Religious coalition supports broadband expansion

The National Interfaith Coalition for Media Justice launched a new campaign to end the digital divide in America: Bring Betty Broadband.

This campaign takes on broadband inequity with a unique perspective - the religious community's appreciation for helping one's neighbor and banding together as one.

Bring Betty Broadband stresses the communal benefits of broadband penetration.

"Increasing access doesn't just assist the people who are helped we all benefit. Just as the value of a telephone increases when we can reach more people by using it, the value of the Internet for all of us increases when we are all connected."

The Bring Betty Broadband campaign casts the debate over broadband in moral terms, comparing the right "to disseminate and receive information," as a right "that helps to define ourselves as human beings and political actors."

Additionally, "in the modern economy, just distribution of access to communication and information is essential to promote economic justice," says the group. "Increasingly in the United States, the fundamental right to communicate is meaningless without high speed Internet access."

Bring Betty Broadband is part of a media reform project called "So We Might See," organized by the United Church of Christ and endorsed by the National Council of Churches, the US Catholic Conference of Bishops, the United Methodists, the Presbyterian Church (PCUSA), the Lutherans (ELCA), and the Islamic Society of North America.

The United Church of Christ - organizers of the Bring Betty Broadband campaign - has a long and proud history promoting media justice, dating back to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. It was the UCC's Office of Communications that successfully petitioned the FCC to revoke the license of a Mississippi TV station due to its racially biased programming.

To learn what other groups and organizations are behind the broadband debate, visit our partners page and see which groups Speed Matters works with to promote broadband expansion every day.

So We Might See: A National Coalition for Media Justice (United Church of Christ)

Bring Betty Broadband (So We Might See)

Partners (Speed Matters)