Media

If you're sick of having your mailbox littered with a dozen catalogs from companies you have no interest in hearing from, you might want to check out Catalog Choice. Catalog Choice is a sponsored project of the Ecology Center, a Berkeley-based group that was responsible for operating one of the first curbside recycling programs in the 1970s.

Adbusters, the Canadian culture jamming magazine largely responsible for propagating Buy Nothing Day, has once again been rejected in its attempt to buy advertising on MTV in promotion of the anti-consumerist holiday. MTV's Advertising Standards representative, Elisa J. Billis, didn't deny that the rejection was based soley on the message of the ad, simply saying that "the spot goes further than we are willing to accept on our channels."

A recent class action lawsuit threatens to blow the lid off of Comcast's alleged data discrimination policy. Jon Hart, a San Francisco Comcast subscriber is suing the communications giant on a variety of charges, ranging from breach of contract to computer fraud.

Scientifically correct clouds are roiling in the atmosphere of the Smithsonian Institute. The institute’s much vaunted 2006 exhibit on warming in the Arctic was shown recently to have been altered toward a global warming-not-yet-proven view at the last hour by the Smithsonian’s director, Cristian Samper.

In the wake of a series of allegations from the Hong Kong-based Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior, Disney has deployed auditors to China's Guangdong Province to investigate the working conditions at one of its toy factories. Last month, SSACM recorded the complaints of workers at the factory in question, and found that laborers had been subjected to 16-hour work days with only two days off per month, and overtime compensation that was less than half the wage mandated by Chinese law.