Those little lights are the last shred of human dignity SOPA plans to extinguish. Metaphorically speaking.

You know that whole Stop Online Privacy Act that threatens to give our government control to basically turn off whatever part of the internet they want? It's really scary. And cable news networks don't really care about it enough to cover it. Or they're simply afraid to poke at their corporate overlords because of it. Or they're part of a vast conspiracy theory to help it pass.

Via Media Matters, as Michael Jackson once sang, they don't really care about us:

....Most major television news outlets -- MSNBC, Fox News, ABC, CBS, and NBC -- have ignored the bill during their evening broadcasts. One network, CNN, devoted a single evening segment to it. (The data on lack of coverage is based on a search of the Lexis-Nexis database since October 1, 2011. The Nexis database does not include comprehensive daytime coverage, and also does not include Shep Smith's 7pm nightly Fox News program, so both are excluded from the study.)

It doesn't help matters that Hollywood is fighting for SOPA with lots of money, to a factor of nearly four times as much as Silicon Valley's putting into the fight. What does this have to do with news networks not covering SOPA, you ask? Well, many of these news networks are owned by media conglomerates who have an interest in SOPA passing. For example:

• CNN is owned by Time-Warner, as in, Warner Bros.
• MSNBC, CNBC, and NBC News are owned by NBC-Universal, as in, NBC, Universal Pictures, and Universal Television.
• Fox News and Fox Business News are owned by News Corp, which owns Fox, the television station and film studio.
• ABC News is owned by Disney, as in, the Disney that owns production studios, television stations, etc.

 
And so on. These guys also own a decent chunk of the music business, too, but you probably already guessed that by this point. So if you're the conspiratorial type, well, you could probably get pretty conspiratorial here. If you're especially crazy, you could surmise that news networks are in a position to give negative coverage to politicians who don't support SOPA, but that's a little too slippery-slope, especially when all you need as evidence of any kind of collusion—latent or otherwise—is the simple, basic fact that SOPA is a frightening threat on our citizenry from our government's unchecked powers, and news networks aren't covering it. If that doesn't freak you out, we can't help you here.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek