The FCC is being slammed by everyone from consumer advocacy outfits to former FCC staffers for their latest stance on media consolidation. The FCC is preparing to relax long-standing rules that limit corporations from owning radio, television stations and newspapers in the same market. Under the weaker rules, one company could now own your town's ISP, all of its newspapers, up to 2 TV stations and up to 8 radio stations.
Consumer advocates have rather correctly observed that this limits the quality and diversity of the news and information a community receives, consumer group Free press running a campaign the last few weeks
gathering signatures for a petition to thwart the FCC's plan. In an
interview with Bill Moyers, Craig Aaron of Free Press ponders why a President who supported these rules would support an FCC trying to eliminate them:
quote:
Well, that’s the $64 million question. Barack Obama as a senator was one of the leading voices against the exact same rules that his FCC chairman is pushing forward now. He wrote op-eds, he co-sponsored legislation to throw out these exact same rules, legislation that passed in the Senate. And yet, his own FCC chairman, his appointee, is suddenly in a huge rush to get this deal done, and if these reports are to be believed, they’re going to try and do this by Christmas, before the end of the year.
In a
blog post, former FCC Commissioner Michael Copps laments the FCC's decision, and blames a government culture that's addicted to M&A's, and no longer serves the public:
quote:
The public sector is at least equally culpable because government—especially the FCC where I served for more than a decade—blessed just about every media merger and acquisition that came before it. Then it proceeded, over the better part of a generation, to eviscerate almost all of the specific public interest guidelines that had been put in place over many years to ensure that the people’s airwaves actually serve the people.
The upcoming FCC vote, which will be conducted behind closed doors, is being justified by the FCC as a way to help struggling newspapers like the
Chicago Tribune, which the agency argues can only survive if they can get funds from larger companies currently prevented from buying them. Though consumer advocates would like to know why exactly the
Tribune needs government saving, and why at such a steep cost?
