Rupert Murdoch is looking to buy the Los Angeles Times. Should the FCC let him?

Reports were circulating in the tech press Friday that serial privacy violator Google is about to cut a deal with state attorneys general to close their investigation of the Wi-Spy scandal.

Remember what happened? Google sent specially equipped cars to travel the highways and byways of the world snapping photos of everything they passed. What Google did not say was that they were also sniffing out Wi-Fi networks and sucking up private data on those networks.

They got passwords, account numbers and email messages, including in France a couple trying to arrange an extramarital affair.

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman Julius Genachowski would like the FCC to vote on a plan to gut media ownership rules. If approved, News Corp owner Rupert Murdoch, who has been considering buying more media, would benefit. The proposal would also allow for more media consolidation.

Using innocuous language to describe a proposal that should raise alarm, Genachowski stated yesterday that he wanted the FCC to “streamline and modernize media ownership rules.” This would include “eliminating outdated prohibitions on newspaper-radio and TV-radio cross-ownership.”

Tonight’s guest Sue Wilson is a firebrand – smart, driven and articulate. A longtime journalist, she got fired up about how the public airways, which belong to the citizens, are controlled by mega-corps which do not act in the public interest. Broadcast Blues, which she wrote, directed and narrates traces the history of the airwaves, the gutting of the Fairness Doctrine, and explains how the consolidation of stations has limited Americans access to a wide range of voices and views—and has actually put citizens at physical risk during emergencies.

Fatster rounds up the weekend news with stories and links about the Euro, Germanyn, Syria, Afghanistan, Burma, Florida voter registration, Mitch Daniels, public unions, FCC, Tom Corbett, school choice, Bernie Sanders, and much more.

I wrote back in January about an FCC proposed rule that would force local TV stations to put the results of the political ad spending on their airwaves online, rather than in an obscure filing room at the station that few people ever see. This would increase the transparency of political spending, which now relies on just a few reports by independent watchdogs and self-reporting from campaigns. Under this new standard, anyone could look up on the Internet the mass of ad spending. It looks like the FCC will do this.

As of Monday, 141 advertisers had evacuated the Rush Limbaugh show, and The Wrap reports that Limbaught’s synidcator, Premier Network, owned by Clear Channel, had withdrawn all national advertising slots for two weeks.

One of the biggest disasters with the broken campaign finance system is that we actually have no reporting mechanism for assessing how much money gets spent on campaigns, at least on television. Sometimes candidates and PACs will announce their spending on ads, but local stations are not obligated to report how much they make from political advertising. You see organizations like the Campaign Media Analysis Group quoted in articles about campaign finance, but they basically make educated guesses that involve a lot of legwork. The only way to truly find out how much one television station makes from political advertising is to physically go down to the station and find the person with that information.

You can say that the entire goal of Julius Genachowski’s pretend plan for net neutrality was to devise something that the telecoms could live with, while allowing him to make a defense that the Obama Administration fulfilled its campaign promise of Internet freedom. If they didn’t care about being taken to court over their plans, they would have written something far more air-tight. So instead, they came up with this heavily compromised approach. And Verizon sued them anyway.

Earlier today, the FCC and the Justice Department ruled in favor of the merger between Comcast and NBC Universal, creating one of the largest media conglomerates in the world and setting an unadvisable template for one company to combine the power of media and the Internet.

Sen. Al Franken, who has been a lonely critic of the proposed merger, released a caustic statement on the FCC action today.