Many nights, Spooks turn on their shortwave radios and drift through the frequencies. On any given night, one can hear amateur radio stations broadcasting church sermons, utility traffic for aircrafts – with the right equipment, you can hear/contact the International Space Station. Yet one of the most eerie, mysterious uses of shortwave is that of the numbers stations: stations that feature ominous – sometimes robotic – voices saying seemingly random number patterns.

They’re folding like cheap card tables. Since the beginning of the year, we’ve seen the demise of NBCLatino.com, an English-language website for Latinos, as well as CNN Latino, Time Warner’s year-long effort to create programming for the U.S. Hispanic market. Now come rumors that Poder, Televisa’s magazine providing “Intelligence for the Business Elite,” may cease publication. Hold on, amigo. Isn’t the Latino market growing in demographic leaps and bounds? Don’t we have a zillion dollars in purchasing power? Didn’t we decide the election? One would think that Latino media should be thriving. 

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski’s plan to allow greater media consolidation in local markets could wipe out many of the remaining TV station owners of color left in the country. According to the latest data, people of color own just over 3 percent of all full-power TV stations — just 43 of the nation’s 1,348 stations — despite making up close to 40 percent of the U.S. population. But the FCC chairman doesn’t plan to deal with this media inequality. Instead, he wants to adopt rules that will make things worse. 

The Pentagon’s defiant pledge to stick with the Rush Limbaugh show, no matter what, bumps up against a few hard and insulting realities. The Armed Forces Network that carries the Limbaugh show is not a private business that can do whatever it pleases with its money, personnel and policy. Every penny of the armed forces’ bloated budget comes from taxpayers. And since the military is not a democracy, and decisions are made top down, there was never any chance that taxpayers would have any say about the use of their money to subsidize the blatant bias of one radio jock.