Report Exposes Telecom Industry's Astroturf Lobbying Groups

Chellie Pingree, president and CEO of Common Cause, a national non-partisan advocacy organization.

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TRANSCRIPT:

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Chellie Pingree, who heads Common Cause. We wanted to ask you about a report you just put out. It's called “Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing,” and it's about the telecom industry lobbying right now and their, what you call, front groups. Can you talk about it?

CHELLIE PINGREE: Yeah, you can find the full report on our website commoncause.org, and basically what we wanted to talk a little bit about was the lobbying activity that's going on now as the reauthorization of the Telecom Act comes up. As you recall, the Telecom Act was put forward first in 1996, and consumers were told, ‘Oh, this is going to be a great thing, we're going to have enhanced competition, much more variety, and your rates will go down for cable TV and other services.’ Well, I think everyone knows that a decade later, there's far less competition, there's more media consolidation, and people's rates have increased 40% and 50%, without the promises that they were offered, so people are already disappointed, and industry sees this as an incredible opportunity for, you know, making a lot of money out there.

So, our report actually deals with this Astroturf lobbying. I mean, we're all getting so familiar with it in any kind of, you know, big industry debate that goes on today, these front groups that make you think that, you know, they're somehow on your side. One of them is called Consumers for Cable Choice, and they run a website called mycablenightmare.org. Well, actually they're backed by Verizon and AT&T. And Verizon and AT&T and the cable companies, you know, they're all at war with each other, because they really want to own the biggest share of this consumer market, and so they make you think that they've got these websites, they want to hear your stories, they lobby Congress, they get you to send in postcards. They do a whole variety of things.

And what we really just want to put forward is making sure people know where these groups get their money. They're not Consumers Union. They're not Common Cause. They're not organizations that don't take money from industry and really do lobby on behalf of the consumer, but they -- a lot of these groups are think tanks that get funded by industry, put out reports that are clearly biased, and we just think in this very important debate, members of Congress need to know where this information is coming from, and when you see these ads in the newspaper or on TV, you realize that it's really just somebody who is trying to make a buck off of you, not trying to make your world of how you access the media any better.

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