More Media Consolidation Coming Soon

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."

Comments

Spectacular

[zpengo]

This is great news. Any empire that gets that large inevitably becomes unstable (see "Roman Empire", p. xxxvi). Maybe this is the only way to get revolution to occur.

It's like a leashed dog. You hold the leash, the dog will pull on it. You let go, the dog will run around a bit then get tired and stop.

Not like it matters these days...

[Riskable]

The reason why these restrictions were put into place were pretty much for NEWS. That way, you would never have just one (or even two) sources reporting the news (in theory, the stations will correct eachother and ferociously try to "get the scoop" first). It was to create competition and better the general quality of the content on your TV stations. The separation of local and cable-based viewership was also thought to be necessary in this regard.

However, in recent years, companies that wish they could merge, but can't due to regulations, have found the perfect way around the problem: Content sharing agreements.

So instead of having to come up with ORIGINAL programming, news, and movies, they can just copy eachother's work. These sharing agreements also cross into paper and Internet media as well.

So it used to be that if media company X did something terrible, companies Y and Z would report on it. However, nowadays we'll see a content sharing agreement between company X and Y, with Z sharing content with Y as well. Since none of them want to lose their 'agreements' they won't say anything bad about eachother... Or resist buying into 3rd party content.

This way they don't have to merge and they don't have to share revenues, but they can save a ton of money--at the cost of original programming and the public's best interest.