Last Sunday night AT&T “sponsored” a live webcast of Pearl Jam’s performance at Lollapalooza. Pearl Jam reports on their website that:
After concluding our Sunday night show at Lollapalooza, fans informed us that portions of that performance were missing and may have been censored by AT&T during the “Blue Room” Live Lollapalooza Webcast.
When asked about the missing performance, AT&T informed Lollapalooza that portions of the show were in fact missing from the webcast, and that their content monitor had made a mistake in cutting them.
During the performance of “Daughter” the following lyrics were sung to the tune of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” but were cut from the webcast:
- “George Bush, leave this world alone.” (the second time it was sung); and
- “George Bush find yourself another home.”
This, of course, troubles us as artists but also as citizens concerned with the issue of censorship and the increasingly consolidated control of the media.
AT&T’s actions strike at the heart of the public’s concerns over the power that corporations have when it comes to determining what the public sees and hears through communications media.
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If a company that is controlling a webcast is cutting out bits of our performance -not based on laws, but on their own preferences and interpretations - fans have little choice but to watch the censored version.
What happened to us this weekend was a wake up call, and it’s about something much bigger than the censorship of a rock band.
So AT&T’s “content monitor” cut political speech from a live webcast of a Pearl Jam concert and AT&T’s response to Pearl Jam’s inquiry was that the cuts were “a mistake.”
What does that mean? First off, if you agree to sponsor a webcast of a performance, then just broadcast it. It’s a Pearl Jam concert. What is there to monitor?
Second, the “content monitor” chose to cut political language that was critical of Bush from the broadcast. Was it “a mistake” or was the person following AT&T’s rules for censoring webcasts down to what they’ve decided is acceptable content?
If it was a mistake, what was the mistake? Was it a mistake that somebody forgot to tell the content monitor not to cut anything from a live concert performance or was it a “mistake” purposely made by a content monitor who doesn’t approve of statements critical of Bush?
So yes, this is something much bigger than the censorship of a rock band. It’s about the future of the internet, and this is just an example of what happens when corporate hacks control the content.
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