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More on Media Consolidation
A few more links on the important FCC decision coming up in a few weeks (see our previous story for more). Common Cause has a good set of background information and advocacy. The Washington Post has a story about the decision, focusing on how independent television stations will be squeezed even harder. This article about ClearChannel is a useful primer about the future of mass media.
Relaxation of media ownership is something that is happening over here in the UK at the moment and many are worried that Murdoch in particular could expand into terrestrial television. Our network television is now owned by two companies who are planning to merge once the Communications Bill is passed.
johnBe like Jayson Blair and make up your own news at the Not True Times
All I Want For Christmas Is My Constitutional Rights
but they have bought every radio station station in the Houston area that didn't suck, and even a few that did. So I drive cross country, I find another radio station. I listen to it, sounds kinda cool, then you hear "Thank you for listend to KXYZ, the ONLY station that doesn't suck, a Clear Channel Communications station." So they admit that all their other stations suck?
I wanted to boycott them for taking off my morning show, and using the trained monkeys that borderline politicaly correct (the previous guys would never be mistaken for anywhere near politicaly correct) from New Orleans to broadcast to the entire Gulf Coast. Sounds like cost savings to me, but it really ruined the mornings for me.
So I swallowed my pride and listened anyways. Before Clear Channel bought everything I stopped listening to one of our local stations because I couldn't stand hearing "Did somebody say McDonalds" 13 times in a 30 second period. Now nearly half the commercials ClearChannel plays assume I can't get my dick up and I need to hear the phone number of the fixer 12 times because I can't dial a damned phone. I assure you neaither is a concern in my case. The quality of radio sure took a dive when they came in.
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Saw my first ClearChannel signed billboard near my home in London :-(. Begun this advertising war has.
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
Clearchannel has singlehandedly destroyed radio in the US. Five years ago, I had quite a nice variety of stations to pick from, with all twelve of my presets going to something that, depending on my mood, I would enjoy.
Now, I have two stations I listen to... A local college station, and NPR. And I don't even like NPR, but angry lesbians amuse me more than the same top-10 pop songs played over and over.
Clearchannel, as an "experiment" in media conglomeration, should end. Revoke its corporate charter, dissolve it, return control and ownership to each individual station. And more importantly, we need to IMMEDIATELY stop further Borg-like activity on the part of media megacorps.
I want decent independant radio back.
Why are they losing audiences to cable channels?
Can it be because the programming they offer flat out sucks?
Can it be that people aren't as stupid as they've assumed since the 50s?
That they dont want to see another sitcom about a family with a precocious little kid that runs the house, or 5 20-something hipsters drinking coffee and making dumb wisecracks?
Can it be that they've reached the puking threshhold with this reality TV crap? That people dont care which of the 40 masked guys that some whore chooses?
Can it be that the old standbys of Leno and Letterman kissing hollywood ass is frankly BORING?
I mean there's a reason I'd rather watch some longwinded documentary about the treasures of King Razamatooten from the 3rd dynasty; as dry and uninteresting as it is, it's better than anything NBC, CBS, ABC, FOX and the DUBBYA-BEE have to offer.
Perhaps just getting "known star" to do a sitcom for 2 million an episode doesn't guarantee ratings anymore.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I suggest that most slashdot types are libertarian in their political thought. Not Libertarian(tm), but libertarian in thought.
At least that's what I seem to get from reading at +1 or -1.
It seems hip to call yourself liberal, but then go home and secretly watch Fox News.
The vast majority of Americans (sorry foreigners) have very mixed political views, and fewer and fewer can strongly identify with one of the two major parties.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
getting three strikes, and then they're free!! All you would need to do is get all of them to agree to it and it might work. See, I see this as an advantage.
and it is as networks like UPN are screaming for stations to carry them. If the station owners had any balls at all they would stop the network strong-arm tactics my having a mass drop of the fox network.
I find that I watch Fox less and less.... except for the Simpsons they dont have anything I want to watch on prime time. UPN on the otherhand does have some things coming along.. and there are alot of good shows in syndication that any station can pick up.
It depends on your station if you are the one low power fox station in a market of 5 then you can be hosed.... if you are one of 3 in a market, changing will not drop your viewership.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
where are all the libertarians crying out in joy? isn't this great - capitalism in action! more and more of those pesky government regulations being whisked out of the way!
and now you guys all have your free-market radio stations where you - yes, i mean YOU! - can make choices about which radio station will be #1! yes-siree-bob, all those companies are entirely dependant on your happiness with their programming decisions.
isn't it just GREAT!
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
To be 100% honest, I don't see the big deal over the issue of media consolidation. Newspapers? Hah. Newspapers are a dead format. It's common knowledge that the current newspapers out there are not gaining any new subscribers to replace the ones that are dying off. Soon enough it won't be worth the printing costs for newspapers to be in the paper business without going completely digital.
:)
Radio? Again, another dead format, save for talk radio. The only time I and others I know listen to the radio is to either catch the local news, traffic and weather while on the way to work and on the way home, and/or to listen to talk radio such as good 'ol Rush Limbaugh. Music stations just aren't worth listening to, both for the low variety of music (rap and hip-hop aren't my forte, but soundtracks are), and because of the low quality of the music they do play. I get better sounding music out of my computer than I do my radio.
Television? For the free airwaves, it's another dead format. The only future of television is in cable and satellite dishes. I remember reading an article a few years ago stating that no television will be free by 2010. Whether that's still the case, I don't know, but it's only a question of when, not "will it happen?" Honestly, who cares who owns two or three local stations when there are 200+ channels to watch? If I want to find out what's happening locally, I can either go to a local news-oriented website, or *gasp* - actually go outside and find out for myself.
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." - Oscar Wilde
Back when I was a DJ at WVBR (briefly) I spent most of my time calculating which songs to play in order to fill the 20-minute space between weather and station identification, and between news and the ad break. Given that I had exactly 20 minutes, if I started with a 5:13, a 3:17, and a 4:39, I then had to find a song or two to fill the remaining 7 or so minutes.
Before holidays, we would prerecord our shifts on reel-to-reel tape, and the engineer would simply swap reels every 3 hours.
It occured to me that if we had every song in our cd library as an mp3 in a database, we could automate the entire process. We could have the software rotate through the songs to fill the air-time exactly, we could load all the ad spots and PAs in a separate table, and not even have to be in the room.
I wonder if anyone is doing this now. If not, I'm sure it will.
every stain tells a story
would be a coverage map of US of each of the companies. Numbers mean little, it is coverage that matters. Anyone know of anything like it? Wanna create it?
"If you are on fire you can just stop, drop, and roll. If you fall into Lava you are just dead." - my 5yr old daughter
San Fransisco and LA have KPFA and perhaps one or two other radio outlets that are operated similarly to the way KBOO is. But nationwide our options for true community controlled media has become very very limited.
There are several reasons why corporate control of our airwaves remains an issue that is important to understand:
It amazes me how little the citizens of this country care about being controlled or manipulated. Perhaps it has come down to the power that can be purchased by a few people who have large sums of money and big desires that remain unfulfilled.
If you are a terror to many, then beware of many. --Ausonius
Just look at clearchannel. They own almost every radio station in the US now and they have been a failure in all respects.
They were not succesfull in making money. Radio revenues went way down after their takeovers.
They were not succesfull in making interesting radio. My favourite hard rock station has become quite awfull after the takeover. Now i prefer playing any crappy CD over and over again instead of listening to radio.
They were not succesful in allowing different political views, informing the public, etc. Many controversial DJs were just fired. Of course Limbaugh reins supreme.
So, yes clearchannel proves consolidation is just bad news.
SOme people may say that the internet makes it ok... but consider this - many people do not have internet (about 50% of the us, i believe) and also the internet cannot fully replace TV as it could not fully replace my fave hard rock radio station. They are just different media.
welcome to the grassroots fight of your life, if you're a media democracy activist. we've been working on this for a year, trying to build a coalition of peace and justice groups against the issue. during the war in iraq, many national peace activists would turn on the nightly news and say, 'what the hell? where are the bodies? why are retired generals and embedded reporters giving me my news?'
so they embraced the issue. it's a lot harder to ignore the group of people on the steps of the fcc whining 'FREE AND INDEPENDENT MEDIA' if those people are anti-war citizens from all across the country with money, clout, and celebrity spokesmen (michael moore).
the smallish team media democracy activists has ballooned into a huge group of peace and justice activists, hackers, consumer rights activists, kids, parents, people of all stripes. now groups like moveon.org are planning national call-in days. now code pink is pink-slipping fcc chairman michael powell alongside his much-more-famous father, colin powell.
so we have the people. what do we do? what's our power?
1) call your senator. like, now. right now. the senate, after the second commerce committee hearing on this issue, is rattling some sabers and could definitely use some encouragement that this issue isn't just one for the lobbyists.
2) comment to the fcc. you can do so here and the comments you make will also go to the senate commerce committee, and to the president.
3) tell someone who isn't tech savvy about this. you're reading slashdot. you have a choice about where you get your media. most people don't. newspaper, radio, and television matter more than we can say in most parts of this country. just ask the good people of minot.
and visit us at prometheus. we're here all the time. and we will be until june 2nd and after.
hannah sassaman
prometheusradioproject
So what. Maybe they should think about not paying people $5 million per year to play a kid's game or $1 million per episode to act in a sitcom. Get to the root of the "rising cost of programming" problem rather than begging the government to let them consolidate programming into even more homogenized crap than it already is.
This is how it's supposed to work. If overpaid actors, sports players and coke-sniffing media executives are making the industry unprofitable, then companies go out of business, supply of overpaid job openings dwindle, and costs fall back into line. We don't need to put all of a scarce public resource in control of a single private party just to prop up a bad business model.
As you may know, one of the advantages of cable is that it has so many channels that there is the opportunity for niche markets.
Digital Television provides 19.4 Mbps of data per channel. This could either be a single high-definition stream, or a multiplex set of standard-definition streams (or even a mixture of both).
So you could have 4 times as many digital video streams on the air as you have analog video channels today, if they all do a 4 way multiplex (they call it "multicast", but that confuses us IT folks) at SD bitrates equivalent to those of SD digital cable.
It remains to be seen what might be made of those multiplexed digital television channels.
PBS, for example, provides a pre-multiplexed DTV feed to public television stations broadcasting a digital channel, including a children's feed, and an adult learning feed, and many are running with this 4 channel "multicast" during non-prime hours.
So it might be that broadcast DTV becomes more "cable-ized" through the addition of multiplexed channels.
They have a license to use the public's airwaves for the public good. They are in gross violation of that license. Someone needs to organize a campaign to protest the re-newal of a stations liscense, they need to be re-newed every 8 years
Free cell phone tracking
First of all, let me make myself clear (no pun intended). Clear Channel sucks. They produce a lousy product, and are profitable only because they are so lowest common denominator that they don't have much costs at all.
But they are a monopoly you say? Or at least someone gobbling up a limited resource? True. But why is the resource (in this case, air waves) so limited? Its the FCCs fault.
FM radio was a huge technological improvement over AM radio. The AM band occupies 540-1700 KHz and FM is only 88-108 MHz. The technological leaps that have happened over the years that made wireless ethernet, mobile phones (which occupy comparitively razor thin slivers in the spectrum when compared with radio) and other technology has the potential to allow thousands of radio stations sharing the same area. If the FCC would get off its ass and get the new band allocated, Clear Channel could set up all the top-40 stations that it wished and there would be plenty of room for public radio, non-profit independant broadcasters and any joe that would normally set up a pirate radio station.
One should not attack entities consuming scarce resources when it is possible to attack scarcity itself.
If Micheal and his flock don't like what they hear on the radio, they can choose another channel, or better yet, start their own. If what they say is true and there indeed is a large group of dissatisfied radio listeners out there, they will tune in and the station will be economically viable. If not, they can chip in to cover the operating costs and play whatever they want.
Like that'll happen. It's a lot easier to keep posting petulant bleatings on Slashdot than to put your money where your mouth is.
> To remedy this horrible situation, the Slashbots propose - wait for it - more government regulation!
No, maintaining existing FCC regulations of ownership. Regulations that have already been relaxed and which in turn allowed ClearChannel to spread like a plague.
> After all - the poor, huddled masses out there can't possibly be expected to make their own decisions on what to listen to, can they?
The poor, huddled masses have... radio. And broadcast TV. Without true programming diversity, no true choice is available to the average person.
If Conglomerate-1 buys out half a region's media outlets, and Conglomerate-2 buys out the other half, you now have to HOPE that one of those conglomerates has a soul. Otherwise what balance of coverage and entertainment are you likely to see from Big Business? "Negative" war coverage bad for business? Pipe up the patriotic tunes!
Control the media, control the minds. That's why we like to knock out an enemy's broadcasts during war and replace them with our own Commando Solo broadcasts.
I am not in the business and I really don't know what I am talking about (I know very little about business, marketing, music, media) so take what I have to say with a grain of salt.
It seems to me that media almost equals "entertainment." Even the news these days (except for maybe your local news) is in essence a form of entertainment. Sure we need to be aware of what is happening in the world but if it isn't selling ads or it doesn't have enough viewers, the format will be adjusted to gain market share. Almost nightly you can switch from NBC, ABC, and CBS and see almost exactly the same stories at almost exactly the same moment because that is how the formula works.
On radio, you can listen to too many sound alike songs on too many sound alike stations, because that is how the formula works - and the formula is what is proven to get the most listeners and make the most profit from ad sales.
I'd sure like more local programming on both TV and radio. I'd like to see less polished matterial too. I'd love to hear local music on local radio stations, knowing that the band I hear on the radio today, I can go to the bar tonight and hear. I'd love to see local talent on a local TV station produced by local people that know their local audience.
But it ain't gonna happen. ad time is bought and sold by middlemen. They won't pay the rates that they will pay for a network show. Not even when you break it down to price per person. Why? Mediocrity rules I think. If they miss the target but can show the formula said this should have worked, they still have a job and a fat paycheck. If they took a risk and blew it, they would be out of work.
Pitchmen also bring the music to the stations and pretty much tell the stations what to play. It is coupled to everything from advertising dollars to upcomming concerts to who knows what else? A program director who does not play ball quickly finds out that the station loses revenue if he won't play the game. So, he plays the game.
Little guys deserve a chance but somehow, I figure it ain't gonna happen.
It sounds like an old-school claim, but this really does set us back a century. We'll take a look at it: Huge media giant buys up a bunch of smaller television stations, and doubles commercial time. Instead of watching a television show, we will be watching a string of commercials with small breaks in between.
This isn't so bad, however. This will push the mass of people that don't want to read for entertainment onto the internet. I spend more time on-line than in front of television. Those that get fed up with the mass abusage of the internet will give up, go to IRC or start reading books for entertainment.
Reading is awesome. I think that everyone's time is better spent reading a book instead of watching a television. Reading affects your articulation skills, enhances spelling ability, and grows your vocabulary. People will eventually get smarter over time, and will be more interesting to speak with.
All of this because some huge media company decided to give ads instead of content. I already gave up on listening to the radio.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
While i'm not exactly sure how they figure it out, i did once get a phone call that asked which stations i listened to, and if i liked certain clips from songs.
The company you are looking for is called Arbitron. Most of the ratings information is compiled during 'books' which are roughly equivalent to 'sweeps' for television. Most of the information is compiled from written diaries where a listener is expected to write down each 15 minutes of radio they listen to. Last I heard (couple of years ago) they were working with a technology called 'People Meters' (IIRC), which would automate the process a bit more.
BTW, I learned this while working the databases of a company that attempted to exploit Arbitron's selection criteria (we roughly reverse engineered it) and marketing directly to the people most likely to have a diary. Ya know, as a simple reminder of what to write in the diaries.
It was a fairly successful business, right up until Clear Channel bought most of our clients and used their own marketing company to do what we did, leading to about a 30% reduction in staff at my employer. Two years after I was laid off the company I worked for crumbled and was sold.
+&x
This article in the NY times is one of the best things I've seen on the subject, so I had to pass it along.
It's true that it is very hard to find an alternative viewpoint in the media in this country, and surprising when the press is so profit-driven. This is the best explanation of this problem that I've seen so far, and suggests that it is this very profit motive that causes large media companies in the US to take the side of the party in power.
Very interesting and important.
(previous submission accidental)