The Neomarxist who is helping to influence Obama’s media policy

Theirer concurs. “Free Press started off not as the radical agitators on the broadband and net neutrality front, but by trying to regulate the press and trying to regulate the media,” Theirer said. “And really, that’s been their heart and soul, and the reason they got involved in the policy world. Of course, net neutrality plays into the battle–or as they call it, the ‘struggle’–for media. But the end game for Free Press has always been effecting media policy, if not utterly controlling it.”

Free Press isn’t exactly shy about its aims. “So who owns your media?” reads the copy on its site. “Is it someone from your community delivering your news? Or even someone who shares your issues and concerns? Probably not.” All such copy, say the group’s critics, comes from a watered-down, more politically palatable version of McChesney’s actual beliefs – beliefs that led McChesney to commend Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez in 2007 after he shut down his country’s private media companies, and to crow, “Free Press is…fighting at the FCC. They’re fighting in the court system. They’re basically fighting behind closed doors.”

Nor is the FTC report the first time Free Press has influenced the Obama administration. Several former Free Press employees now work for Obama. Former policy director Ben Scott left Free Press last month for a gig at the State Department, where he’s now acting as an innovation advisor for the agency’s overseas media efforts. Like a number of other Free Press employees, Scott learned the ins and outs of media advocacy directly from McChesney while a student of his at the University of Illinois.

Right around the time that Scott announced he was leaving for the State Department, National Journal revealed that a press release supposedly authored by Democratic Rep. Jay Inslee had actually been written by Scott. “As legislators committed to expanding access to open, affordable, world-class broadband networks,” reads the document, “we have a very strong interest in promoting policies that can support these goals.”

Theirer points to Scott’s hiring, as well as the recent FTC report, as evidence that Free Press is starting to develop “some real connections and impact.”

“Essentially we have someone from a neomarxist media outfit setting America’s global policy on information issues at the State Department,” Theirer added.

Scott isn’t the only Free Press employee to land a government job under Obama. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has Free Press alumna Jen Howard on his staff. Before flacking for Genachowski, Howard was the spokesperson for Free Press. Since joining the FCC, she’s worked tirelessly to make sure her boss’s messaging lines up with that of her former employer.

According to another source who works with net neutrality advocates, Free Press is considered fringe even by the standards of pro-media-regulation types. “Everybody likes to have a tiger on their side,” he said, “but Free Press makes people nervous.”