media

Hundreds of thousands surrounded the Wisconsin State Capitol building a year ago in response and protest of Governor Scott Walker's radical agenda, including his proposed "budget repair bill" to balance the budget on the back of state workers. There to document history in the making, was independent filmmaker Sam Mayfield from Burlington, Vermont. Sam was seen everywhere with her high definition camcorder, at Walker press conferences and climbing though Capitol windows with protesters. In the many months she was in Wisconsin, she obtained hundreds of hours of footage -- often at moments when hers was the only camera present. Among her hundreds of interviews with newsmakers and protesters, the Center for Media and Democracy's Mary Bottari was interviewed for the project on the role that ALEC played in shaping the Walker agenda. "People really need to pay attention to this and start bird-dogging these institutions, these legislators and these corporations and taking back their democracy," Bottari said of ALEC.

As Time Magazine names 'The Protester' as person of the year, news broke that Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal joins JPMorgan Chase as a major stakeholder in Twitter, the social media network that catapulted both the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street movement onto the global stage.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced Tuesday that it reached a proposed settlement with the social networking site Facebook for charges it has failed to keep promises about guarding the privacy of information of its consumers. The settlement comes in response to a two-year federal investigation and demands by a coalition of pro-privacy groups, including the Center for Media and Democracy, to investigate these claims in order to protect the some 200 million Facebook users in the United States.