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Media & Politics
Publications
Local Government Infrastructure and the False Promise of Privatization
Mildred E. Warner, The Century Foundation, , 6/1/2009
Local public services-water and sewer systems, roads and bridges, solid waste management, and human services-create the physical and social infrastructure needed for sustainable economic development. Local government leaders, whether Republican, Democrat, or Independent, are pragmatic managers focused on providing quality services that make communities desirable places to live and attractive to economic development. In this report, Mildred E. Warner lays out the infrastructure crisis currently facing local governments and explains the need for increased federal investment to confront this crisis. Warner presents actual trends in local government service delivery and shows the empirical results of the effects of privatization over the past decade. Despite the hype about privatization over the past two decades, Warner finds that local governments have discovered the limits of privatization and have scaled back some of their initiatives, and instead now look at it more as one tool among many in finding pragmatic solutions to solving today's infrastructure needs. Download the PDF here.  
A Plan to Extend Super-Fast Broadband Connections to All Americans
John Windhausen, Jr., The Century Foundation, 1/27/2009
Few doubt that broadband communications are increasingly vital to our social and economic well-being. The universal availability of affordable high-speed access to the Internet has become essential not only for business, but also for public safety, research, education, health care, and protecting the environment. Broadband communications are the future, yet the U.S. government has no national broadband policy, and does not treat broadband as a form of infrastructure and does not regard broadband as an "essential"service. The U.S. currently lags behind other nations both in terms of connection speeds and the number of citizens who have access to broadband. In spite of this, the U.S. the market for broadband services is largely deregulated, under the theory that the marketplace will provide the optimal level of broadband in response to customer demand. In this paper, part of the Building a Strong America series, John Windhausen Jr. discusses how the United States can create policy that recognizes the creation of and access to broadband service as a vital infrastructure issue. Download the report (PDF).  
> All Media & Politics Publications
News & Commentary
The Snapshot: Public Backs Regulation of Big Banks
Ruy Teixeira, The Century Foundation, 2/8/2010
Between health care, the State of the Union, and the budget, Obama’s proposals for financial regulatory reform, including tough new moves to reduce risk-taking by our country’s largest banks, haven’t gotten all the attention they should. But these proposals are highly significant as policy and are likely to be debated in Congress quite soon. They are also likely to tap into a wellspring of public support for this kind of tough approach.
The Platform: What Next for News?
Peter Osnos, The Century Foundation, 2/3/2010
All across America this winter, there are news-gathering start-ups with an array of business models reflecting the energy of an industry in reinvention rather than the dying newspaper trade that has become—while worse-off than anyone would like—an exaggerated cliché. Nonetheless, my back of the envelope calculation of the total investment in this national transformation of the news business is still a fraction of the bonuses Wall Street is paying itself for surviving the government bail-out (and not a whole lot more than NBC paid Conan O’Brien to go away).
The Snapshot: How the Public Really Feels About Obama’s Performance
Ruy Teixeira, The Century Foundation, 2/3/2010
There has been a lot of hyperventilating about the January 19th election results in Massachusetts, with conservatives insisting that a massive repudiation of Obama and his agenda has taken place. Not so. In a Lake Research poll of voters in that election, Obama actually received a higher favorability rating than the victorious conservative candidate. And in the same poll voters said by 51-43 that Obama is taking the country in the right direction.
The Platform: Amazon, Apple, and Caravan
Peter Osnos, The Century Foundation, 1/27/2010
It is fascinating and encouraging to see the titans of technology competing to distribute digital books. The new Apple reader will feature multi-media applications that have proved to be hugely popular on the iPhone. Amazon’s Kindle, among other devices, already has validated the e-book experience for significant audiences. Recognizing the importance—the potential and the risks—of this digital transformation, the publishing world, from industry behemoths to authors willing to self-publish, have mobilized to join a major new marketplace. What follows is a wrap-up I wrote as the executive director of Caravan, a just–concluded, four-year project to support leading university and nonprofit presses in dealing with changes that have arrived with astonishing speed:
The Platform: What Is a Magazine?
Peter Osnos, The Century Foundation, 1/13/2010
An unexpected highlight of the recent holiday interregnum was a discovery in a random file of old family letters and clippings. It was an immaculate copy of the first issue of Esquire from autumn 1933, probably saved by my wife’s grandfather who was an advertising executive with Chicago connections, which is where Esquire was edited, a surprise to me. I had parochially assumed its sensibility was New York-based. What an elegant creation this Esquire was and still is. It was billed as “The Quarterly for Men,” with a cover price of $0.50, which must have seemed substantial in the midst of the Depression.
The Snapshot: The Weakness of Conservative Opposition to Health Care Reform
Ruy Teixeira, The Century Foundation, 1/11/2010
In recent polls, more of the public opposes than favors the health care reform bills in Congress. Conservatives would have you believe that the opposition plurality in these polls is a result of public distaste for a big government takeover of our health care system. Not so. In a December CNN poll, a total of 55 percent either favored the Senate health reform bill outright (42 percent) or opposed it at this point because its approach to health care isn’t liberal enough (13 percent). Just 39 percent said they opposed the bill because its approach to health care was too liberal.
The Platform: Paying for the Goods
Peter Osnos, The Century Foundation, 1/6/2010
A fierce battle ensued at the beginning of 2010 over News Corporation’s demands that Time-Warner Cable increase fees for the right to distribute the Fox Broadcasting network. Media behemoths fighting over money? Predictable, but nonetheless significant. The issue is who pays how much for the right to distribute content in all the ways it reaches consumers. Cable television (programming), Amazon’s Kindle (books), iTunes (music), and Google (news) are all part of the same continuum in which the mostly flush disseminators are doing better than the strapped creators.
The Snapshot: Public Rejects Conservative Views on Global Warming
Ruy Teixeira, The Century Foundation, 1/5/2010
Conservatives are trying to convince the public of three things on global warming. The first is that human-induced climate change either isn’t really happening or is vastly exaggerated. The second is that the United States should not sign any international agreements designed to combat climate change. And the third is that action against global warming will wind up killing jobs and harming the economy.
The Platform: Two Cents on Barack Obama
Peter Osnos, The Century Foundation, 12/30/2009
Vernon Jordan has seen it all in American politics since he graduated from Howard University Law School fifty years ago next June. He led the Urban League in the great days of civil rights turmoil, broke racial barriers as a director of major American corporations, reached the pinnacle of law and banking in Washington and New York, and for decades has a been a powerbroker among Democrats.
The Platform: A Lesson from History
Peter Osnos, The Century Foundation, 12/16/2009
Earlier this fall, Foreign Affairs asked me to write a review essay for the January-February issue about Journalism’s Roving Eye: A History of American Foreign Reporting by John Maxwell Hamilton, founding dean of the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University.
The Snapshot: Public Says Go Green With or Without a Climate Agreement
Ruy Teixeira, The Century Foundation, 12/14/2009
Debate has been vigorous at the Copenhagen climate summit, which continues all this week. We shall see if this debate leads to a meaningful global agreement on combating climate change. But it’s worth stressing that the American public wishes to see steps against climate change by our country regardless of Copenhagen’s result.
The Snapshot: Public Supports Action on Climate Change
Ruy Teixeira, The Century Foundation, 12/10/2009
The Copenhagen summit on climate change is coming up and everyone agrees that forging a solid agreement at this summit will not be easy. And the political fate of the climate bill that passed the House and is now languishing in the Senate is far from clear. But these political uncertainties should not blind us to the fact that the American public remains fundamentally supportive of taking action to stop climate change.
Sarah Palin, the Book Business and the American Dream
Peter Osnos, The Century Foundation, 12/9/2009
Sarah Palin's Going Rogue: An American Life is a smash. It sold more than a million copies in the first two weeks and heads into the Christmas peak with enough momentum to anoint it as probably the best selling nonfiction book of the season. Considering that the contenders include the late Senator Edward Kennedy, Mitch Albom and Jon Krakauer, two multi-million copy masters of narrative writing, and Fox News' Glenn Beck, the current superstar of rabid right-wing rhetoric, Palin has bested an impressive field.
The Platform: A Few Words About Andy Rooney
Peter Osnos, The Century Foundation, 12/2/2009
Andy Rooney turns 91 on January 14, 2010. For 31 of those years he has delivered the closing essay on CBS's 60 Minutes. These pieces are the main reason Rooney is so famous. Walk (actually shamble) through an airport with him, and everyone who is not a foreigner offers a smile, a nod, or a friendly comment. But celebrity is not Andy's own measure of his professional worth; writing is. He has published sixteen books, and for the past two decades, I have been his publisher.
The Platform: The Future of Journalism
Peter Osnos, The Century Foundation, 11/24/2009
“The Future of Journalism” has been the subject these many months of conferences and confabs from coast to coast. Some experts and pundits seem to be omnipresent. The problems under discussion are certainly acute. The prescriptions focus on a mix of entrepreneurial and nonprofit models. Contemplation has its place. But the real tests will be in what actually gets done as journalism under force majeure is reinvented. I have just been reading the spring 2010 master of science curriculum at the Columbia University School of Journalism.
The Snapshot: Public Resisting Conservative Slanders on Health Care Reform
Ruy Teixeira, The Century Foundation, 11/20/2009
Conservatives are putting up a last ditch effort to stop health care reform. They’re doing their level best to scare the public, telling them that passing health care reform will take the country down the road to socialism and ruin the economy, among other things.
The Aftermath of Soviet Hegemony
Peter Osnos, The Century Foundation, 11/18/2009
A couple of years after the collapse of the Soviet empire, I asked Adam Michnik, one of Poland's leading dissidents who had founded a major new newspaper, how he thought the country was doing. "Terribly," he said, describing factional squabbles among the emerging political parties and his growing disdain for Lech Wałęsa, who had become Poland's president. He called him "Piłsudski without a horse," invoking the country's strongman of the 1920s and 1930s, a brief era of Polish inter-war independence ending with the Nazi invasion.
The Snapshot: Public Backs Abiding by International Law
Ruy Teixeira, The Century Foundation, 11/13/2009
In the bad old days of the Bush administration, our nation’s leaders did not seem too interested in abiding by international law and, in fact, seemed to take some pride in asserting our right to ignore it. Under the Obama administration, that attitude has changed and it is good to see some polling evidence—from a WorldPublicOpinion.org poll, conducted by Knowledge Networks—that the public is simpatico with this shift.
The Platform: What Is It About Google?
Peter Osnos, The Century Foundation, 11/11/2009
In 1985, Ken Auletta published Greed and Glory on Wall Street, a national bestseller. This was a colorful account of the battle for control of Lehman Brothers and was the first book that turned the machinations of previously discrete bankers into a topic for public fascination. In 1991, Auletta wrote Three Blind Mice, as the three great broadcast networks "lost their way," in the words of the book's subtitle. Then in 2001 came World War 3.0: Microsoft and Its Enemies, which was about the anti-trust cases that nearly brought the software giant down.
Keynote Speech: Reflections on the Mainstream Media Performance
Morton Abramowitz, The Century Foundation, 11/6/2009
I want to share some thoughts on the media’s coverage of the Afghan issue. By media I refer essentially to the Washington-centric mainstream press, the major newspapers with their commentators, a few weekly magazines, and the television networks, not the inhabitants of the internet, who do a significant amount of often useful analysis. I believe the media, in general, have done poorly in relentlessly examining what administrations have been doing on an issue critical to the nation.
The Platform: Harry Evans, Ace Newsman
Peter Osnos, The Century Foundation, 11/4/2009
For the past twenty-five years, Harry Evans (formally, but rarely, known as Sir Harold Evans) has been based in New York in a succession of high-profile media roles, including publisher of the Random House Trade Division, founding editor of Condé Nast Traveler, best-selling author, and husband of Tina Brown. But before all that, Harry already had made his name as hands-down the best newspaper editor in Britain of his era, mainly at the Sunday Times. Now 81, Evans has written his memoir, covering the full arc of his very full life. His youth and early career take nearly half the book and have an elegance and generosity of style. Harry does everything with verve, and this autobiography is, to use a time-honored encomium, rollicking.
The Snapshot: The Blame Game: Conservatives vs. the Public
Ruy Teixeira, The Century Foundation, 11/2/2009
Conservatives love to blame Obama’s policies for everything, including our current economic problems and the difficulties of passing health care reform. But the public doesn’t see things that way. For example, a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds just 20 percent blaming Obama’s policies for current economic conditions, compared to 63 percent who say this is a situation Obama has inherited.
The Platform: Introducing the Chicago News Cooperative
Peter Osnos, The Century Foundation, 10/28/2009
Chicago was the quintessential twentieth-century newspaper town. Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's play Front Page, which premiered in 1928, captured the city's zest for breaking news. Tribune Tower, a monument to Colonel Robert McCormick's vision of his daily as the "World's Greatest Newspaper," was also a buttressed symbol of power. In its pre-World War II heyday, the Chicago Daily News had the premiere cadre of foreign correspondents in the country. In later years, New York was the financial and media capital of the nation. Los Angeles had the movie business. Washington had politics and government. Chicago had The Mayor (Richard J. Daley) and the ne plus ultra of big-city columnists, the great Mike Royko.
The Snapshot: Public Supports Moving Forward on Climate Change
Ruy Teixeira, The Century Foundation, 10/26/2009
Health care reform is occupying almost everyone’s attention these days, which is understandable given its level of importance and how close we are to big decisions in Congress. But other critical issues remain on Congress’s agenda and will be taken up once the health care situation is resolved. On the top of that list is climate change. Just-released data from the Pew Research Center suggests the public is ready to move forward in this area.
The Platform: Encore! Encore! And Journalism.
Peter Osnos, The Century Foundation, 10/21/2009

Journalism's Great Depression has meant the loss of many thousands of jobs: 16,000 in 2008 alone, according to estimates cited by the Columbia Journalism Review. These departures are characterized and paid for on a scale that goes from lucrative buy-outs to firings with virtually no severance. Overwhelmingly, the cuts represent a break from expected career patterns with resulting personal and family upheaval. Not surprisingly, a fin de siècle gloom tends to hang over newsrooms these days, especially in the once-proud metropolitan dailies and in many magazines.

The Snapshot: Public Open to Additional Efforts to Improve Economy
Ruy Teixeira, The Century Foundation, 10/16/2009
Conservatives have derided Obama’s stimulus program as a waste of money despite the substantial contribution it has made to mitigating the economic downturn and stabilizing an economy that was on the verge of a depression-like meltdown. And they are poised to oppose any and all attempts to expand government spending to promote the recovery.
The Platform: Books: Get Them While They're Hot
Peter Osnos, The Century Foundation, 10/14/2009
Two announcements lately highlight the growing and increasingly glamorous role of the digital delivery and distribution of books. HarperCollins, publisher of Sarah Palin's memoir, Going Rogue: An American Life, said it was rushing the book to sale on November 17, months earlier than originally planned. But the publisher is withholding the e-book version to be offered on the Kindle, Sony Reader, and their emerging competitors until the day after Christmas because the hardcover price, listed at $28.99, will be so much higher than the digital book, which certainly will go for much less ($9.99 on the Kindle, for example).
The Snapshot: Public Warms Up to Health Care Reform
Ruy Teixeira, The Century Foundation, 9/28/2009
The president’s speech on September 9, the presentation of a specific plan (finally) by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, and some vigorous pushback by progressives against conservative antihealth care reform hysteria has moved public sentiments about health care reform in a positive direction. Across multiple polls, a consistent pattern of increased support exists for Obama’s handling of health care and for the health care plans before Congress. This pattern can be seen in the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, where Obama’s approval rating on health care increased by 4 points and support for health care legislation rose by 3 points.
The Snapshot: Public Views of Obama Remain Favorable
Ruy Teixeira, The Century Foundation, 9/24/2009
The conservative narrative about President Barack Obama is that he is rushing down the road to socialism and the public is rising up against his big government schemes. So the florid anti-Obama rhetoric of the “tea party” activists and Joe Wilsons of the world is not extreme, but rather an expression of underlying public sentiment.
The Platform: Judgment Day for the Google Book Pact
Peter Osnos, The Century Foundation, 9/23/2009
Google, the Authors Guild, and the Association of American Publishers (in unlikely fraternity) have bowed to the very large number of petitioners who oppose their agreement that would profoundly affect the digital future of books. A hearing long scheduled for October 7, before District Court Judge Denny Chin in New York is now expected to be postponed while all concerned consider objections to the accord  reached a year ago that gave Google vast rights to scan books and devised a system for paying authors and publishers for the right to do so. The pact—actually the settlement of a suit filed by the authors and publishers to stop Google from what they saw as uncontrolled digitizing of their work would be a fundamental step in the world of letters’ adjustment to all the new ways literature and information are distributed.
The Platform: Mad Men at Risk
Peter Osnos, The Century Foundation, 9/16/2009
The superb multi-season television dramas of the past decade—The Sopranos, The Wire, and Mad Men, now in its third year on AMC—are triumphs of a cinematic genre, featuring plots, characters, and settings that are terrific, with enough edge to bring sophisticated viewers back week after week. Next Sunday, Mad Men is up for sixteen Emmys. Last year it won for best drama. Okay, so much for encomiums.
The Snapshot: Conservatives’ Greatest Enemy on Health Care Is Clarity
Ruy Teixeira, The Century Foundation, 9/8/2009
Conservatives have held nothing back in their efforts to discredit the efforts of the majority of Congress and President Barack Obama to reform the health care system. Their strategy is simple: by spreading lies about the health care plans before Congress, among them government “death panels,” coverage for illegal immigrants, and government tax dollars for abortions, conservatives hope the public can remain confused about what is actually in these plans.
The Platform: Do You Subscribe to Fox News?
Peter Osnos, The Century Foundation, 9/2/2009
At every opportunity this summer, I would ask people, random strangers to close friends, whether they subscribed to Fox News. In the circles I tend to travel, the answer was some form of dismissive, "Are you kidding?" Well, actually, I was not. By the most recent estimate I found, 80 percent of Americans have either cable or satellite television service, which means that all of them are subscribers to Fox News, AMC (Mad Men), Lifetime (Project Runway), and many dozens more.
The Snapshot: Public Holding Steady on Key Elements of Health Care Reform
Ruy Teixeira, The Century Foundation, 8/31/2009
In the last month, the public’s view of Congress’ health care reform efforts has certainly darkened. But it’s striking how little change there has been in the public’s view of the basic elements of health care reform as articulated by President Barack Obama and progressives. These essentials of health care reform remain not just popular, but very popular. Consider these data from the just-released August edition of the Kaiser Health Care Tracking poll.
The Snapshot: Strong Support for Changes in Energy Policy
Ruy Teixeira, The Century Foundation, 8/31/2009

With all the brouhaha about health care reform, it’s easy to forget the other big domestic policy priority before Congress: energy policy and climate change. Here the Obama administration’s approach continues to receive solid public support. According to just-released data from ABC News/Washington Post, support is running about a 2-1 ratio for the proposed changes to U.S. energy policy (57 percent to 29 percent).

The Platform: Don Hewitt's Secrets
Peter Osnos, The Century Foundation, 8/26/2009
The deaths of Don Hewitt, producer extraordinaire, and earlier this summer of Walter Cronkite highlight from both sides of the camera the passing of broadcasters who epitomized the best in television news: great storytelling that combined journalism with showmanship of the sort that television, from its earliest days, has always demanded. It is striking and sad that both men in their later years talked openly of their disappointment with how news on the airwaves had been degraded in favor of profit. In fact, these frustrations were nothing new. Their predecessors in the superstar pantheon of CBS, Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly, were already warning of the corrupting values of television news in the 1960s, when Hewitt and Cronkite's brilliant careers were on the upswing.
The Platform: Robert S. McNamara: In Memoriam
Peter Osnos, The Century Foundation, 8/18/2009
The family of Robert S. McNamara sent out cards recently to those who offered condolences after he died last month. In accordance with his wishes, said the card, “there will be no funeral or memorial service and his ashes will be placed in Snowmass, Colorado and Martha’s Vineyard.” I can hear McNamara’s gravelly voice and picture him waving his hand to lend emphasis to his determination not to be extolled—or denounced by a protestor—at a posthumous event. In different circumstances, he might have been persuaded otherwise. After years of saying he wouldn’t, McNamara did finally reflect deeply in print and on film about the Vietnam War and his role in it. But it would be inconceivable, I suppose, for his survivors to overrule McNamara’s fiat that the scattering of his remains be the only ceremonial recognition of his very full, very long, and very controversial life.
The Platform: Books: The Next Chapter
Peter Osnos, The Century Foundation, 8/11/2009
Four summers ago, pondering a way to define how publishers could take advantage of emerging technologies for delivering information in a variety of formats, I came up with this slogan: Good Books. Any Way You Want Them. Now. The point was that books, basically unchanged in centuries as handheld objects composed of printed pages and covers, needed to adapt to the growing importance of screens, mobile devices, earphones, and the sense among readers that they should be able to get whatever they want on demand instead of searching for it.
The Platform Archive: Caravan and the Book Business
Peter Osnos, The Century Foundation, 8/6/2009
Peter Osnos is Senior Fellow for Media at The Century Foundation. His column "The Platform" appears each week at www.tcf.org. This archive contains columns that pertain to the e-book business in particular.
The Platform: Remembering a Remarkable Jewish Mother
Peter Osnos, The Century Foundation, 8/4/2009
A documentary feature making the art house rounds this summer with the jolly title of Yoo-Hoo Mrs. Goldberg is a fascinating and revealing look at the story of Gertrude Berg. She was the star, writer, and producer of an enormously popular radio and television series in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, which was also a movie and Broadway play. In retrospect, this warm-hearted portrayal of a New York Jewish family without reference to anti-Semitism, ethnic insecurity, or the Holocaust seems amazing, all the more so because the program eventually was undermined by a different scourge, the anti-Communist fervor of the post World War II era.
The Snapshot: Dramatic Improvement in Our International Image
 The Century Foundation, The Century Foundation, 8/3/2009
President Obama has pursued a far different foreign policy than his conservative predecessor George W. Bush. He is heavy on consultation and diplomacy and notably light on the unilateral use of U.S. power to achieve objectives—and the world has noticed.
The Platform: Superpowers
Peter Osnos, The Century Foundation, 7/28/2009
On October 1, the People’s Republic of China will celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the revolution that gave Mao Tse-tung and the Communist party control of a vast, chaotic, and depleted nation. Today’s China has become a superpower, a country that in scale, ambition, and demonstrated success will be a dominant global force in the twenty-first century. As it happens I was a correspondent in the Soviet Union in 1977, the year it marked the sixtieth anniversary of its own Communist revolution. It too was then an acknowledged superpower that, along with the United States, sought to project military capacity and ideological hegemony the world over. Yet only fifteen years later, the Soviet Union disappeared, its empire shattered, its economy in ruins.
The Snapshot: Public Backs Funding for Scientific Research
Ruy Teixeira, The Century Foundation, 7/27/2009
The Obama administration has put a strong emphasis on scientific research, backed up by funding commitments in the 2010 budget. And this appears to be simpatico with the views of the American public. A new survey from the Pew Research Center shows that the public, by 60-29, thinks government investment in research is essential for scientific progress, rather than believing that private investment can ensure scientific progress without government investment.
The Platform: Reading Lolita in Beijing
Peter Osnos, The Century Foundation, 7/21/2009
The preferred shopping environment in China is captured in the characters for “renao,” which translates as commotion or, more literally, hot and noisy. By that standard, the Beijing Books Building is idyllic, five floors of books packed with excited customers, overwhelmingly young on a weekday morning. There is an astounding cross section of Chinese and international titles with a breadth and depth that would—and actually did—impress an American publisher on an informal mission to find out what is readily available to China’s 1.4 billion people. This bustling vista overwhelmed the inclination to measure what is there against what was not allowed or to dwell on the problem of piracy.
The Platform: What’s a Fair Share In the Age of Google?
Peter Osnos, The Century Foundation, 7/14/2009
The buzz inside Google is overwhelmingly positive about what the company does and how we will all benefit from the results—including the embattled denizens of newspapers and magazines who increasingly see Google as an enabler of their demise. Barely a decade ago, Google received its first $25 million investment, based on search technology developed by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the company’s cofounders. By the time it went public just five years later, “Google” was a verb.
The Snapshot: Public Backs Sotomayor for the Supreme Court
Ruy Teixeira, The Century Foundation, 7/7/2009
Conservatives are doing their level best to derail the nomination of Latina Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, targeting her race and views on abortion in particular. But these culture wars appeals are having little effect on the public’s views.
The Snapshot: Why the Public Supports a Public Plan
Ruy Teixeira, The Century Foundation, 7/2/2009

Debate is really heating up on health care reform and at the center of that debate is Obama’s proposal to create a public plan option to compete with private insurance companies.

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Events
Access Denied? The Cyber-Gap and Its Effect on Democracy
The Century Foundation - 8/5/2009
The rise of the Internet has ushered in an era where many Americans, particularly young people, are increasingly turning to non-traditional forms of media, such as online newspapers and magazines, Twitter and You Tube, for their news. Many have praised the Internet as an open, democratic forum, free from the horizontally integrated media companies that control traditional news gathering and dissemination. However, widespread inaccessibility to high speed internet across America, due to poor broadband infrastructure, is interfering with the Internet’s democratic capabilities. What does the future hold for universal Internet access, and, in turn, America ’s mediascape? 
Color Bind: Race in the 2008 Election and Beyond
The Century Foundation's 2008 Public Policy Lunch Series - 8/5/2008
Barack Obama's success so far in the 2008 election cycle has fostered optimistic rhetoric in mainstream media about race relations in the United States. But does Obama's candidacy transform Martin Luther King Jr.'s American dream into a reality? A recent New York Times/CBS poll found that Americans are sharply divided by race on their views of Senator Obama and the state of race relations. In addition, with an increased presence of other minority groups, issues regarding race in political and social life are no longer black and white. What role does race play in the 2008 election and beyond? Can America ever truly be a color-blind society? 
90 Years of Progress
- 12/1/2009
This year marked the ninetieth anniversary of the founding of The Century Foundation (which was known for most of its history as the Twentieth Century Fund). Our founder, Edward Filene, created this organization with the goal of supporting studies and analysis that could lead to constructive action on our nation’s public policy. That heritage has compelled us to educate, provoke, and develop better answers when evidence and reason show that public debates are badly off track. Over the past nine decades, we have called attention to facts and analyses to correct widespread misconceptions and provide policymakers with new ideas for addressing the challenges facing the nation. We have created this video to provide a glimpse into our story and how it is intertwined with America’s story for much of the twentieth century and beyond.  
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Press Releases
New From The Century Foundation’s Building A Stronger America Series: A Plan to Extend Super-Fast Broadband Connections to All Americans
1/28/2009
Download the Press Release (PDF).
Century Foundation Senior Fellow Jeff Laurenti Says Nobel Prize Award to Obama “Bookends” 2002 Carter Award, Marking U.S. Policy Reversals
10/9/2009
The Century Foundation’s Jeffrey Laurenti, senior fellow in international affairs, drew a link between today’s award of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama and the Nobel committee’s granting it to former president Jimmy Carter in 2002.
Digital Promise Project Reaches Goal for Creation of National Center For Research in Advanced Information and Digital Technologies
1/27/2010
After more than a decade of nationwide effort, the Digital Promise Project has achieved an essential goal the creation of the National Center for Research in Advanced Information and Digital Technologies.  The Digital Promise Project had its beginnings as a project sponsored by The Century Foundation. This year the Department of Education, as provided by their 2010 appropriations legislation, will make available the initial funding required to launch the National Center.   In the words of the Centers authorizing legislation, The purpose of the Center shall be to support a comprehensive research and development program to harness the increasing capability of advanced information and digital technologies to improve all levels of learning and education, formal and informal, in order to provide Americans with the knowledge and skills needed to compete in the global economy
> All Media & Politics Press Releases
Issues in Depth
Campaign Finance Reform
Legal underpinnings of the current system and how to change it.
Urban Politics and Policy
Planning for the future of America's cities.
Youth Engagement
Involving young people in public affairs.
Media Studies
How new developments in the media affect our politics and democracy.



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