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More Media Consolidation Coming Soon

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the conglomomegahypercorp dept.

Logic Bomb writes: "According to the Washington Post, a federal appeals court yesterday made a ruling that could make the last couple years of media consolidation look like nothing. Some major FCC rules about media ownership were ruled as "arbitrary" and therefore illegal, most importantly the one preventing a company from owning the cable system and television stations in the same place. Also, though the FCC gets one more chance to defend it, the rule about a company not owning stations reaching more than 35% of the national viewership may get tossed out too."

4 of 200 comments (clear)

  1. Who Owns What by SkewlD00d · · Score: 5, Informative

    Who Owns What, the list keeps getting smaller and the entries get longer.

    --
    The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
  2. Re:News for Nerds?? by Keith+Mickunas · · Score: 2, Informative

    How can this not be a concern for us? All these giant media companies control all sorts of media. TV - OTA, satelite and cable, internet sites, internet access via cable, DSL, dialup, or wireless, and telephones both normal and wireless, magizines, newspapers and radio. These media companies also control movie and music distribution and will dictate new technologies that remove our rights. The also control the primary news sources. This certainly matters to anyone that cares about technology.

  3. Re:Cheaper rates? by Sivar · · Score: 2, Informative

    DirecTV has only gone up once in the entire company history, and that was by $2.00 for all packages. Who needs cable?

    --
    Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
  4. The problem with voting... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative
    The problem with voting as it is done today is it is only good for choosing between two things. What we need to do is change the way voting is done, so that instead of picking who you want to win the election, you put all of the candidates in order of who you want in office.

    Say you have three candidates, apple, orange, and pear. Your voting population rates the candidates in the following order:

    Voter # Candidates (favorite to least favorite)
    1 - apple, pear, orange
    2 - apple, orange, pear
    3 - orange, apple, pear
    4 - orange, apple, pear
    5 - orange, apple, pear
    6 - pear, apple, orange
    7 - pear, apple, orange

    In a standard election, orange would win, since he got three votes. People would say voters 6 and 7 wasted their votes, since pear didn't have a chance of winning. But there's a better way to do the elections.

    Have the voters create an ordered list like above. Then use those list to do pseudo elections between each pair of candidates. The results look like this:

    apple vs. orange - 4 to 3
    apple vs. pear - 5 to 2
    orange vs. pear - 4 to 3

    As you see, apple won every election he was in. The results are as they would have been if voters 6 and 7 hadn't "wasted" their votes. It always works out that one voter wins every pseudoelection.

    But what are the chances of such a more logical voting procedure ever being adopted. If people wern't afraid of wasting their votes, it just might happen that the republicats lose, and so they'd never let this happen.