both during its review with anti-trust regulators and at the Federal Communications Commission.

Josh Silver, executive director of Free Press, said Wall Street analysts are underestimating “the level of damage this merger will do” to competition.

“We have never seen so much control,” he said. He said not only would the combination end competition between Comcast and NBC Universal, it would trigger other mergers to achieve similar scale.

“We will be rallying citizens who are sick and tired of mega mergers,” he said promising a campaign similar to the successful effort the group helped launch to oppose the FCC’s easing of media ownership rules several years ago. That campaign drew more than 3 million letters and comments in opposition to the FCC.

Mark Cooper, director of research for the Consumer Federation, suggested the merger raises extensive anti-trust issues.

“The pundits who are predicting this will be slam dunk have not done a complete analysis,” he said. He said that the merger eliminates a budding rivalry between cable providers and Hulu and raises concerns about how the company would treat rivals' content and rivals' desire to feature NBC content.

He also said that Comcast has a pattern of trying to freeze out content from rivals that anti-trust regulators would want to review.

“Serious conditions would be necessary [for the deal to go forward.] Given the magnitude, the simpler and direct way to preserve competition is to just say, ‘No,’” he said. 

George Kohl, senior director of the Communications Workers, which represents 6,000 Comcast and 2,500 NBC Universal employees, warned that Comcast “will have the power to determine what programs get aired and what we pay. Comcast is too powerful today and [the deal] will make them more powerful. The bloat it gives them will erode democracy,” he said.

President Obama is tapping some big names from Hollywood to serve on the President’s Committee on Arts and the Humanities.

Among the 25 members announced Monday by the White House were actors Edward Norton, Forest Whitaker, Sarah Jessica Parker, Kerry Washington and Alfre Woodard; CAA partner and managing director Bryan Lourd; independent film producer Liz Manne; and publicist Andy Spahn.

They join a committee that will include Vogue editor Anna Wintour, cellist Yo-Yo Ma and Teresa Heinz, a philanthropist and wife of Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass.

President Obama previously appointed writer-director-producer George Stevens Jr. and theater producer Margo Lion to serve as co-chairs of the committee and New York University Tisch School of the Arts dean Mary Schmidt Campbell to serve as vice chair.

First Lady Michelle Obama is the committee’s honorary chairman.

In August, the president named Rachel Goslins, independent TV and film producer, as the committee's executive director.

Since 1982, the committee has worked to advance the White House's arts and humanities objectives by working directly with the three primary cultural agencies – the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Its goal is to initiate and support key programs; to recognize excellence in the fields of arts and humanities; and to encourage private-public partnerships around those disciplines, according to the committee’s website.

Violence against women is increasing on TV, according to a new study from the Parents Television Council -- and its leaders are urging network exec to step in suggesting the violence could desensitize youths and cause incidents like the “horrendous gang rape” of a woman last weekend in Richmond, Calif.

“A wave of media violence is hitting the public like a tsunami,” said PTC president Tim Winter. He said not only are incidents of violence against women and girls increasing in storylines, but the violence is getting “more graphic and more gruesome.”

PTC’s study tracked depiction of “female victimization” and violence on primetime broadcast TV from 2004 to 2009, focusing on sweeps periods in February and May each year. It didn’t study cable, saying it didn’t have enough staff.

The study noted that depiction of violence overall has changed little over the years -- up 2 percent from 2004. Depiction of violence against women, however, was up 120 percent.

It said 29 percent of the incidents were beatings, 18 percent credible threats of violence, 11 perdent were shootings, 8 percent were rapes, 6 percent stabbings and 2 percent torture -- but that in 92 percent of the incidents, graphic violence against women was depicted, not just implied.

“The raw number is not in epidemic proportion,” said Winter. “What is sobering is the trend.”

He suggested that the impact of violence on TV had a desensitizing effect, especially on youths and he urged TV networks and TV advertisers to act. He pointed to the rape incident in Richmond and to recent publicity about pro athletes being involved in beatings.

“I believe it is having a devastating effect,” he said.

PTC included cartoon violence in its examination, and the group rapped Fox for violence against women in "Family Guy" and "American Dad," accusing the network of “trivializing the gravity of the issue of violence against women.” Fox declined comment.

PTC said every network except ABC “demonstrated a dramatic increase in the number of storylines that included violence against women.”

It said the number was up 192 percent at NBC, 119 percent at CBS, 109 percent at Fox and 39 percent at ABC. CBS had the highest number of incidents.

Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., has repeatedly expressed concerns about the amount of violence on TV and Winter said his group had sent the senator the study.

Winter said he was hopeful that the TV industry would act voluntarily to lessen incidents but also that Sen. Rockefeller would hold a hearing to push the TV industry to act.

At the same time the Federal Communication Commission was voting to launch a formal process to create a new FCC rule on net neutrality, Hollywood writers went on an offensive in Washington to urge the FCC to act – and to warn Congress about the dangers of inaction.

“Battlestar Gallactica” executive producer Ron Moore, testifying on behalf of the Writers Guild of America West, told a panel of the House Energy & Commerce Committee Thursday that without some action either to ensure net neutrality or provide opportunities for independent content on TV and cable, such content will continue to be under great pressure.

Writers say that after the elimination of financial syndication limits in the 1990s, TV and cable networks have gravitated towards programs that the networks own. The writers see the web as an alternative method of distribution, and Moore suggested the FCC needed to step in.

“There are tremendous pressures on each of the studios to develop programming for their sister networks,” he said. “Studios are no longer looking at the ‘best’ idea. They now are looking for the idea that best helps their corporate siblings.”

The companies, he said, "are doing what makes sense to them financially. However, what makes sense may not be in the best interests of the audience, the television interest or the American people ... (they) are run by good and decent people who are working within the regulatory environment they have been given. The danger we face is not that we work for evil men and women -- it’s that good men and women can produce evil results in the absence of law.”

WGAW, an early supporter of net neutrality, also issued its own statement of support of FCC action, suggesting the web is just developing as an alternative distribution platform to TV for independent producers -- and net neutrality is essential to preserving the platform.

“We believe ‘net neutrality’ will protect the open marketplace that currently exists on the internet and prevent the kind of consolidation that has allowed six media conglomerates to achieve control of traditional media outlets, to the detriment of independent production and diversity of content,” John Kosinski, WGAW’s director of government affairs, told TheWrap.

He said the internet holds great opportunity for writers to reintroduce independent and diverse entertainment offerings, “but the promise of the internet requires net neutrality. “Only in a neutral environment do independent producers have the opportunity to compete with the major media companies on the basis of content quality.”

While WGA urged FCC action, media and internet service providers at the hearing contended there is little evidence of a need for action and questioned not only net neutrality, but existing FCC rules.

“Video competition is thriving,” said Benjamin N. Pyne, Disney Media Networks, president of global distribution “There has never been a more competitive marketplace.”

He suggested the media marketplace had become less not more consolidated.