Digital Future of Public Media: Policy Papers

The FCC should reconsider its decision to allow incumbent radio licensees to expand into neighboring spectrum without imposing additional public interest requirements. The Second Report & Order is premised on the unexamined and unsupported assumption that the Commission is not assigning new spectrum for mutually exclusive commercial uses to incumbent licensees. Because of this erroneous premise, the FCC completely fails to consider a key question of whether the spectrum should be used for alternative purposes, such as noncommercial low power… more

Links to PDF versions of the full report (133 pp.), as well as the Executive Summary (11 pp.), are below.

The digital age has drastically reshaped the world that we live in—making communication faster, information more accessible, and our knowledge more expansive than ever before. With even more information at our fingertips, it has become increasingly difficult to keep up with the pace of information output. Knowledge is now the principal source of wealth creation and new jobs in the United States. Ensuring that the United States and its populace keep up with the fast pace of knowledge dissemination and… more

Over the past thirty years, by many measures, U.S. student educational performance has not improved. Some measures of educational achievement have actually decreased. This development is coupled with a dramatic decline in the productivity of educational spending: As a nation, we spend more and more to obtain the same level of educational achievement. Other industrialized countries do much better than the U.S. when comparing educational performance and the productivity of educational spending. With respect to educational achievement, the position of… more

Even amidst the burst of the "dot com" bubble, many believe that new information technologies are having a dramatic impact on the way we live, work, learn, and communicate with each other. One of the applications of information technology that has attracted the most attention is "e-learning." Technology has the potential to transform education and lifelong learning. In the future, learners of all ages will be able to tap in to vast digital libraries and online museums,… more