Slashdot Mirror
FCC Approves Media Consolidation
evenprime writes "You can expect more media consolidation in the future. CBS is reporting that the FCC has approved the media deregulation that was previously discussed on Slashdot. Expect Clear Channel, Viacom and their kin to get bigger, and the radio to have even less diversity (a situation that some people think is responsible for falling CD sales)."
...and no rules to bind them...
I gave up watching TV and listening to the radio long ago. There's simply nothing good on anymore, and the radio has been crap for years. I'm sure many of you feel the same way.
RaGe
We're all just noise on the wires..
That's all I have to say about that.
More to the point, is there anyone, ANYONE at all who thinks this is a good idea besides the peeps at the top who stand to get more money?
GeekNights!
Late Night Radio for Geeks!
"If I were a record seller, I'd lay heaps of blame on radio, which used to be 80 per cent of the reason people bought music. ..... Today, that figure is closer to 20 per cent, insiders say."
I know the radio sucks, but I had no idea that the record industry felt the same way. Seems like everything to do with music needs a remodel.
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
Neo-conservatives strike again! Thanks Mr. Powell!
The continuing decline of the overall quality of US radio has been my primary motivation in finding alternative music sources. I tried shoutcast and spinner as well as some of the smaller webcast groups. Eventually, I just started listening to Radio 1 from the BBC. This now streams into my home 24/7 as well as my laptop at work. I have never looked back. Hopefully as folks start becoming more disgusted by the dumbed-down and monotonous crap that Clear Channel pumps into Everytown, USA, folks will start to look abroad for entertainment. The music is out there, you just have to look beyond the borders.
Here ya go!
Radio 1 - Rock and Pop
Radio 1 Xtra - Rap and Hip Hop
Some of the music is exactly what you hear in the US on Clear Channel stations, but there is a hell of a lot more music-base to generate the playlists.
While you're there, be sure to read/stream the news. CNN has been becoming even more remarkable selective in what they post lately. Another symptom of the disease that infects the deregulated media industries.
Enjoy!
It's strange indeed that the over-the-air broadcasters successfully complained about the threat of cable, when GE, Disney, Viacom and Fox are hip-deep in cable properties themselves. Gotta love them lobbyists!
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
I like all kinds of music.
As long as the radio plays both top-40 and pop, it doesn't really matter to me.
Best Windows Freeware
deserve's got nothing to do with it...
Perhaps it will be up to PBS to step up and become a real news source much like NPR is on the radio. (True NPR as its own biases, but they seem much less pronounced than any of my alternatives.)
The media are already too big not to offer the same rehashed content over and over again... and yet they want to merge...
Note that authors and other content providers usually work in small teams that can fit in most small board rooms (a large-sized university class could hold anywhere from 5 to 15 TEAMS in comfort...)
Yet the content owners want to merge their teams of lawyer to sue everyone else more effectively. They also happen to become the corporate equivalent of "unions" when negotiating contracts with the content providers...
And our governments don't fine them a million for each time they think about merging instead of providing exciting, valuable content for which most of us would pay...
Has Powell, at ANY point, actually outlined how he thinks that allowing for further broadcast television consolidation will help it compete with cable? I could have SWORN the main reason people get cable was for the diversity of the programming.
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
Sounds like it's time to start maintainin
a list (web site, blog...) of the
non-alignend radio & TV stations....vote
with your tuner.
...I think I am going to be sick.
Clear Channel getting bigger won't be good for anyone. Now the RIAA will have more power to fight file sharing, while ignoring the fact that the reason they aren't selling as many records is because most of what the push out is complete and utter fertilizer.
(/local/home/curiosity)-#who -u|grep thecat|cut -c 44-49|xargs kill -9
It increases the ownership from 35% to 45%, but prevents mergers from the big 4 (Fox, ABC, CBS, NBC). I'm not sure the % increase would make a huge difference anyway, but by not allowing the big guys to merge will keep some semblance of diversity in programming. That's assuming you think there is currently any diversity in OTA offerings.
Also the radio markets are still limited to a max. of 8 in markets of 45 or greater stations. Same issue as above, if there is no variety now, how in the world are they going to make it much worse?
-- Rick
There are a few independent radio stations left that are quite popular and financially successful: FM 107.3 "The Wave" Smooth Jazz in the Cleveland area is quite popular and gives away daily two tickets to a tropical vacation.
All those found conversing with the thought criminal will be treated in the same manner. Have a nice day. Or else.
Fine by me. In fact, maybe more than fine. If the entire modern entity that is radio wants to specialize and specialize further, when tech changes enough, they're gonna fall hard, just like any other entity that adapts itself to one set of conditions and attempts to preserve it.
Tweet, tweet.
We can finally get Hal... er.. that is, Carson Daily to bring a digitized... er, again, I mean a personalized local Top 20 program to Temple, TX! Howard Stern will start pushing Textile Fabrication Vermont Teddy Bears to the local Wilsonart guys! It's a great day to be an American!
With media conglomerations owning local channels, there is no incentive to provide news with a local slant. Thus, no one will hear about local issues. Since (thanks to the incredible human intelligence) nothing exists unless we see/hear it, small cities will cease to exist. I say that only partially in jest, but think about how many local issues that get squashed because it conflicts with a more profitable (in the minds of the corporate master) slant? Local environmental impact? Oh, no. Mustn't give that airtime lest it impact the profit machines in the big cities. Also, how about this for a twist on the first amendment? Condider offensive material. People in different areas have different standards, and THAT'S OK. If your city believes that the Golden Girls are the harem of Satan, it should be able to keep Golden Girl re-runs off their local stations. More power to'em. We shouldn't force global culture to be homogenous, even in the name of "Free Speech" and equal access. Ahh... yet more reasons for rejoicing in our household. We have taken our media budget (TV, movies, etc...) and plowed it into books and other activities.
ok troll, but the consumer is also a producer (or else, he has no money to consume), and economies of scale always hurt the employement.
Word Axis
Does this affect XM as well? Most of the mainstream radio stations play garbage (except for classic rock :). However most satellite radio stations (XM) or music TV stations (the channels you get with digital cable) usually play a good variety. Anyone know what will happen here?
somebody sets up 'public access' style internet TV? IPv6 has great multicast handling, and we're getting more and more bandwidth at home. We essentially have all the tools, and millions of potential channels. Anything you want to watch, when you want to watch it, all for the price of cable or dsl.
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
The party in power has now purchased 24/7 favorable media coverage in the upcoming election - and didn't have to spend a dime. How about them apples, Senator McCain and Senator Feingold?
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
Step One: Build a Media Empire.
Step Two: Buy out the US Government
Step Three: ????
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Soon, there will only be a single, united group of consolidated conglomerates, where it will be impossible to discern if what you are watching is entertainment, news, or just a clever marketing ploy. The saddest part of all is that the average citizen doesn't know or care. From American Idol to soundalike "Gangsta Rap," -trademark used by permission of ClearChannel - it is a seamless integration into our culture, where we are being trained by the richest 1% to be complacent with whatever is produced. The ultimate goal is to turn our lives into an MTV frenzy.
And it is working.
During the Iraq war I heard it said that the Iraqis had state run media, controlled entirely by the government.
We have corporate controlled media. Which is worse, I wonder?
Like figuring out which dildo hurts least going in...
"Regulations in the radio business, on the other hand, were actually tightened in some areas to limit the number of stations that a company can own in one market."
Doesn't make sense, since Bush is chummy with Clear Channel... In any case, if its true thank god, radio conglomerates are ruining America.Visualize the world of wine
One thing that disappoints me about this, is that the vote was on party lines, with Republicans on one side and Democrats on the other. Are Republicans (generally) really in favor of simultaneously deregulating while continuing to grant the government-backed monoplies that prevent free market competition? Or is this just the usual case of whoever-happens-to-be-in-power being corrupt, where Republicans (the people, I mean, not the politicians) are shaking their heads at how they've been sold out? Republicans, please answer: are you getting what you wanted, or are you being betrayed by poseur "Republicans"?
Or have you not figured it out yet, so you're suffering from a vague uneasiness that you can't explain? ;-)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
What isn't mentioned is that there is growing bipartisan distaste for this ruling. Trent Lott and several democrats have spoken out against it and are talking of bringing the issue to congress. Hopefully more republicans will jump off ship and support Lott and the others.
-Sean
Just remember kids... we created these media monopilies so you don't have to worry about complex choices and hard moral decisions. Just twitch when Clear Channel tells you to. Also remember to support their advertisers, and nobody will get hurt.
Republican Michael Powell, the chairman of the five-member FCC board, said the new rules are more likely to withstand legal challenges than the old rules, which had been rejected by U.S. courts.
Michael Powell is the son of Colin Powell in case you didnt know.
This means that in the future, the government will now only have to write one letter or make one telephone call to one board of directors of a single company to control the flow of propaH^H^H^H^H news throughout the entire usa.
They are already controling what you see on the news; read about it here.
And I quote:
(March 22):....it is not conducive to maintaining an overall neutrality in the Palestine uprisings to show any pictures of the American peacenik that was run over by the Israeli army bulldozer. This is only to be mentioned as a "tragic accident" for which the IDF "is truly saddened."
(Feb 10)....It is not permitted at this point to use or refer to any film clips, stills or articles emanating from any French source whatsoever.
The consolidation of these powers in the hands of a single person, say the person who inherits Murdoch's empire is truely firghtening, not only for the citezenry of the USA, but for the whole world, because now any flagrantly law violating military action can and will be sold to the american poplulation, and subsequently exported anywhere in the world, justified with bald faced lies transmitted through this consolidated and all powerful deception machine, which the Neocons are building.
Even Ted Turner is against this. It is a huge tragedy for the USA and the world, no doubt about it.
Great, CBC and no DirecTV. No thanks. Though Hockey Night is nice.
The BBC is a government subsidized quasi-monopoly. Using the BBC as a good example when it comes to media consolidation is abolsutely stupid, since they stand for what we are NOT wanting to happen to US media.
I love KEXP, the student run radio station associated with the Experience Music Project out of Seattle. Check them out at http://www.kexp.org/ It's listener supported (I'm a member) but free to all.
So, go out and get an Audiotron, and toss your AM/FM receiver in the trash.
As far as this latest ruling goes. It sucks. What needs to happen is radical change that vastly changes the value of the spectrum that people are using. Once these companies merge they'll be impossible to pull apart.
I think right now we need to free up more spectrum for public use, plus defend the WiFi space from being totally commercialized. Perhaps them we can have low cost bandwidth available everywhere and help keep us free from the monopolization of the airwaves.
The other avenue to fight back involves bringing back many of the FCC rules on community service, and the fairness doctrine. Fat chance, but worth writing and calling your congress-critter...
The people are ignorant, why give more power to people like the RIAA and other corperations to rule over people lives?
Like I said most people are ignorant and they believe whatever the box says to them.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Jukebox Jihad
That whole comment and the "What would Elvis do to stop piracy?" really annoys me to death. The Jihad comment for taking the word of the month (you know, terror, evil people, so on, so forth), and appling it to something that doesn't relate in the least.
Why doesn't the industry start talking about real leaks in their profits? Bad press for suing kids for $97 billion comes to mind, a price fixing scandal in the mid 90's gets on that list too, but above all, the state of music, the state of repetative crap that continues to be put out... it's like if 31 flavors determined that most people liked choclate and vanilla. You could get those two and only those two flavors at the counter. The others were still available, but you would have to go to black-market 31 flavors to enjoy it, all the while being called a criminal for spending money you never would have spent if you never made the effort to look for more flavors in the first place.
The industry must nevertheless also content itself with conducting business on a more modest scale, painful though the process might be. No one needs to spend in excess of $40 million on a record, as Sony did with Michael Jackson's 2001 flop, Invincible, for instance, when the White Stripes can muster a hit record for $10,000.
That's because the White Stripes is good, and Michael Jackson is getting old. By the way, I like how they skip mentioning that the "flop" sold many millions of records, just not on the same scale as previous, and I don't believe that "Elephant" (latest White Stripes) has cracked 1 million sold anywhere yet...
SecondPageMedia - Wha
Welcome to life under the Republicans. Please remember this blatant, greedy power-trip in November 2004. Thank you.
Globe199
When I hear a good song on the radio, I quickly get a pen to write the title down. But guess what? They never name it. Another cd sale lost.
Only the most popular (top ten) singles are treated fairly (artist and title given).
I know I can use the numerous electronic appliances sucha as sattelite tv ) that will enable this but simple radio is much more mainstream.
Oceania is now allied with Eastasia. Oceania has ALWAYS been allied with Eastasia.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
Reference to Paranoia?
My journal has hot
Well there is Jeb Bush in Florida... you may remember him as the guy who oversaw the mucking up of the election of 2000.
SecondPageMedia - Wha
Has anyone else heard this statistic or know where I can find a source in print?
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
is that it is just an FCC rule and given time it can be changed easily...unlike a law passed by congress.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
just my two cents:
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1c: shit
2c: shit
and an extra dollar as a tip:
shitshitsh itshitshits hitshits hitshits hitshitshitshitsh itshitshitshits hits hitshitshitshitshit shitshitshitsh itshitshitshitshitshitshitshitshitshitshitshitshi
america is certainly leading the way.
i'm going to invest in a bomb shelter in a few years, starting up a eco-collective and ignore the rest of the suffering world.
considering what huge impact media has, this seems like another nail in the coffin of whatever free speech remained in the states.
i'm sure the rest of the world will soon follow.
now we can all just sit back and enjoy the war with eurasia.
crap. i'm going back to reading sci-fi, and pretending the rest of this shit-for-brains world doesn't exist.
f64 : ranting and raving at the same time!
option 1: don't despair, organize! option 2: resistance is futile, despair!
The agency was also six months behind on completing its biennial review. Under a congressional law, the FCC is supposed to revisit its media rules every two years. ... and some urged the agency to ignore its deadline.
Revisiting the rules so frequently gives too much opportunity for rules to relax to quickly.
It's like continually asking the question "were we right?", then rolling the dice.
It's a complex issue, requiring lots of information to be collected and assessed. If this is rushed, it makes it too easy to make a bad call.
To badly paraphrase "the progress of a society cannot be increased just by speeding it up".
I think the Ents had it right.
Esteem isn't a zero sum game
(There is of course the need to make something that doesn't suck.)
sulli
RTFJ.
Is that this is a good thing for content producers. Think of it this way:
When consumers major media outlets completely cease to produce anything other than plain gelatin in terms of content, who will fill the void? More and more media choices are available every day. Even through the mainstream channel of cable and satellite options, there are more choices and more content produced.
When people find something creative and appealing, it will give a leg up on the regurgitated reality fare offered by the major players.
Anyone who thinks that they get the straight scoop from any major outlets - NY Times, Washington Post, CNN, Fox News, slashdot.... - needs to have their preconceptions evaluated.
The future of broadcasting is not to be found in the major media outlets. They will be left behind by the next generation of media. It's coming, and making programming more mindless will only hasten the death of TV as we know it.
This could be a great thing.
Respectfully,
Anomaly
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
Im sure the fact that this passed had absolutely nothing to do with the $2.8 million travel tab that FCC officials have been showered with by the people they are supposed to regulate. Not a thing. Does anyone except the people that stand to profit from this really think its a Good Thing?
no
. . . that all news will become Fair and Balanced!?
Or is that Fairly Unbalanced?
Dan Gillmor wrote a column in advance of this decision, worth a read at http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/598 9915.htm
Except that the FCC is required to review the diversity of media every two years and decide whether or not ownership limitations need to be opposed or lifted (this was result of the 2 year anniversary from the last review). So if the media really did become a monoculture and the FCC actually did serve the public interest ... then we'd be okay.
:)
Oh yeah, you know where I learned that? NPR
It's like asking "How will this affect HBO's fall lineup?"
150 years ago, 80+% of the work force was on farms, growing food.
Today, it's less than 3%.
According to your thinking, 77% of the work force is unemployed. Oops, no they got higher paying jobs elsewhere.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
So, there are going to be two possible things that can come of this: One, the media companies will be effective at giving people what they want. In this case, both consumers and the media companies win.
The other option is that media companies are not effective at giving people what they want. In this case, people will stop listening to them and the media companies will lose. Consumers will lose a little in that the radios in their cars will become pretty much useless. However, they'll be able to branch out into other forms of entertainment -- DVDs, video games, independent music, web surfing, and so on. The real winners will be the companies that figure out how to give consumers what they want.
I think that one can make a pretty good argument that the media ownership rules have outlived their usefulness. When each city only had 4 TV stations, a dozen radio stations and one newspaper, the rules made some sense because it guaranteed a wider variety of information and entertainment. But now, if I don't like what's on my local radio station, I can stream music from some independent station across the country. If I think the news from my local ABC news/newspaper/6 favorite radio stations is biased, there are a thousand options for me on the internet.
I'd argue that local broadcast media (TV/radio) and local newspapers are something of an anachronism anyway, for everything but the local stuff. I don't receive the local paper, because I can go online and read the news (for free). I rarely watch network TV because I have 50 cable stations and I'd rather watch Comedy Central than ABC.
To me, this seems to be equivilant to complaining about how few choices we have in bus and train transportation, while ignoring the fact that we have so many choices in cars, motorcycles, scooters, bicycles, airplanes, taxis, rollerskates, subways and so on.
Probably the most significant statement surrounding all this was made by Viacom Stations Group head Fred Reynolds, quoted in a NY Times story (frrbbb): "We're in the business of making money." So much for the public interest, convenience and necessity.
Just a friendly reminder to try your local national public radio stations. Although these stations aren't typically going to play current new music, often they do indeed run programs which feature new artists in various genres. Their website's music section, which lists upcomming scheduled music radio programs, reviews, and other things, is here.
At NPR's website, one can enter their zip code and your local NPR frequency will be shown to them.
On a side note, Clear Channel. Good Lord. Anyone here from Cleveland or familiar with the once-mighty WMMS? It was, during the late 60's and throughout the 70's and 80's, a great station. After several takovers and a seeming going-off-the-air-forever-stunt, Clear Channel picked them up. Today it is this pop-metal station that is the same format in every city. It is a really sad skeleton of a once-revolutionary radio station.
Loomis
"The television is the retina of the mind's eye" - Videodrome
seems like you get around a lot
Kidding aside, I absolutely agree with you. I think Dean Kootz put it best in his novel "Sieze the Night" when he stated that the collective intelligence of a family drops 5 IQ points per TV in a household.
we're not cattle, but well suscepteable to mass marketing, which is what media outlets are being used for.
it's not a lack of free will, but it's well funded persuasion. and it works terribly well.
in short: any deregulation of any market, leads to monopolies, and a deregulation of the media market leads to control of a majority of people.
f64 : quite in despair over the state of the world
According to this story at Yahoo, News Corp and Viacom are already in violation of the 35% reach rules as a result of mergers:
News Corp. and Viacom Inc., which owns CBS and UPN, stand to benefit from a higher national TV ownership cap because mergers have left them above the 35 percent level. Those companies, along with NBC, persuaded an appeals court last year to reject that cap and send it back to the FCC for revision.
Basically they merged, never divested some stations to become compliant, and have tying up the courts with appeals.
All this FCC decision does is take it out of the courts and make the mega-media companies happy. They have been breaking the rules all along and instead of punishment, they get rewarded. This decision does nothing good for us, the consumers, who OWN the airwaves.
Let us not forget that airwaves, just like public lands, are owned by all of us, the people.
There was a time that in exchange for having a broadcast license, a radio or television station used to have to file reports to show that they were airing programming in the public interest. Now they simply fill out a postcard for the FCC every 5 years or so. Basically they use OUR airwaves for THEIR profit and we get LESS options as a result.
If you want to make change, get out and vote. Call your senator or representative and let them know you are displeased. Believe it or not, they DO listen. They may not respond to every message, but they do keep a tally on how may letters they receive per a given subject and with enough letters, they will do something.
--Jon
From the article: "Record companies should start flooding the Internet with bogus MP3 files that look like songs, but that explode on contact inside the hard drives of Internet thieves. Anyone who illegally downloads an MP3 file via KaZaA or any of the myriad peer-to-peer (i.e. thief-to-thief) services would at best get a corrupted file, and at worst a ruined hard drive."
... the radio provides me with all of the FREE music I can handle. And yes there are a few non-ClearChannel stations left in this country.
Is this guy NUTS! Why does he think destroying someone's private property (i.e. their hard drive) will make them become a customer of the RIAA? I already refuse to buy any CDs because of the whole "enhanced" non-CD garbage. And no I am not "stealing" the music I listen to
In a recent interview, Lowry Mays, CEO of Clear Channel, made the following remark: "We're not in the business of providing news and information. We're not in the business of providing well-researched music. We're simply in the business of selling our customers products."
Therefore, whatever you think Clear Channel is today is whatever the consumers wanted.
yep, i'd give it a troll certainly. the only comment /. made regarding this store was with "from the monopoly-players-pass-go dept." no, one liners about how bad big monopolies are or how big business really sucks and we should all move on to greener pastures of using the wonderfull apt-get except for a win98 partition for games. nope, they're merely posting a story that they probably had submitted 20,000 times and figured the /. crowd wanted a discussion on it.
10,000 radio & TV stations
1,000 channels
100 years of broadcast history
10< owners
And still nothing to watch.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Can't say it enough. KEXP is the best radio station in the country.
Listen to the live stream.
Listen to the streaming archives.
Love music again.
Sure, they can't save TV. But they are saving radio every day of the week.
-r
Just because something is free does not mean you have to take it.
For taking the country your father has been defending and handing it over to us. I'm sure he is proud of you. Love, Verizon
I don't know what the big deal about companies being able to own more stations.
In the old days, it was true that you could only get a few stations from majoy networks, but today we have HUNDREDS of stations on cable, sattelite, and the internet.
If Clear Channel buys 8 out of 45 stations everywhere in the U.S. what's the big deal? Even if they bought EVERY channel what would be the big deal? If you don't like it, don't listen, if people don't listen, they won't be able to get advertisers, if they don't get advertisers they don't get money, if they don't get money, they go out of business. Problem solved!
It's not like T.V. and Radio are a TOOL that you HAVE to use to get your job done (I.E. a car, Windows, etc.). They are entertainment. If people don't like it, they don't need to watch.
"Much work is lost, for the lack of a little more." -Edward H. Harriman
Here in the Philadelphia area we have stations like WXPN as well as a plether of college radio. Between those stations and NPR, I don't even bother with comcerial stations.
Many cities have the like, find something in your area and support it.
If all else fails, join WHYY / NPR.
Now I understand why I could by all those fancy radios at the local dollar store...
Insert Witty Remark Here ===>____________________________
Because the BBC is government subsidized it tries extra hard to be "independent". Unlike, perhaps, FOX, which is "idenpendent" but toes the Bush line most closely. Just look at the Jessica Lynch coverage from the BBC and compare with what you see in the US. Them complain about bias, and compain to FOX
development.lombardi.com
The Good Ol' Boys (of Media) announced today that their formats will now be expanding. "We've got both type of music - country and western."
Double plus good, that! Looks like news, sounds like news, but there's no news in it.
He who controls the media, controls the people.
The BBC do have the advantage that they're a government-funded public service, rather than a profit-making business. In the worst case, that'd make them as bad as you describe, but they seem to have avoided that.
:-)
(They do have pretty serious competition on mainstream TV from the commercial ITV and Channel 4, although commercial radio is bad enough here that the BBC wins by default)
They're often rather critical of the government, actually, and in many disputes they're accused of being biased by both sides, which might well mean they're uncomfortably close to being balanced.
It's amusing to see the grandparent post commenting on Radio 1's larger playlists though, since some of the Radio 1 DJs have been known to complain (subtly, of course) about the commercial crap they're made to play. I hate to think what Clear Channel must be like if that's an improvement
It's no more independent than any other media. In fact, the BBC was charged by one of their own reporters of skewing the news coverage of the Iraq war.
I'm already bored by the fact that most radio stations manage to play the same set of 12 songs all day long, over and over and over. A local Clear Channel radio (who else) in Austin even plays the same songs at the same time. So every time I leave home for work, I feel like Bill Murray in "Groundhog day".
Does anyone know of an in-dash CD player without FM radio?
"I suppose you don't like tabloid newspapers either!"
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Thus continues the fall of America into bland mediocrity, and that is at best. I wouldn't be surprised if they manage to kill the new Low Power FM (LPFM) regulation next.
So it seems that the internet will continue to be the only source or real news and music anymore.
Hopefully people will finally get sick of the drudge TV and radio have become and demand things be put back the way they were. I mean seriously, look at what crap cable is now.
I have Time Warner Cable in Cincinatti, the standard cable and it makes me want to puke.
I get a few local channels which of course play crap. I've got CSPAN which comes in full of bars in the image, not that I watch that anyway unless I need to get to sleep fast. I've got three religious channels, which to 95% of the world is unwatchably boring, not to mention I'm not Christian anyway. I've got two PBS channels, which probably are better viewing than most the rest of it put together. A few crap movie channels like TBS and TNN and TNT. Discover channel, comedy central, cartoon network and news. That is IT. Oh and I have nine channels above 70 which show a test pattern 24/7, one of which has someone chanting the local weather over it. I pay about $40 a month for this "privilage".
If it were not the only way to get high speed internet where I am at, I would not even fucking bother with cable. I only wish I had enough techy neighbors to get a bunch of us together and buy our own T1 and set up a wireless neighborhood access point... Sadly, all my neighbors tech expertise ends at giving their John Deere an oil change.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
The BBC's Jessica Lynch "expose" was recently exposed as a fraud.
/.ers make -- thinking that "independent" means "agrees with me."
You make the same mistake a lot of
This has nothing to do with liberalism.
Market consolidation is just a pretty way of saying COMMUNISM.
The whole point of capitalism (for those of not Robber Barons) is the beneficial side effects of competition that arise out of multiple players existing in the marketplace. Eliminate choice and diversity from the marketplace and you are left with the unacceptable choice of either putting up with the crap or stop participating in the market.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Too many people are discussing this as though the problem is what it does to diversity. It's not that it will make it harder to find good music (it's already nearly impossible) or that you won't hear a wide enough diversity of opinion (you already don't). It's not about consumer rights, it's about democracy. Concentrated ownership allows them to lie unchallenged. Even if the lies are caught and publicised on political websites, etc., the majority will never hear anything but the lies. Exit democracy, exit a functioning republic.
Behold the riant ape! Beware, his crooked thumbs!
Look on the bright side, kids; people in my area can, between two stations, watch The Simpsons four times on the average weekday, and soon maybe six or ten!
I for one, am quite pleased with this decision. It is a great day for Sienfeld re-reuns.
Bored with karma, be a fan/freak
I strongly disagree with the halfbaked idea that the government should start taking less of my money! How DARE you even suggest such a possibility!
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and this one is no different. While I applaud the intent, the implementation is disasterous.
For starters, the broadcasters have claimed for years that attrition due to cable TV and DBS broadcasters was eating into revenues. True.
They also claimed that this was likely to hurt smaller-market and independent broadcasters the most. True.
What the broadcasters *didn't* tell you is that they own many of the cable channels that are hurting them. So at best, the claim that over-the-air broadcasting is in trouble is only a half-truth. It is in trouble, but they are the ones who have made it so.
The intent of the FCC is to hopefully be able to allow smaller-market and independent stations continued operations because they'll be part of a larger group ownership. This will ostensibly allow the smaller station lower operating and programming costs. True.
Unfortunately, what they don't tell you is that this requires that the independent and local programming be replaced with mass-produced content or full-network programming. It'll also mean loss of jobs as production and operations staff is moved to primary stations.
Worse, this does nothing to solve the original problem. Michael Powell stated in a recent interview that he was concerned that in many markets, you don't get to watch local sports teams without ponying-up $60 for basic cable services. Well Mr. Chairman, I hold the FCC responsible for this problem. First, the Commission let cable companies like Comcast, or mostly-cable outlets like Fox Sports, bid on the rights to sports broadcasts. Not to mention that the FCC simply refuses to reign-in the outrageous costs of cable and DBS services, claiming a free-market will solve the problem.
So instead of fixing what's really wrong, the FCC applies a giant band-aid and sticks head in sand.
So, my home town had an advertising company that had a virtual monopoly on bill boards. It was kind of irritating. Billboard space was very expensive, and it was becoming increasingly difficult for small companies to advertise their services. .. and now a brief tangent ..
.. their goal is to attract the maximum number of eyeballs to their advertising spots. It's all about the advertising. Now, what happens when people loose interest in your single TV channel in a market? You have two options: roll the dice and try to develop a popular TV show, OR, buy another channel, also flooded with crap, but guaranteeing a sharp increase the number of eyes who are looking at your channels. Suddenly, your advertising space becomes much more attractive.
... so, back to our billboards ...
The broadcast industry derives their money from advertising. Their goal is not to provide good programming
Once a company has a monopoly in a closed market (such as broadcast television -- the FCC isn't allocating any more frequencies for that), they no longer have any incentive to produce good programming if they're making enough money from their advertisements.
Clear Channel bought our local monopolistic billboard company, almost as soon as the state (or city, I forget) rubberstamped an approval on their monopoly, and the city no longer lets people build more billboards within the city limits. Another closed market.
Clear Channel now owns a significant percentage of our local radio stations, the majority of our billboards, our major ticket sales systems, and several other major media holdings.
They have no reason to keep prices down, because there are enough big companies and non-profits (read: write offs) here to keep them going strong as they increase their prices due to the recession and/or inflation.
They have no reason to improve their programming.
And now, the chairman of ClearChannel, makes this response to the further deregulation of the broadcast industry:
"Clear Channel is deeply dissapointed with today's FCC vote to re-regulate the radio industry. While the FCC is supposed to act in the public interest, today they missed the mark by a mile."
(from their web site)
Wow. What can I say?
Now my news choices are TV, /., DrudgeReport (aka let's see what's in the Washington Post today), and english.aljazeera.net, if that every comes back up.
You are not the customer.
Living in the Boston area, I'm blessed by having several college stations to choose from. You won't find a more rich mix of music anywhere on your dial.
****
"I'd never want to join a club that would have me as a member" - G. Marx
Must take blue pill . . .
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Yes, but here in Oregon, they've decided to screw NPR/OPB by not giving them ANY of the state funding they had already budgeted... now would probably be a good time to actually donate to NPR if you like it so much...
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Does anyone see this leading to an increase of the number of pirate radio stations here in the US. The psuedo-monopoly that the BBC has is in some ways what caused an explosion in pirate radio stations in the UK. They're everywhere..you can even listen to them online
What will the effect be in this country??
i'm not a troll! i'm a terrorist! f64 : crack remarks while on crack
and the radio to have even less diversity (a situation that some people think is responsible for falling CD sales)
First you try to tell us that the economy is sluggish, so record sales will be slower, and now you're trying to tell me that less diverse advertising means they sell fewer albums. I wish you'd quit trying to use disinformation tactics.
Everybody knows the reason record companies sell fewer records is because of rampant evil music pirates and mp3!
Sincerely,
Joe Newspaper-Reader
Except,
I don't see the option to put limitations back in. So if it does become a monoculture, there isn't much the FCC could do.
I think the only times I've listened to the radio are when I'm in my car ... those couple of seconds between when I turn on the car stero and when i press play on the CD. I think there are maybe two shows that I watch occasionally on regular network TV ... the bulk of broadcast TV is just ridiculous these days. As for print publications, I pretty much just read USnews and world report.
... it's not worth my time anymore so I've got so much more free time to spend on other more productive things ... Now all I need is a-la-carte cable services and I'd be all set.
I suppose what I'm trying to say is that I kind of like how the media has become consolidated and homogenized
Is the recent mistreatment of the Dixie Chicks. The head of Cumulus Media, which owns 41 radio stations, decided himself that none of the stations would play the Dixie Chicks any more.
See this link for more on this. What we see and hear is decided by corporate heads and lawyers.
Expect to hear (or to not hear in this case) more of this.
The recent war coverage should be all the evidence needed for that conclusion. I'd love to see evidence of the contrary.
No DirecTV? Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman! Yeah, it's illegal for them to sell it, but since there's no DMCA up there, it's still perfectly legal for you to recieve and decode it, arrr matey?
Now I no longer have to decide whether to watch Friends repeat A, Friends repeat B, or Friends repeat C, since all the stations will be showing the same repeat!
/. types are. If you're going to put your money where your mouth is on the whole small government thing, then this is a step in the right direction. Less regulation, less government intrusion on issues that can be handled by the free market. Radio sucks now, so I just don't listen (seriously, I only listen to NPR or nothing now, usually nothing). If more people followed through and put their money where their mouth is, the free market would take notice, and quality programming would return to the airwaves. It's unfortunate that so many people can't live without TV or Radio that they'll watch whatever schlock comes on and just complain about it later.
Seriously though, I've thought long and hard about this. My first knee-jerk reaction was "WHOA! Look what happened to radio! BAD!". But then I thought about it some more. I am a very Libertarian-leaning person, as it seems many
Now I need to go drink some (decaf) coffee.
Wow, I didn't realize the FCC just banned anyone from owning a radio station except those five evil corporations. What is the timetable in the FCC regulation for the police and military to storm the independent radio stations, nationalize them and then give them to the "big five?"
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
What exactly have you seen/heard/read during the administration of the FCC by Michael Powell that would indicate to you that any decision they've ever made was done to serve the public interest?
Don't forget NPR along with National Association of Broadcasters has vehemently opposed community microbroadcasting. That coupled with the advertising is enough to keep me from supporting them ever.
As much as I enjoy (some of) their content I think its sometimes better to let something die to give something else the opportunity to fill the vacuum. Or we continue to limp along with the steady Clear Channelization of public radio.
Quack, quack.
I thought the summit was in Switzerland, but the riot spilled over into France, where it sort of petered out because everyone was on strike (well, it is summer) :-)
I don't know whether to be happy or sad.
After all, the more stations a company owns in a given market, the more variety of programming it will provide. Let's look at a contrived example:
The town of Example, TX, has 10,000 residents and 5 licensed commercial broadcast frequencies. 70% of the population like pop, 20% like country, 7% like rap, 2% like disco, and the final 1% like ska. With 5 companies owning the frequencies, we'll get 3 rock and 2 country stations, because that gives everybody the largest possible audience. If we go to 2 companies (we'll call them Clueless and Cheap Channel), we'll get 2 rock, 2 country, and 1 rap. If Cheap Channel buys out Clueless, we'll get 1 station of every type and everyone in town will be happy.
So, as you can see, consolidation is good for variety. And besides, it's not like there were ever any dissenting voices or minority opinions on commercial radio. Those always have been and always will be found below 92 MHz on your FM dial.
The current rule change is just a continuation of rules changes from the past. The worst changes were done years ago when the limit on number of stations owned nationwide was lifted. That allowed radio to become truly homogenous across the country rather than reflecting the local community. Howard Stern in the mornings, Opie and Anthony in the afternoons, pumping out the same show everywhere iva transmitters in cities far and wide. Infinity gets to fire a bunch of staff by automating their stations all over the US. Funny that it cut both ways...when Opie and Anthony caused controversy in NY they got fired and that meant they got fired everywhere. :-)
Although I despise the idea of paying for radio in the car, I hope XM sucks enough listeners from regular AM/FM that the media conglomerates are forced to program for the communities they serve. This is probably a pipe dream since Clear Channel and Hughes/DirecTV is parterned with XM, so little by little all the airwaves are being sucked up (literally).
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
That's fine for Fox to refuse certain ads, in the current environment anyway. Now imagine a future where Newscorp or clearchannel or disney owns 98% of a market - they will control all info. You won't even know what the issues are because you will never hear about them.
The internet is inadequate for solving this problem. Start looking for the "friendly cooperation" links - like the WashPost/Newsweek/MSNBC cluster. Nice, eh? The truth is that Big Media controls a lot of the internet too. Popular exceptions are rare - Drudge Report, for instance - but often lack "credibility" in the minds of many.
The FCC's next goal is to "deregulate" the Internet. You'll have to pay packets will pay a toll going both directions, rendering the Internet too costly and cumbersome to use. DSL and Cable modem services are capped to 9600 baud. Users stop using the web and email, flock to BBSes in hopes of cheaper data traffic. Again, pr0n pictures take 1 hour to download. The US Postal Service has record sales after SMTP and UUCP are made illegal because they claim to offer "electronic postal delivery services." Deja vu? "Deregulation" is code for government corruption allowing big business to screw customers. Gee, I wonder how these FCC commissioner assholes are going to vote after they just flew in from their 5-day, $10,000, all-expenses-paid vacations courtesy of the industries they are supposed to be regulating.
/. cares, err... who owns them?
The problem is the voters must not know about it, or care enough to do anything. Maybe the media isn't doing its job because it's OWNED BY THESE SAME BIG BUSINESSES!
At least
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
Give VPRO in the Netherlands a try. They are a free thinking public broadcasting company, and a lot of their radio programs were DJs playing exactly that what they like, and to hell with any listeners statistics. They introduced me to a lot of music I would otherwise never have heard. Haven't been in Holland for a while so I don't know the situation now, but the music on their site is great.
On at least one point...
...this was result of the 2 year anniversary from the last review
The FCC is supposed to review every 2 years, but the last review was actually 8 year ago. In another 8 years things will be pretty awful if the critics are right.
Also, if the media becomes one great big company, who is really going to go up against it? That company would effectively control politics in this country.
I'm keeping my eyes on the boarder for now.
Really, there isn't anything to worry about. ClearChannel wouldn't ever mis-report the news. They are more than happy to even put the news of FCC's "vote to re-regulate the radio industry" right on their home page
Wait, "re-regulate". WTF?
Viacom: I have an announcement!
Clear Channel: What's that?
Viacom: I have seen "The Matrix Reloaded".
Clear Channel: Please continue.
Viacom: It has come to my attention that the power of choice will ultimitely lead to the destruction of the Matrix.
Clear Channel: Interesting.
Viacom: It is my suggestion that we eliminate choice.
Clear Channel: FCC?
FCC: If what you say is true, we must consolidate all media immediately.
Viacom: con..so...li..date?
FCC: We can have all media consolidated in 3 easy phonecalls.
Viacom: Uh...Okay.
Clear Channel: Excellent, well that is settled...So, who's seen the new Xmen?
IMNSHO, this will be the great privatizing of the profits and socialization of cost, and the nationalization of outfits like Clear Channel. I'm glad I'm starting a new newspaper right now, and I wonder if we'll ever get megaconglomerates trying to take us over. (I doubt it.)
What this will likely mean in the short-term is that medium-sized media companies such as Lee Enterprises will get bought up, essentially meaning that newspapers will generally recite only one line, which (through an amazing coincidence) will be the same line you hear on TV and/or the radio. That's just my opinion as a slightly informed media activist; I could be wrong.
It will be interesting to see if there's an upsurge in interest in Indymedia outlets if the FCC votes to allow this. And my feeling is that they will, by a party line, with son-of-Sec. of State General Powell, Michael Powell, giving the key vote allowing it to happen.
That democracy you thought we had actually has been comatose for some time now. This will shoot it in its paralyzed leg.
------
That said, here's a group that's making a difference in fighting the conglomeration: mediareform.net, a group concerned that is concerned how journalism has become dumbed-down entertainment and how shrinking the diversity of media ownership has muted much of the debate and placed an extraordinary degree of economic and social power in a very few hands. (Witness the recent rush to war.)
As always, start looking at your local Indymedia chapter. There's two new ones in Kansas City and Cincinnati that I don't think are on the main site yet.
And have fun.
-- haaz.
...the Golden Rule. You know...he who has the gold makes the rules.
It's rather sad, really. Here's a good example why: My home state is North Dakota. When Grand Forks and Fargo had a three-day ice storm during the winter of '96-'97, there was a radio station in town which 24-7 covered every single piece of news or announcement related to the event. Even with the phone lines down, our high school speech team was able to use the radio to tell everybody back home that we were alright.
On the other hand, a little more than a year ago, Minot (town of about 38,000 people in central North Dakota) had a train carrying anhydrous ammonia (cheap fertilizer) that derailed in the town early in the morning. Everybody instinctively turned on the radio (either after hearing the crash, seeing a huge white cloud of ammonia coming their way, or feeling the smoke burn their lungs) to find out what was going on, only to hear music. Six of the seven radio stations in Minot are owned by ClearChannel. Afterwards, when asked for a comment, ClearChannel said that they were in the business of playing music and selling advertising, not 24-7 local news coverage.
It's about the money.
My Friends, Please know that consolidation will not bring an end to diversity in the media, while all of this was regulated you had 2 or 3 companies in radio and television (ABC, CBS) both of which were tilted to the left; and it was difficult to find opportunities for the other view points to be expressed or squeezed in (Right Wing people; Rush Limbaugh, Fox News) --in the meantime new people with new viewpoints arrived ,also, deregulation happened--
Today we have the NPR(left) in radio and then the array of others , of varying view points now. Furthermore, none of the "EVIL" big corporations would survive and grow if people did not listen and like them.
One could argue that since deregulation, the progressive/liberal media lost its grip on the media and it become more diverse.
Thank you
Oh, please. Government subsidized means catering to the people who control the purse string in government.
This is absolutely amazing. Out of one half of their mouths, slashdotters scream government corruption and tyranny (read patriot act) and out of the other half of their mouths preach that only the government can be trusted with stewardship of the media.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
All well and good, but no doubt they will be just as open for public comment as they were on the ruling itself. Let's see, most human beings were against the rule change while monsters like Big Corporations were all that mattered.
The FCC will have a massive blindspot for the tremendous deficiencies in the media as long as Bush and buds are in power. They are NOT interested in furthering dissenting voices' (anything other than conservative Republican cheerleaders) access to the airwaves. They are NOT interested in ANYTHING that doesn't further pad the pockets of rich corporate heads in the media. They are NOT interested in anything that might produce news media that isn't 100% behind the current regime.
Unless there is a new Administration in 2 years, the rules will be a priori assumed good regardless of public comment or real evidence to the contrary.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
Just some thoughts.
the FCC is not required to review the diversity of media. a commissioner said as much today. they're required to review the "competition" -- so long as there is no technical monopoly, they've done their job. doesn't matter of there's an oligarchy of corporate/state entities with the same interests that behave similarly.
Convervative communists benefit from this too.
Its not democracy if capitalism can buy all the media, and everyone knows the people are dumb enough to follow the media.
Jedidiah this is the same problem we have with Microsoft in the PC industry, what if Microsoft decides to spend hundreds of billions and buy all the good channels, they already have NBC, what about CBS, ABC, etc?
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Wasn't he a supporter of LPFM? Was that just a put-on that he expected to get struck down by congress?
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
The Newspapers, TV Stations, and Radio stations will soon have the same parent company.
In reality this will hurt in that Newspapers will be bought by bigger corporations (clear channel), and the content will be dumbed down, local personalities will be "Right-sized" to control profit margins in place of Market researched personalities.
This hurts, and you will notice the difference. Right now newspapers and newsstations keep each other in check by double-checking facts. Soon you will have one person double-checking facts for the radio, newspaper, and television. You get one slant, one idea, and one perspective from all three. That is where the diversity will be lost. I hope you like reading BBC newspapers over the internet, because soon that's where the best news you get will come from.
I've been listening to Radio 1 Xtra for a while. I find it kind of lame that I have to turn to the British government of all places to hear good hip-hop on the radio when I live in the San Francisco Bay area, #4 radio market in the US. At least we have good college radio.
At this point the only commercial radio I listen to is classical, I can't really see it making radio that much less diverse. At a point advertisers don't want to have to buy time on 5 similar stations.
It doesn't matter, the web is next: soon TimeWarner will instigate QOS, bandwidth caps, preferential routing to make sure you're only streaming the *right* content. It will be achieve via lobbying in Washington, the sheeple will be sold the same BS: "it's a good thing, you'll see". Read Lawrence Lessig to know what I mean. Besides, it's sad because one should not have to listen to foreign media to be informed in his own country.
there's no place like ~
To make matters worse, the review is anti-consumer.
If you look at the Media Access Page, you will see that the federal courts force the FCC to "re-justify every major ownership rule or strike it from the books" every time there is a review.
The problem here is that the same corporations that want the relaxed rules also are among the largest soft-money donors. They buy the legislators and then demand favors.
I'd say you've proven yourself wrong by the fact that your inane rant was summarily modded down into oblivion. Stupidity gets modded down. Seems like a good system to me.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
Except that the FCC can't reverse anything that occurs in the next two years that's not in the public interest. Those who are in controlling positions have just been given free license to make permanent changes. Any future review cannot effect what they will do in the next two years.
:-P
Oh yeah, you know where I learned that? NPR
Notes From Under *nix: blas.phemo.us
And, of course, all the people bleating the socialist, class warfare mantra on this topic are the ones who have FREED themselves from manipulation and propaganda.
Yeah, right.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
Funny how you only get the "real" news from UNsponsored media. And now we want to make it worse by consolidation? Yikes...
I mean, how many coporate sponsored media outlest (which is almost all of them, save NPR...) would report anit-American policy sentiment, or views that would damage income? Not many, I assure you. They have an "obligation" to it's "customers", which usually means "do what we say, or we stop writing checks." And THIS is where we get our news, our world view? Yikes again...
Keep listening to NPR, or even Canadian news for that matter. This is of course if you are wanting unslanted information. If not, keep watching FOXNews or MSNBC. What does the MS stand for in that name? Hmmm...
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
I'm happy with the way TV is. I look to the internet for some of my news, tv for some, paper for some, watch a bit of TV, enjoy movies and the sexual inuendo that saturates our society (I 3 Boobies) and am a happy, ignorant clam.
Oh, btw, and you 'i dont listen to radio/watch tv so i dont care' folks are just missing out on the magazine/newspaper/website side of things here.
Sig & Below
Yuck Fou
I don't want to say too much right now, because I feel betrayed and I am at the day job. IANACS (I am not a constitutional scholar), but given my limited knowledge, the FCC is supposed to REGULATE wireless communication in the name of the public and for the public good. This is because the airwaves are PUBLIC property. My hope is that people will wake up soon, but I fear this is not going to happen, since conventional wisdom states that most people get their news from one of these major corporations that stands to gain from media consolidation. Strangely enough most people I know don't it seems, maybe I just spend time with like-minded individuals. I was going to make this a completely cynical comment, but several ideas give me hope. 1. People will wake up and realize something is amiss. I believe the people of America can only stomach so much, before they take action. 2. There are still plenty of community driven media outlets, and I think people DO pay attention to them. 3. These companies will get so big they will trip over themselves, and I think this is already happening. Recent Examples of #3: Nullsoft's WASTE Sony Entertainment vs. Sony Electronics Of course, people I associate with may just happen to be more media savvy than most people. It is very likely that the mind of the average American is being underestimated. This issue really makes me want to ask some difficult questions of the powers that be. I may have some more insight into this after listening to the media center staff and board tomorrow morning. Stay Tuned. I'm going back to doing my day job. Disclaimer: I work for a community media center.
That's great, HanzoSan!
When are you leaving?
Check out my workday freakout suppressant, WFMU--listener-sponsored freeform music, talk, and live music streaming 24/7.
Conspir8or
One day before this FCC vote to relax media ownership restrictions further, Wired News ran this article saying that satellite radio was finally starting to take off in the U.S.
That cannot be a coincidence. Granted, more people are jumping on the XM & Sirius bandwagons because they cost less than before, but still, FM radio these days is so big a vacuum that it has to be filled by something...
Visit me on the web at Permanent4.com.
The article from The [Toronto] Star points out that it's as shitty up here as it is in the U.S..
We used to have a good alt-rock station, called CFNY (102.1 FM). Then, slowly, they started to change. They started to cash-in on their image, calling themselves "The Edge" (tm) and playing more Lenny Kravitz.
Then they were acquired by CHUM-City, which owns Q-107 - the Toronto classic-rock outfit. They actually pretend to compete with each other, which is the most sickening display of market monopoly you can watch. CFNY went as far as to secure the web-domain www.no-stones.com to show their true colours (which in retrospect will only serve to alienate anyone with a wide latitude of musical taste).
Alt-rock radio is dead in Toronto. No more Buzzcocks, no more The Fall, no more pre-"Let's Dance" Bowie. It's as if punk never happened, and post-punk was just a passing 80's novelty.
*sigh*
I guess if the Leafs were in the Cup right now, I wouldn't feel so bad. Unfortunately, 2003 will not be remembered as The Year of Toronto (hello SARS)...at least not for the right reasons.
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. - Dorothy Parker
More people watch "The Daily Show" than Fox.
More people watch "Spongebob Squarepants" than Fox.
Fox isn't the problem. The problem other media outlets following their example.
I'm rather shocked I haven't seen any complaints about the lack of diversity in news coverage that this will promote. Everyone has been yelling about the lack of diversity in entertainment broadcasting, but compared to news coverage that seems a bit of a minor detail. After occassionally checking out CNN's coverage of the recent war in Iraq I'm rather dismayed at any decision giving more power/control over the airwaves to such organizations. Am I just being a conspiracy theorist to suggest a more sinister potential behind decisions like this? I just can't see how allowing even more centralised control of the media is anything but a death signal for a democratic system.
CNN's one sided coverage of the decision to go to war was apallingly 'patriotic'. If American stations are only going to air news that supports the current administrations position, how can one expect the people as a whole to make informed decisions? Will CNN ever mention the false accusations that where made against France in what was basically a media smear campaign of a nation that disagreed with the Bush admin's plans? Nope, not good for ratings. America's most trusted source for news, there's a joke I won't be laughing at anytime soon.
Convervative communists benefit from this too.
Conservative communists?!
Um, yeah. Okay.
There were several available online petitions to simply fillout and click to submit--how many of us actually bothered?
Not happy with biased news? Tired of being handed opinions rather than facts? Well, if you stood by and did nothing, stop whining and eat the pile of poo you actually helped create.
Liberty isn't free. We need to be vigilant and consistently take sensible action before tyrants take over out of pure self-interest.
So stop your whining on Slashdot until you actually do something constructive like contacting your representatives to tell them this issue will decide how you vote in elections.
Advertisers should expect rates to increase with the reduced competition too. This will naturally lead to smaller companies in other markets going away along with the smaller media guys. OTOH, perhaps some of them will find alternate means of advertising. I find more and more people who can live without cable - there must some way to reach them :-)
Bingo.
How can the Drudge lack credibility. He simply finds stories, and posts links to them? If you follow the references and do your own research, like you should anyway, then the Drudge is very simply a tool, like it should only be.
The "news" used to be a public watchdog of sorts. Now, it's a ratings grabbing corporate run marketing scam. And to think of all the people gaining their world views from them and ONLY them scares the living hell out of me. If you only watch MSNBC (yes, that's MICROSFOT NBC) or Fox News to form your world view, then believe me when I say, you "live" in an extremely distorted world. A corporate view, a sponsored view, etc...
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
baggins, did you see any socialist, class warfare mantras in my post?
don't be a moron; if all the media was controlled by a communist state, of course that would have a huge impact on what people thought, and of course that would be equally unjust.
i'm not criticizing the message of major media, i'm criticizing that it is controlled by a small number of corporations, which OF COURSE limits the discourse possible.
this is beyond left/right politics, it's more along the freedom/slavery lines.
: f64
If some of you would read a little closer, this change affects the radio portion of media little or none at all. It cracks me up how people want good radio and want more programming and syndicated shows but dont wanna be bothered with the fact that there actually is a cost associated. Do you actually think that non-top 10 markets would have any syndication or decent programming if they were still owned by billybob over on the east side of town? The bashing of successful companies is getting quite old. If companies like Clear Channel and CBS DIDNT do a good job, they wouldnt be as big as they are.
I'm a single male, in college, I have no wife or kids, lets assume I have a job that pays $30,000, I pay federal taxes, I get no returns. Why? Because I have no kids, I'm not married, i get no exemptions except for school tax credit, so maybe I can get $1000-2000 back at the absolute most.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
what's the other end the spectrum, if 'cattle' is one of them? machines?
if you're told 1000 times you are fat, you're bound to start believing it. psychology 101. and PR industry, sorry, media industry is very good at it. it's their job.
f64 : organized despair
From clearchannel.com:
Clear Channel is deeply disappointed with today's FCC vote to re-regulate the radio industry. While the FCC is supposed to act in the public interest, today they missed the mark by a mile. This FCC action will extinguish the substantial consumer benefits brought on by radio deregulation
What's up with that? I can't help but wonder what this stinks of. Are they trying to look like the "good guy", while secretly getting in position to reap the rewards, or do they fear a bigger competitor taking the market away?
I expect to get my news from an aggregate/agent from many sources. These sources/feeds will be a combination of subscription/ad driven/professional reporting/blog. They will be a blend of text/audio/video from fast (realtime) and slow (downloaded) connections.
I doubt very much that I'll be able to distinguish between what was a newspaper, television, or radio station.
I see the current rules as a being very irrelevant in 5-10 years.
out of the other half of their mouths preach that only the government can be trusted with stewardship of the media.
Umm, that's not what the poster said at all... quit building strawmen. The poster said it's possible for a government-run media outlet to still be an independant, viable news outlet without being biased (and is, arguably, more likely to, since they must try so hard to shirk the stigma of being government owned and operated). They did NOT say that ONLY the government can be trusted to run an unbiased media outlet.
Incidentally, another datapoint which supports this theory (in contrast to your assertion that "Government subsidized means catering to the people who control the purse string in government") is the CBC in Canada. It is, technically, a crown corporation (i.e., government run). However, it also happens to be one of the highest quality news outlets I've come across. Even-handed, unbiased, and generally quite intelligent.
A similar situation occured last December in central North Carolina, when the biggest ice storm in years knocked out power to more than a million people in the area. Nearly all of the (mostly Clear Channel-owned) FM stations that could broadcast at the time were still playing the same old Dave Matthews and Fleetwood Mac songs that they always played, totally oblivious to anything happening outside. Luckily, we have a few locally-owned and/or operated AM talk radio stations that filled the void and got important news and info out to people.
Local radio presence is important in any market, especially in times of emergency. I get the feeling, though, that only local and state civic leaders will be able to do anything about that...
Visit me on the web at Permanent4.com.
*chuckle* And you want to move to Canada? We only have one view here. It's called CANCON, "Canadian Content"; or How much "Canadian" TV is required by law by the goverment to be be shown on all TV networks regardless of their broadcast orgin. Which means that american channels are pirated over, C&KU dish's are illegal, and those nifty little 18" dish's are also illegal unless approved by the CRTC and Federal goverment. You can use an antenna, but that doesn't mean you'll get anything. But don't get your hopes up.
And if the news isn't exactly along the goverment line, sometimes the cable or satellite signal will suddenly "drop out". You do the math.
It's definatly not "greener on the other side of the fence".
Om, nomnomnom...
I don't think so. Ownership by the *State* is the central tenet of Communism. Everything owned by the government. What you're talking about is corporate monopoly, not a form of government.
How does this kind of Just Plain Bad Information get modded up so high?
Whats really going on here....is everyone wants every radio or TV station to be tailored for THEM. That of course is impossible. What most people don't realize is that what you hear on the radio or see on TV is there for a reason...because its what people have shown they want! It's all about supply and demand. The people who whine about the big companies taking over media and ruining media are the ones who think it should be indie labels all day and no commercials...but forget that radio and TV stations cost an amazing amount of money to run. Like my earlier post...want thier cake and eat it too.
You tell me how to manage payoffs to 10,000,000 individual Internet Radio broadcasters with nobody noticing. With the first step being how to figure out who is worth paying off.
Tech Public Policy stuff
These neo-Conservatives work on the belief that an unrestricted market will be the cure for all ills, yet the closer we get to this situation - the worse everything is! A market that relies on a government enforced artificial monopoly will never be unrestricted. If they really wanted the airwaves to be an unrestricted market, they should let anyone broadcast without restriction.
Lower income people DO pay taxes. Lower income people pay a greater percentage of their income in taxes than rich, just ask warren buffet.
Warren Says Bush Tax Cut is Stupid
Even the rich are against this tax cut, they dont WANT the money and they flat out tell people they wont spend it.
Personally, I think we should do away with income tax completely. Instead, tax the goods that people consume.
I completely agree with that. But if we taxed the goods, people would consume less and the economy would slow down. It depends on the percentage of tax on each good, but currently states do tax goods.
"Those that buy the goods pay the taxes on them. More expensive items, same tax rate, but more is paid."
Thats already done, so I guess we need to raise taxes in this area, fine, but I think the income tax should still exist.
Anyway the tax cut is bad, the worlds richest people know more about the economy than you, if warren buffet says hes not going to spend the money and to give it to the poor, why the hell dont you listen to him? Hes going to get most of the tax cut anyway.
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What is with the bias against large companies? It always amazes me that almost everyone on Slashdot is against any large company simply BECAUSE it's a large company. What's so bad with a large company controlling more of what you see and hear? Think about it logically... which might be tough for some of you government-school-educated youngsters...
A company is concerned with profit. Profit comes from customers. Customers come from people that are pleased with what you provide. If you don't please people with what you provide, you don't get customers, and you don't make a profit. If you don't make a profit, you go out of business, and someone else takes your place. The Big Corporations aren't the enemy... the public is the enemy. If the public is diversified enough to demand more variety in their television and radio, then the Big Corporations will create more programming to suit those needs. If those needs aren't being filled, a new company will be formed to fill them (and at worst, the Big Corporation will buy the small company when it becomes a menace to their profits, but the Big Corporation will keep the programming that made them successful, thus increasing their profit).
I don't see how politics has anything to do with the FCC's decision, but as long as you bring it up, nobody said anything when ABC, CBS, and NBC were the only stations in the market, so why worry now that Fox (and Rupert Murdoch) are becoming successful? Again, the law of supply and demand kicks in.
Step 1: Demand conservative-biased news reporting.
Step 2: Supply conservative-biased news reporting.
Step 3: Profit!
Why is this so difficult to understand? With all the coverage it's getting, you can hardly say that the "current regime" is "NOT interested in anything that might produce news media that isn't 100% behind" them. It's the simplest of economic rules and it's been working since the dawn of time, yet you continue to put the political spin on it. Why are you so afraid of a little competition from someone who obviously understand economics?
"It's better to have a gun and not need it than need a gun and not have it." ~ Christian Slater, True Romance
In a recent interview, Lowry Mays, CEO of Clear Channel, made the following remark: "We're not in the business of providing news and information. We're not in the business of providing well-researched music. We're simply in the business of selling our customers products."
And to clarify, the customer is the ADVERTISER, not the listner. You are simply the PRODUCT. It is your eyballs and ears that are being sold, in the form of ratings.
Clear Channel could care less what you the listener/viewer want. It's all about advertisers. If you were tied down in front of the telly with your eyeballs stuck open with toothpicks to be force-fed intellectual sludge, that would be just peachy by them...
Warren is one of the richest men in the world, and he says he doesnt WANT a tax cut, he says he doesnt know what to do with Millions of extra dollars besides put it in the bank along with the billions he hasnt spent.
Warren calls it Class Welfare.
By Warren Buffett
Tuesday, May 20, 2003; Page A19
The annual Forbes 400 lists prove that -- with occasional blips -- the rich do indeed get richer. Nonetheless, the Senate voted last week to supply major aid to the rich in their pursuit of even greater wealth.
The Senate decided that the dividends an individual receives should be 50 percent free of tax in 2003, 100 percent tax-free in 2004 through 2006 and then again fully taxable in 2007. The mental flexibility the Senate demonstrated in crafting these zigzags is breathtaking. What it has put in motion, though, is clear: If enacted, these changes would further tilt the tax scales toward the rich.
Let me, as a member of that non-endangered species, give you an example of how the scales are currently balanced. The taxes I pay to the federal government, including the payroll tax that is paid for me by my employer, Berkshire Hathaway, are roughly the same proportion of my income -- about 30 percent -- as that paid by the receptionist in our office. My case is not atypical -- my earnings, like those of many rich people, are a mix of capital gains and ordinary income -- nor is it affected by tax shelters (I've never used any). As it works out, I pay a somewhat higher rate for my combination of salary, investment and capital gain income than our receptionist does. But she pays a far higher portion of her income in payroll taxes than I do.
She's not complaining: Both of us know we were lucky to be born in America. But I was luckier in that I came wired at birth with a talent for capital allocation -- a valuable ability to have had in this country during the past half-century. Credit America for most of this value, not me. If the receptionist and I had both been born in, say, Bangladesh, the story would have been far different. There, the market value of our respective talents would not have varied greatly.
Now the Senate says that dividends should be tax-free to recipients. Suppose this measure goes through and the directors of Berkshire Hathaway (which does not now pay a dividend) therefore decide to pay $1 billion in dividends next year. Owning 31 percent of Berkshire, I would receive $310 million in additional income, owe not another dime in federal tax, and see my tax rate plunge to 3 percent.
And our receptionist? She'd still be paying about 30 percent, which means she would be contributing about 10 times the proportion of her income that I would to such government pursuits as fighting terrorism, waging wars and supporting the elderly. Let me repeat the point: Her overall federal tax rate would be 10 times what my rate would be.
When I was young, President Kennedy asked Americans to "pay any price, bear any burden" for our country. Against that challenge, the 3 percent overall federal tax rate I would pay -- if a Berkshire dividend were to be tax-free -- seems a bit light.
Administration officials say that the $310 million suddenly added to my wallet would stimulate the economy because I would invest it and thereby create jobs. But they conveniently forget that if Berkshire kept the money, it would invest that same amount, creating jobs as well.
The Senate's plan invites corporations -- indeed, virtually commands them -- to contort their behavior in a major way. Were the plan to be enacted, shareholders would logically respond by asking the corporations they own to pay no more dividends in 2003, when they would be partially taxed, but instead to pay the skipped amounts in 2004, when they'd be tax-free. Similarly, in 2006, the last year of the plan, companies should pay double their normal dividend and then avoid dividends altogether in 2007.
Overall, it's hard to conceive of anything sillier than the schedule the Senat
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Yes the war on iraq is justified by Saddam having WMD and the Dixie Chick can't sell even one ticket to their concert tour...
So where do you suppose people will go for real news?
The internet?
For those of you who speak before reading or doing any research (especially clear channel bashers)....do a little reading! Radio was RE-REGULATED!
Zero-sum game:
Given the possibility of an indie licence owner buying one owned by The Big 5 approaches zero (since The Big 5 won't sell by choice, and if they're in dire enough financial straits that they must, well, then it's paradigm-bustin' time)
Given the possibility of the Big 5 buying an additional indie licence > zero (since growth breeds cash)
We can reasonably assume that at some point in the future all FCC licences will be owned by a few companies,
and more importantly, that at a point in the reasonably near future, a LARGE MAJORITY of licences will be owned by one of the Big 5.
An example of this can be seen in Clear Channel, which now owns something like 1,300 stations nationwide, many hundreds greater than its nearest compeditor. And it's been only 7 years since deregulation. Plenty of time.
AHHHHHHH! I'm burning with goodness again!
- Reakk, Sluggy Freelance
Oh, please. All the other media outlets are pounding constantly on Fox News.
As much as it offends your little universe, Fox News DOES tell stories other networks spike. A beautiful case in point was during the 2000 election. No other media outlet reported that EXACTLY the same issue with recounts had occurred in Palm Beach county, only it was a local Florida republican. And the EXACT same lady who insisted on hand recounts for Gore, denied them for this lady because electronic counting was more accurate. Another story was a series of people who had been sent to prison for committing perjury on the stand during the Clinton perjury.
Reporting these was NEWS. Spiking it was propaganda.
The truth is Fox News reports stories the other outlets spike, and you are being told that Fox News is the threat. Keep taking that blue pill...
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
Except, I don't see the option to put limitations back in. So if it does become a monoculture, there isn't much the FCC could do.
It takes a partisan 3 to 2 FCC vote to relax regulations so the conservative CEO's of Fox and Clearchannel can have yet more power, but it would take a huge (think ma-bell proportion) congressional act to cut them back down if they ever get too big.
I really wish the FCC had to explain (and justify) why they think it's in the public interest to allow mega media companies to expand further. So far their reason is, "well, we couldn't think of any good reason not to!", even though thousands of americans emailed and called in plenty of reasons against deregulation.
$8.95/mo web hosting
This surprised me not at all.
A few years back, when Murdoch was a Canadian citizen, he tried to get British Peerage, which is illegal for Canadians and so was blocked by the Prime Minister. This did not please Murdoch and so the issue became front-page news on the National Post, the Canadian national newspaper he'd founded not long before. That's right--he used his newspaper chain as a venue for a temper tantrum. (IIRC, Murdoch eventually gave up Canadian citizenship so he could get his lordship. Good riddance, I say.)
More seriously, he also ordered all of his papers to run editorials opposing a particular major land-claim settlement with various First Nations groups.
And then, there was the town that got so pissed off at him that they started their own local newspaper.
Anyway, y'all had best start investing in printing presses and broadcast licenses. The only way you'll get decent media now is if you make it yourselves.
Why take with force what you can buy with money?
Cost of entry's been made prohibative to anybody except the very rich, and as corporations, they can raise enough money to push that cost higher and higher (look at what happened to webcasting).
All that's left for them is to offer obscene amounts of money to anybody they can't price out of the market.
You're right though, it's not so much communistic as an oligarchic system. In either case, customers lose while consumers end up even.
So, when's lunch?
you do not regard it highly probably because you haven't asked the question: "who owns the government" and listened to real answers (not theory). just follow the money, o querilous one.
You link to a single post from a Slashdot user making unsubstantiated claims about NPR as evidence of its bias? I listened to NPR during the impeachment, and I certainly don't recall hearing them play "We Shall Overcome" during any breaks. A Google search for 'NPR "We Shall Overcome" impeachment' yields less than a page of results, none of which (after a cursory glance) has anything to do with the claim in the post that you linked. A Usenet archive search yields zero results. If there were any truth to this claim, the FreeRepublics and WorldNetDailys and Fox Newses and conservative newsgroups would have been all over it.
It's ironic that you complain about not being able to trust NPR and then use examples like this as your evidence.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
Since the majority of soft money goes to Democrats, perhaps Powell isn't going to listen to the corps that overwhelmingly support the opponent party. We're talking big-news and not big-oil here, after all.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Do you not understand what "re-regulate" means? What the industry was looking for was...lets say it together kids...DE-REGULATION....and what happened as the opposite...ready kids? RE-REGULATION...not that hard to understand.
They're now gone. The broadband audio stream is now a feed from Denver station KBCO. Same format, but the LA foundation is long gone, as are the DJ's that were there. (For those who know the station, I think Nicole Sandler is working somewhere in a New Mexico station as their Program Director. But I digress.)
Why do I mention this, off topic though it may seem? Because the slashdot blurb is right - there isn't any more diversity on the radio unless you go to public radio, college stations, or the AM band. The broadcast stations are picking up their money on low-quality music because that's what somebody $ay$ is popular.
And the RIAA has the audacity to say that, if I want to decide what I listen to in CD's, I should base my decisions on what's on the radio. In that case, how about I give them The Finger, and listen to these guys (a jazz station in Long Beach) - and donate when I can.
This sig no verb.
oh great, an AC with a purpose, to be a grammar-nazi. and possibly a regular nazi....
tell me oh great prestidigitator of the written word, how ever did you come up with such a creative and insulting sig. to complete your post of excellence. did it come to you in a dream, during a wank, a ferocious nose pick, or some other past time? do your views of others stem from being ripped from the teet too early/late... please, please tell me, i can no longer bare not knowing.
just in case you are as slow as your post would indicate, you are an obvious LOSER... check your dictionary pinhead, i believe you will find I have used the correct spelling.
it's trolling shitheads like yourself that make sites based on the discussion of information, or news just a little less informative...
sure, i could change my settings so i wouldn't have to see the type of tripe you spew, but then i wouldn't have the oportunity to blast such a self important twit.
you may now go back to patting yourself on the back for pointing out a spelling error.
Because news sources are supposed to report what is truthful, not what is profitable.
Is this so difficult to understand?
no
If the ressource necessary to make an entry are sooo high that no independent can make it thru, then how is this different than forbidding effectively by law to have them belong to the big five ?
As I said many time here, Censor, oppression and control do no need to be at a point of a weapon. There are far more subtil method , especially if you hold the media channels... Tsk.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Republicans get just a bit more than the Democrats.
Both sums are really sick though.
No, I'm not being a shill. No, really.
This sig no verb.
Now, it would be nice if the FCC would use (rather, relax) their police power over the airwaves and allocate more bandwidth for wireless networks, and also relax power limits so we could build high-speed wireless networks (something like the coast-to-coast net mentioned here earlier, or just to share a connection in the local area). But that would allow more competition in the communications and media markets so don't expect it to happen anytime soon.
The entire POINT of a free press is NOT to act as a cheerleader or supporter of the government. It is supposed to be a semi-4th tier to government, independent of of the government, watching the government and providing information, not propaganda from the government.
The big media moguls are, to a man, conservative. They only accept conservative slanted news, conservative opinion pieces, and pro-business pieces. They only care about profit, not telling the truth, not providing a bullshit detector for the people against the government - unless the government isn't inclined to give bags of tax giveaways, special business deals (cronyism ala Haliburton), and other special dispensation to big business. Then they can be counted on to support...wait, that simply means once again that they support only a conservative agenda. They have no interest in objectivity nor in getting a balanced view to the people, like it used to be.
Big Corporations are automagically in bed with conservative politics and political figures. Anything they support is automatically against the interest of the many (the People) and in favor of the bank book of a few CEOs and other members of the board. Big business is automatically against freedom, alternative views, even objective views (because it is objectively bad to pollute, no matter what, for instance, so an objective view of that fact is anathema to Big Business because it impacts the bottom line).
Name a single Big Corporation that supports free expression, the improvement of those with less instead of furthering those who already have everything, are pro-environment, anti-pollution, etc, etc. They do not exist. Hell, the stockholders of Exxon, an evil company if ever there was one, voted for $$$ instead of the most logical and sensible and GOOD thing...healthy environment and the inevitable future: developing more "green" energy. Big Business is anathema to life in general.
Repeat after me: Money \= happiness. Lots of money is not better than clean air, water, and open space. There are more important things in life than $$$.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
The Limbot is invited to tell me just what kind of "ultraliberalism" a Fortune 50 company is likely to sponsor. He is also invited to tell me about how liberal Warren Buffet is (owner of Berkshire, owner of whe Washington Post.
The whining about the "ultra-liberal" mass media used to come from conservatives.
The mass media isn't ultra-conservative, they're the same people who promote and broadcast and sell the entertainment content that the Religious Right whine about.
The proper description for the agenda of both PBS and the mass media is corporatist. The agenda is about social control via news management for the benefit of the people who buy advertising, and that isn't your average "progressive" group and that isn't the average limbot.
Tech Public Policy stuff
...Rupert Murdoch purchased the FCC yesterday in exchange for UPN.
I am currently not obliged to divulge that information as it might compromise the agents in the field
Yeah, their liberal bias is so blatant. I mean, just look at the leftist looneys they have commenting on NPR: heritage.org
I think if you follow the link, you'll see that NPR allows all kind of views on their programming. I mean, have you ever listened to Marketplace? It's not exactly Communist Party material. I agree with the parent - ultraconservatives have gotten to the point where they believe that anyone who doesn't think as they do must be a liberal pinko.
to pop Pump Up The Volume in the DVD player and start dreaming of my very own pirate radio station.
Yarr!
I gave myself to Jesus, but now he never calls
Yeah, and we all know how truthful MSNBC, ABC, CNN, and CBS are, don't we?
Being a news channel also means being a television station, and if you don't give the public what they want (in this case, reliable news), they won't watch and you won't make money.
Obviously, you're suggesting a government-run news channel, right? That's the only instance that profit doesn't come into the mix. Who would run a news agency that never profits? What would be the point? To inform people? People aren't that nobel. Are you daft?
"It's better to have a gun and not need it than need a gun and not have it." ~ Christian Slater, True Romance
Deregulation is to Consolidation as Jon Katz is to Common Sense - they just don't have any corelation. In fact, if you "oh this is bad" mindsets would pull your head out of your ass, you'll see that the big media companies are actually looking to sell off their different media units. That's right, big media like AOL/Time Warner are actually going to get smaller.
If you think that the public has more power than the large corporations, please go and work for GW's reelection campaign. The rest of us know better. Corporations run this country. Until we overhaul the way Congress does business, it will only get worse.
Im not daft, not am i suggesting a gvt run news agency.
Truth in news reporting should be a goal to strive for. Unfortunatly, this is no longer the case anymore. Greed rules and people are not interested in the truth, they are interested in the allmighty buck. This wasnt always the way. Now, im not saying that the news used to be perfect in the past. Far from it. I am saying that there used to be something above just profits that the news was geared too.
I find your value of profits over truth to be disturbing.
no
UCA! UCA! UCA!
Let's look at the situation here for a sec.
If everyone here is preaching diversity of opinion, why are all the up-moderated comments of the same mindset that consolidation is evil? Answer: moderators voted with their points. This is the same as the real-world, only the reason that what's on the radio is there is because people voted with their dollars.
Those that are of the opinion that we need to bring back the fairness doctorine need to give me +3 Opposition for presenting an opposing view to this monotonous thread. Sound ridiculous? IT IS.
QED. - JT
Does anyone know how Powell gets his job? Is he appointed by Bush or is he elected? Has Congress approved his appointment? If so, we should pester our congressmen to impeach him. His mandate is to protect the public's interest not big business. He has failed at his mandate. Therefore he should be fired. Plain and simple.
Quit playing Monopoly with Bill.
Linux - of the people, by the people, and for the people.
What use are large companies??????????????
Small companies are better for the economy, more competition.
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Um, actually de-regulation is not the opposite of re-regulation. In your case , 'de' refers to "remove or remove from" while 're' refers to "again, anew". Not the same thing, with quite distinct meanings. To claim that a relaxation of existing regulations is to "re-regulate" an industry is quite frankly bullshit.
I can understand dismissing broadcast media as something you don't care about. But if you combine the effects of this ruling along with the death of DSL competition. This could really get worse every year.
If the FCC uses methods such as these to try to revitalize the economy by giving big media "a break", big media will get bigger every year we are in a recession.
Imagine 5-6 megacompanies controlling both broadcast media and the pipes to the internet. It seems like a frightening idea to me. But the way we are headed, it does not seem impossible.
C-Span is the only news resource that can actually be called "fair and balanced", because all they do is show you what actually happened. Little to no analysis. It's awesome, and will only become more valuable as media consolidation moves forward.
They have 3 TV channels, a radio station, and streaming web feeds of everything. They even have a video library of notable coverage and events, all available for free.
It is simply not relevant who the monopolist is.
It doesn't matter that it is the state or some Robber Baron, the end result is the same. A collection of Robber Barons in diverse markets is no better than a central political authority that control all monopolies.
Once a particular market is dominated by one entity, all competition pressures cease to exist.
My comment is essentially true.
Your pedantics are only an attempt to cloud the issue with superficial details.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Miyamoto Musashi
I think that goes for OS's too
With respect to large numbers of people not being able to receive the content, the issue is personal economics rather than infrastructure. There are multiple suppliers for satellite-fed television channels that allow all of North America to receive major media content.
:)
Now there is competition in the area of satellite-based radio content - again meaning that the folks without local stations can receive information from "Major" media outlets.
At any rate, even if it is 40M people, that's just 13% of the estimated 291M people in the states today. 13% is not that many people, although apparently just 50M votes is enough to contend for the presidency.
(The fact that only 100M votes are cast in this country is another indication of problems we face. We're too entertained and unplugged to be motivated to express our opintions. - except on Slashdot.)
Those people without cable, satellite TV or radio can go to the public library to get government-funded access to alternative sources of media.
People have choices. Hopefully the dearth of difference between the major content producers will spark others to create.
If not, perhaps bland programming will get people in our country to break the addiction we have to entertainment and start to engage in real relationships again. Or maybe I'm just hopelessly optimistic.
Respectfully,
Anomaly
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
Yes, People who want to give $15 billion to people for aids, and waste billions and spend spend spend us into a deficit. But who have conservative viewpoints on everything but the economy.
You can be against abortion and for tax cuts, but you arent a capitalist unless you support small competitive business.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Although this won't help the situation of news information all coming from one source, I have found a new and better way to get exposed to music:
Have you found Gnod?
You tell it 3 of your favorite artists, and then it names a bunch it thinks you'll like, asking if you like it, don't like it, or haven't heard of it. It's intelligent, personalized, and it evolves.
The following is brought to you by the Ministry of Information.
[Begin Sarcasm]For Immediate Release:
The Republican National Committee is pleased to announce that it fully supports the recent FCC decision relating to broadcast media ownership requirements. It has long been the opinion of this body that the vast majority of broadcast communications have been terribly one-sided with regard to the sacred views and opinions expressed by the vast majority of true American patriots.
By eliminatiing these outdated and unecessary rules, the FCC re-establishes the constitutional principles of "free speech" so long missing from the country's airwaves. No more will the people be forced to listen to the self-righteous posturing of liberal idealism.
That being said, we at the RNC would like to announce the immediate retention of the following organizations to assist in our efforts to restore reason and values to the American Airwaves:
We would also like to take this opportunity to announce our latest proposals for further streamlining the Federal Government, lowering tax-payer burdens, and increasing national security.
Under our newest plan, the following departments and agencies would be eliminated:
Of course, we are sure that the FCC reserves the right to review this decision at a later time [ed.: like if and when a democrat somehow manages to get elected]
[/End sarcasm]
Either we are really screwed, or the wheels of fortune will turn and this will become an advantage in the near future.
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
mailto:mpowell@fcc.gov
Let this corporate whore know that little brother is watching as well.... And oh yeah.. Turn off your TV.
Conspiracy theorist always complain about consolidation with claims that it "hurts competition" or "raises prices". But in many cases it does lower costs and lowers prices for consumers. In a business sense, consolidation doesn't always guarantee success for "the corporation" anyway. If that were the case, HP would dominate the market and AOL shareholders would still be happier than pigs in shit. Point is, it can go either way with consolidation. Just like any other business decision.
. it's 55 degrees here today, and it's JUNE
What, are you in Chicago too?
And it is so easy now to see the american public as those workhouse boys, intellectually scrawny, minds all malnourished, forced to spend all day on the treadmills of the corporations, every so often peeking in at the big shots, feeding themselves richly on the profits but always whining about how poorly used they are.
And just in case you read this wrongly, I'm all in favor of free enterprise, but I think the kinds of corporate consolidation, monopoly and cartelling that we see now is far from being free enterprise as we need it. And the way the government and corporations are colluding is closer to communism and fascism than I'm comfortable with.
What obvious things happened after the telecom deregulation in 1996?
1. Cable prices went up and I (along with many others) don't have any choice in selecting a cable provider.
This shows that deregulation doesn't always increase competition and benefit consumers. In fact, it had the opposite effect!!!
2. Companies like Clear Channel now own 1,200+ radio stations rather than the previous limit of 40.
And you say larger media companies will get smaller as a result of deregulation? Your conclusion directly contradicts recent and verifiable history. How exactly did you form your conclusion? Did you pull it out of your ass and hope people would buy it simply to avoid being labeled a "paranoid"? The "if you disagree with me then you must be a conspiracy theorist" argument was overused for years and lost its impact on people who can see through bullshit.
3. Clear Channel stopped playing Dixie Chicks for making a political statement that management did not agree with.
This is a verifiable example of how censorship can occur when media companies get very large. Other artists with similar opinions obviously got the message they'd better clam up or risk losing airtime.
And whether we agree or not with the Dixie Chicks is totally irrelevant--actually UNDERSTANDING and DEFENDING the Constitution of the USA is what is important for true American citizens. You did read the entire Constitution at least once, right?
While I disagree strongly with your opinions and obviously incorrect statements, I will fight to defend your right to express them.
Again, the best reasonable guess as to what will happen as a result of this deregulation is to look at recent history regarding similar events like the Telecommunication Act of 1996.
Stop being a liberal or a conservative: be rational and exercise common sense.
Multicasting to a large extent means that the BBC can feed a large ammount of the American market at the cost of feeding one listener.
;o)
In any event the BBC gets funding and has commercial support for the BBC world service, I don't see why some of this money shouldn't be diverted to R1-7 distribution overseas. At least this way some Americans might start to acquire a decent sense of humour and the ability to pronounce left-tenant and al-u-min-i-um properly
Beep beep.
A few years back, when Murdoch was a Canadian citizen...
You've got your media barons confused. You're thinking of Conrad Black. Rupert Murdoch's an Aussie. Black owns lots of newspapers, whereas Murdoch only owns one (New York Post?). Not sure if Black owns any TV stations.
-- Will quantum computers run imaginary-time operating systems?
Except that the FCC is required to review the diversity of media every two years and decide whether or not ownership limitations need to be opposed or lifted (this was result of the 2 year anniversary from the last review). So if the media really did become a monoculture and the FCC actually did serve the public interest ... then we'd be okay
Oh yeah, this works-- AFTER the horses are out of the barn, THEN we can decide "oops, it didn't work" and then what? We can always break up the monopoly like was done with Microsoft I suppose.
The media has ALREADY become virtually irrelevant in the few cases where its not simply erroneous or fraudulent, an ad spammer mentality that frankly I've already given up on, except for a very few select circumstances. I watch less TV and read less newspapers and magazines than I ever have. After this, I'm REALLY glad I've got a lot of other things that better deserve my attention, as the media just spells b-o-r-i-n-g, now it'll just be in all caps and underlined....
Actually, I think that is only part of the story. Another part of what people are concerned about is the diversity of opinion and taste in programming. This is about more than just giving people what they say they want. Diversity in programming is important because you don't know what you like until you try it! I didn't know I liked flamenco guitar untila friend played it for me. I may not know about a particular political theory until I happen to catch a news segement on it. It's fine to give people what they want, but we can also get to a point where we always want the same thing because we don't know what else is out there. In addition, speaking of the free market and all, we should also not be fooled into thinking that what makes money is necessarily good for society. What is on the radio is not actually a clear representation of what people want. It is a representation of what people have bought. That's not to say they don't like the music necessarily, but they might buy something different if given the chance. The chance is what is important. Lastly, I'm not sure it takes that much money to run a local radio station. Certainly is costs something, but that figure is much more when your CEO makes $2 million a year. Just to play on the /. milieu: 90% of computer users run Windows. Is that because of an informed decision, or a perceived lack of options?
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
An A/C said: "Is it me or are the 1984 quotes so 1994? Orwell would have been for this. This about freedom. Having the government tell you what you can and cannot own in a free market is, well, Orwellian!"
You misunderstand the situation. The government is all for the concentration of ownership of media, because it makes it that much easier to ensure that virtually all major media outlets are disseminating the "proper" government propaganda, and not allowing any pesky dissenting voices to be heard. Once the media is completely under the control of a select group of people, which it nearly was already, it will be very easy for the government to say, "Oh, no, we were always at war with Eastasia." Which is EXACTLY what Orwell was warning about. Centralized control of the media is just one method by which a government can exact an absolute level of control over its citizens. Don't try to muddy the issue with poorly-thought-out arguments about the free market. This is NOT about the market, or about who gets to own what. This is about who gets to control which points of view you get exposed to, and what information you are permitted to consider.
So, no, you're wrong. Orwell would NOT have approved. Not even in the slightest.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
I noticed you left out Fox News, which is just as bad as the others you listed, except with an extreme right-wing slant. If you want to talk about slanted news reporting, you absolutely MUST include them with the others. Just because they're on the side of the right doesn't mean that they're not as crooked as the others. Just because they use doublespeak like "fair and balanced" doesn't mean that they actually are. Throwing labels like "liberal" and "left" on other outlets (which is a hilarious new form of name-calling)doesn't excuse Fox from this fact, and never will.
There is no common sense, truth, or middle ground in mainstream news these day. It's all profit and political slant.
Nothing worse than an apologist that points out faults of other apologists.
"You're getting brutal, Sark. Brutal and needlessly sadistic."
"Thank you, Master Control"
-Sark and the MCP
1. What does 'consolomodnination' mean?
2. Is that big GAP sale this week?
There can be only one!
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
I think it interesting that many people didn't know that this was going to happen. The only thing I can think is this:
Who benefits from the relaxing of the rules? Big Media certainly.
Who is the source of information in most of the country? several large Media corps. Why would ABC/CapCities/Disney, AOLTW/CNN, CBS/Viacom, GE/NBC (and possibly MS), Vivendi, Clear Channel, Sony, and/or FOX care about the rules by which they operate?
something else that passes my mind. Seeing how vengeful the current government is regarding things spoken against them, is it possible that the media has been soft on the Government for precisely this reason?
"the difference between myself and a madman is that I am not mad" -Salvadore Dali
In theory... Small companies are good for the economy. They aren't very large, so they continually listen to their customers, in order to keep their support. Large companies can better afford to sell products for less, so in the end the consumers should see savings. In reality... Have you ever watched "Max Headroom"? You know how all the companies are huge monopolies that decide what we (common man) should hear, see, and know? You should watch an episode or two. Small business goes out of business be cause big business basically eats the small business. Big fish eat little fish. In the end the consumer only knows what we are told by the big fish.
Stop the Slashdot effect! Don't read the articles!
And YOU can fiddle while Rome burns. Go ahead and wallow in your ignorant bliss. One day you'll realize.
The "children" example was in relation to the state of knowledge we have before the media pushes THEIR knowledge to the majority of us. I kind of figured that argument would be too complex for a conservative to grasp.
Yes we can change the station but, once again, your simple shouting ignores the complexity of the situation. What shall we change it to, oh wise one? Another station owned by the same corporation? Yeah, that's a good choice. And why do you choose some wacky conspiracy story and assume that's what I'm talking about when I ask for truth in broadcasting? Can't you see that's a non sequitor and makes for an invalid argument? Once again, oversimplification rules.
Also, you assume I want to ban things I don't approve of (as in your Cartoon Channel rant). How did you get that? If anyone is banning anything it's the corporate media who is banning quality information in favor of infotainment. As an example, how much did you hear on the networks or Fox News about the FCC vote? (See? Look at that right there. That's what's knows as a valid argument as compared to a rant.)
And as for sending me to North Korea, Cuba, blah, blah, blah . . . Damn, Stalin! Are you calling for exiles for people whose opinion you don't approve of? What kind of country is this turning into? You people are scary.
- Hail to our fearless misleader! Fool speed ahead!
"... Customers come from people that are pleased with what you provide. If you don't please people with what you provide, you don't get customers, and you don't make a profit. If you don't make a profit, you go out of business, and someone else takes your place... "
Exactly. So why are the big few media companies grovelling to the gov't to change the rules? Because they provide crap and expect people to be happy with that. Instead people turn off the radio/TV (or don't buy the brain dead newspaper unless they have a bird that needs a cage change). Then the big corp. cries that they can't be competitive without inhaling whatever small stations are giving them competition.
The people own the air waves in the U.S. and the media is supposed to serve our needs, not the other way around. Or they have the option of not providing the service and they can go out of business. I guess that's the capitalist way - I just looked it up in my copy of "Selfish Greed 101".
Penguins are so sensitive to my needs - Lyle Lovett
Expect Clear Channel, Viacom and their kin to get bigger, and the radio to have even less diversity (a situation that some people think is responsible for falling CD sales).
Which in turn will promote more P2P sharing, more legislation and criminal cases against regular people trying to resist the marketing spoon of big corporations.
I've been watching some of FCC hearings on C-SPAN about this topic - it's just a monkey circus with a pre-determined outcome.
The government, in the end, is responsible for this situation, what it seems for quite different reasons from this point of view. Don't let handful of media corporations form a cartel, control the whole market, illegally squash competition, fix prices at wholesale and retail levels, and then expect something productive or fair to come out of it.
FCC screwed up big time on broadband just recently, only to be fooled by greedy telecoms with empty promises, and now this. Time for a regime change, I say. FCC is supposed to benefit public good, not media cartels.
Wow, I didn't realize the FCC just banned anyone from owning a radio station except those five evil corporations.
There are a limited number of radio stations on the dial in a given market (because of FCC regulations, not limitations of radio technology). So on which radio frequencies are new, indepedent radio stations supposed to broadcast? They must buy out a radio frequency from the Big Boys or go home.
cpeterso
Except that their customers aren't their listeners. Their customers are advertisers and music labels. (Both of whom pay them for air time) So Clear Channel today is what big media wants, not what the public wants. Yet they're using increasingly large percentages of our airwaves for stuff we don't want.
I bet that greedy war-monger of an arse-fuck ( Rupert Murdock ) is behind this.
Democracy carries with it the assumption of independant media. Without it, there is no news - only government propoganda. What is the difference between what the US is striving for and what they just removed from Iraq? Answer: George Bush is uglier that Saddam. Other than that, same same.
And I checked my e-mail this afternoon and it had a message from the president of Clearchannel.
In it he says "We are generally disappointed with these additional regulations; however, it will be some time before we see the details of the final order."
and
"The bottom line is that the FCC's actions were deregulatory for every industry other than radio which was RE-REGULATED, even though radio is already a VERY competitive medium, arguably much more so than any other medium. Our Radio people will tell you this is not an easy business: we have plenty of strong and healthy competitors in every market, which of course includes not just other radio stations, but newspaper, TV, Cable, Yellow Pages, Magazines, Direct Mail and Internet sites.
We think the FCC's action has the potential to negatively impact the radio industry's opportunities to offer diverse and compelling programming to listeners because it puts more limits on station ownership going forward. The evidence, including the FCC's own studies, has clearly shown that consolidation has INCREASED the amount and diversity of programming for consumers. We think consumers lose."
I think the message is amusing in a wierd sort of way.
MicroSoft
~What planet do you live on?
On television, There is Bill O'Reilly, and Sean Hannity, who are fairly good speakers, and generally speak well right of center. right? Now name one Speaker of that caliber, in Primetime (like O'Reilly or Hannity) who is a liberal?
On Radio there is Rush, and Hannity. Who represents the liberals?
Where is this liberal bias people keep talknig about?
"the difference between myself and a madman is that I am not mad" -Salvadore Dali
~Tell me about it... ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, NPR, NYTimes, WashingtonPost... I'm getting tired of being innundated by liberal viewpoints. Its high time for competition!
How many of these corporations even mentioned this vote was coming?
People are Idiots. 75% still believe that Saddam directed the planes into WTC personally. Someone, whose job it is to inform people of the truth, has failed in their job.
Note: to date: no evidence has been uncovered linking Saddam to Al-Qaeda. Nor has anyone caught Saddam, Osama, Omar, or the Anthrax Bomber) I wonder how my friend, who died in 9/11 would feel about being used this way for political gain.
"the difference between myself and a madman is that I am not mad" -Salvadore Dali
First, ClearChannel isn't terribly affected by the changes, at least as they stand. The radio cap was left at 8, so they aren't going to be buying up a lot of new radio stations because of this ruling. The item that may give them more potential is the ability to buy newspapers that are in the same market as their radio stations, but radio diversity will not be affected by that.
Second, very few people have mentioned the unfortunate fact that something had to be done; the courts were prepared to throw the current cross-media ownership rules away completely on First Amendment grounds. Those who are informed on both sides of the issue acknowledge this fact. You may disagree with the changes that were made today, but please don't argue that the rules should have been left the same or even tightened, as they would have been dumped anyway.
Lastly, I don't believe that the changes are effective until 60 days after they have been published by the FCC, so there is still time to write your Representative/Senator to encourage them to overturn the ruling.
For a better review of what happened today, see the FCC's website with the commission's opinions.
That's both true and false. If we all stop listening to Clear Channel stations, then they won't be able to sell advertising.
If you play to the lowest common denominator you sacrifice diversity and (because this is communications) sacrifice choice and freedom. If you don't play to the lowest common denominator then you risk pissing people off, which causes those "people" to crack the whip and complain. So, the larger a company gets the more likely it is to AVOID taking on challenging issues, AVOID pissing people off, and thus AVOID providing a diverse outlook on the issues.
If you are the ONLY market in a town (as CC has all but become in many towns) then you existence has nothing at all to do with "keeping the people happy" and EVERYTHING to do with "not pissing anyone off" - especially when a portion of that "someone" may represent regulatory agencies. the important issues get ignored out of self interest (just as they were in this case) and, with no competing viewpoint in the market debate is utterly stifled and the back room politics gets deeper still - just as in the FSU, just as it does in China.
Your pedantics are only an attempt to cloud the issue with superficial details.
Yeah...those damned "facts" can be so stubborn sometimes. Especially when they're not on your side.
Moderate drunk! It's more fun that way!
Who owns those stations? Are they individually owned/operated or run/sponsored by the sattelite companies themselves?
And even then, don't all the media conglomerates have a stake in both companies?
--D
I never said I valued profit over truth. I said that nobody would start a news agency that had no ability to make a profit.
The concept you don't seem to understand is that with competition, each news network will check the rest, thus preventing any incredible failures in communicating truth. If you're an exec at MSNBC and FNC makes a grave error and reports that Osama Bin Laden has been killed, and you can prove they're wrong, don't you think you would? You'd gain an edge over the competition, bringing in more viewers, and more potential customers... eventually equaling more profit. Don't you think that's the point of starting a national news channel?
"It's better to have a gun and not need it than need a gun and not have it." ~ Christian Slater, True Romance
Ludicrous. Ted Turner and Michael Eisner are obvious counterexamples.
Big Corporations are automagically in bed with conservative politics and political figures.
Again ludicrous. Corporations want to increase their profits, and they'll support anybody who will help them do that. For example, "Big Entertainment" is overwhelmingly liberal, which is why it's mostly Democrats pushing user-hostile DRM schemes.
because it is objectively bad to pollute, no matter what, for instance
Even more ludicrous. If you actually believed that you wouldn't be using a computer. There are costs and benefits to everything.
Big Business is anathema to life in general.
Please define "Big". I'm curious at what number of employees or what level of revenue an organization becomes unalterably evil.
Lots of money is not better than clean air, water, and open space.
Maybe not, but they tend to go together. Rich countries have better envrionmental conditions than poor countries.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
You're right, the FCC doesn't ban anybody from owning a radio station, and I personally don't the FCC should limit how many radio/TV stations a company can own.
BUT!!!
Did you ever bother to ask, "How is it possible with all the available Radio and Television spectrum available, that ONLY 5 companies make up a majority?"
Radio technology has advanced at a phenominal rate, and the equipment has gotten rediculously cheap, so why don't we see smaller/nimbler radio/TV broadcasters out there, especially with so many people creating so much content on the Internet?
Could the FCC be possibly regulating the industry so that the Barrier to enter the market is so high that it effectively kills smaller/nimbler competition?
Think about it:
1. Radio/TV is sustained with advertisement which are derived from ratings.
2. There are a limited amout of ratings.
3. In order to sustain yourself as a broadcaster, you must capture a big enough slice of the pie to cover this barrier to entry.
4. The bigger the barrier the entry, the more ratings you'll need to sustain yourself.
Maybe that would explain why the National Assocation of Broadcasters gave $2,502,700 dollars to various politicians.
I don't mind corporations owning as many TV, Radio stations as they want, but I want something in return.
*** Short Range TV/Radio Broadcasting ***
Since, I've been talking about Barriers to Entry, then why not lower them?
Here's how you do it:
* The FCC should Offer Inexpensive Short-Range TV/Radio Licenses, so broadcasters could operate a station on a budget of a couple thousand dollars a year rather than hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
Will it happen? No fucking way. That would give any asshole to opportunity to offer the public cutting edge TV/Radio a lot cheaper than the larger broadcasters, which would SEVERELY eat into thier margins.
Could it be that free enterprise in this country is a sham? Could it be that neither Republicans or Democrats actually give a shit about equal justice and equal economic opportunity?
If you really think this is a free country, I challenge you to try to get your town to build a municipal fiber-optic infrastructure to deliver high-speed internet access and then watch how fast Verison, SBC, or whoever controls your local telecommunications infrastructure slaps so many injunctions on your ass, that it'll make you head spin until you vomit.
Fuck you, I want this country to return to a REAL free market that isn't obstructed by FCC "deregulation" (Give us real deregulation), Corporate Welfare, CEO's CIRCUMVENTING (slap THEM with the DMCA) the entire PROTECTIVE purpose of FILING remotely accurate information to the SEC, and rabid Patent/IP Lawyers litigating entire industries to death (thanks to their $28,000,000 to the democrats).
You may say this country never had a real free market. Fuck you, your socialism, and your little dog too!
Thanks, That felt pretty good.
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
I'm not apologizing for Fox. I know they're right-wing stance, and as it happens (as if you haven't figured it out), I agree with them most of the time. The only difference between Fox and the rest is that Fox at least gives the other side a chance to speak before shooting down their ideologies and utopian societal concepts.
And before anyone attacks me for being anti-utopia, I'd love a utopia (hence the definition of the word)... problem is, too many people would prefer everyone else doing only what they told them to.
"It's better to have a gun and not need it than need a gun and not have it." ~ Christian Slater, True Romance
If the big media is "leftist" then:
- Why are the REPUBICANS blocking restoring the "Fairness Doctrine?"
- Why are the REPUBLICAN members of the FCC voting FOR the big companies and the Democrats against?
- When was the last time you saw a representative of the union movement on TV?
- Why is every single AM radio station right-wing?
Some facts are more important than others.
Thus the expression: Lies, Damned lies & Statistics.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The whole point of becoming a monopoly is that one doesn't have to bother to spend money on putting out good products or new, radically good ideas anymore. The public will either buy whatever swill you give them or leave the market.
Of course, an increasing number of people are leaving the market.
Certainly, there are people who look forward to the 'latest and greatest' music from their Clear Channel station. Just as you look forward to the home version of the successor to XP.
Tech Public Policy stuff
1. The Fairness Doctrine.
The "Fairness Doctrine" isn't fair. That's why. It's pathetic and stupid. What's fair about prohibiting people in places of power to speak their mind 2 months before an election? What happened to Freedom of Speech?
2. FCC Vote.
You tell me.
3. Unions.
Unions were a good idea back in the day... now they're a waste of money and time. Look at the airlines! Thousands of people could lose their jobs because the unions were too concerned with themselves to take a 5% paycut that would save THEIR OWN jobs.
4. Talk Radio.
Because the Conservatives are the only ones that can back up their beliefs and ideals with logic and reason.
"It's better to have a gun and not need it than need a gun and not have it." ~ Christian Slater, True Romance
Your argument about global warming is so weak as to be useless. I'll just point out that global warming has little or nothing to do with ozone, and that a temperature reading at a single place on a single day is a pretty laughable way to determine a global trend.
Woopie-Doo.
This will effect my life in this many ways: 0
Why? Without sounding to cocky...I gave up the addiction of glowing phosphorous and frequency modulation long ago and cant tell you the myriad of ways my outlook has improved.
Im not concerned that every zombie in a lazy-boy is getting all their information from one source. Was that the kind of mentality I would have been able to convince outside of this new regulation...no, and I gave up caring about that lifestyle long ago. Just because your not on welfare doesnt mean your not still sucking on the governments tit.
In fact its almost its own form of entertainment when I run into 'normal' people. The morons that think every day of their lives will be exactly like the day before. Its a sedentary form of existance that I have no desire to even be in the company of. How many times have I seen expressions of shock when I tell people like that I work with computers and they wonder why I have a tan...simply because they have been fed an image over and over again that people who work with computers are pasty white freaks with no social life...
Yup. The world is run by big corps, and cares not what you give a rat's ass about.
Global Capitalism is the current empire, and we are surrounded by the Bread and Circus phase.
What am I talking about? Take a look at the Roman Empire. After it had grown too large to sustain it's weight, and the government had grown too corrupted and set in it's ways to change, the empire slowly crumbled. But they kept society ignorant by distraction - Bread and Circus. In such a situation, even free thinkers cannot motivate the masses due to their general satisfaction, so there's nothing dissenters can do.
So, be a cog in the machine, and take what you can. Watch the Daily Show for all your news and funnies, and be thankful that you are alive NOW rather than 100 years from now.
You know this world is going to hell in a handbasket, but thanks to the slow pace of such things, you won't have to endure much of it.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
The rest of us use the Net to get to a lot of foriegn press sites and to the sites of the newsmakers (and their enemies) themselves and lots of other places. While they have their own local biases, at least they generally aren't owned by the people who 0wN Bush.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Are you an idiot or just not reading the article?!?! THEY ARE KEEPING THE REGULATIONS THAT ARE IN PLACE FOR RADIO!!!! Therefore they are RE-regulating radio. If they were de-regulating then the big companies could buy more radio stations per market...BUT THAT IS NOT THE CASE!! OMG people read before opening your mouth!
Obviously you never had to get a license from the FCC. As an exercise in your personal education, why don't you try getting one of those LPFM licenses so touted by Powell as an "answer" to market consolidation and diversity?
Maybe /. will still be around when you finally get that license so you can come back here and tell us all about it...
According to Salon (ad clickthrough required), John McCain has scheduled a hearing of the Senate Commerce Committee for this Wednesday. All 5 commissioners including Powell will be there. Your opinions can be sent to Sen. McCain here. The Commerce Committee's listing is here. While it does include Fritz Hollings (D-Disney) It also includes such high-profile opponents as Olympia Snowe (Maine) and Ted Stevens (Alaska). Congress can still stall this. It isn't over yet.
Yes. The people running the Big 5 major labels via payola.
Guess what. EVERY song you listen to on a chain-owned radio station is a paid placement. If you didn't know that, you have no business posting on any public policy issue having to do with music.
People ARE voting with their dollars by NOT buying music as much as they used to. That's why every major label is in financial trouble.
Sound ridiculous? IT IS.
No, YOU are. The reason why the comments you don't like got up-modded (I've never seen one of my comments hit 5 so fast) is that on this subject, everyone else is better informed than you are. Listen instead of sniveling, maybe you'll learn something if you are capable of doing so.
Tech Public Policy stuff
BBC
Hopelessly pedantic since 1963.
Public input to the FCC ran 97% against this move. How much good do you think a few more people filling out online petitions would do? They were ignoring people who actually used their procedures for getting input, so a few more names on an online petition, which is of dubious validity anyway, wouldn't have made any difference.
>"The BBC's Jessica Lynch "expose" was recently exposed as a fraud."
Bullshit. How about posting any references.
Exactly.
Rupert fucking Murdock has been selling up a storm against Iraq in the local media here in Australia.
And his reasoning is simple: do what the governments say, get permission to buy the remaining media companies.
Money, government and news should NEVER be associated with each other in any way.
Clear Channel's customers are:
The consumers are NOT radio station customers, and the connection between whatever the consumers want and whatever is played on a major chain radio station is a hell of a lot more tenuous than you think.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Hey, while they may have a huge part of the markets in some cities, they hardly monopolize. Of the 17000 or so stations nationwide, they own like around 1400 of them. Oooooo better call the anti-trust lawyers...oooo SCARY! Compare that to M$ monopoly. People pick on Clear Channel for one reason, Glen Beck started advertising the Pro American Rallyes. And they were started grassroots and originally from non-Clear Channel stations. If the left has something that can compete put it on the air. Let's have both sides. This measure allows for no more than 8 stations in markets of 40 or more stations. It's not a bad thing. >
I'd agree with those points. Late at night on CBC radio, they even rebroadcast signals from other public broadcasters around the world. Deutshewelle, Radio Sweden, RFI, and tons of others. It's a godsend to information-junkie insomniacs like me. I've found CBC's daytime Radio 1 programming to be lacking lately, though.
(For the love of god, why is Richardson's Roundup still on the air? If it wasn't for The World At Six and As It Happens (imagine a public-radio general interest version of Slashdot) I'd go nuts.)
And I don't know about entertainment programs from those other broadcasters, but I do know that CBC really enjoys skewering the government on its' comedy programs. I dare anyone to watch "This Hour Has 22 Minutes" and then claim that the CBC is a mouthpiece of the government. :)
Yeah...those damned "facts" can be so stubborn sometimes.
What facts would that be? The fact that you hate being rogered by an all-powerful hierarchical uberstupid government because you would rather be rogered by an all-powerful hierarchical uberstupid corporation?
The problem with libertarianism is that it expects competition to exist indefinitely without regulation. Fact is, without a moderate amount of regulation, competition will evaporate like so much smoke.
To put it in different words, optimizing the market is a lot like maximizing the area of a rectangle in a Calculus problem. You get zero area if you don't have any regulations and you get zero area if you have max regulations (i.e. everything government-owned). The optimal position is somewhere between the two extremes.
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
The airline industry... the telecommunications industry... the energy industry in California...
Can anybody tell me why de-regulation is necessarily a good thing? As far as I can tell, de-regulation means that the richest companies get richer, the smaller companies get crushed, and the consumers get hosed.
-- The reason it's called the right wing? Irony.
Seems to me that, based on this and other actions, the Bush administration is the most anti-American administration ever to come along (though I guess Nixon did a fair job of disgracing himself and the country).
-- The reason it's called the right wing? Irony.
I'll just start with your third agrument. The first two aren't worth debating since they're subjective.
You say more money is being given to Republicans, yet the Democratic Party has admitted that it has more donations amounting to $1,000,000 or more. The Democrats also raised more than $30,000,000 more than the Republicans during the 2002 fund raising. If you're wondering, the Republicans had far, far more donations under $1,000 than the Democrats. Feel free to try to refute those arguments, but please do so with links. I can't locate the article I read that in, so if you have it, please let me know.
Could you explain what your "conservative politics" argument has to do with my point? Oh, and in case you're wondering, you might want to read globalwarming.org. It has quite a few good FACTS about Global Warming and the "Greenhouse effect". Maybe you don't understand the Greenhouse effect, and the global warming issue, but if you're wondering, all you tree-huggers seem to think that the supposed depletion of the O-Zone (the layer of the atmosphere that blocks out harmful rays of the sun) has caused the average temperature of the earth to rise, thus threatening to thaw the polar ice and drown us all. FACT: If all the polar ice would melt, it would raise the ocean a whole 300 feet. No big loss.
"It's better to have a gun and not need it than need a gun and not have it." ~ Christian Slater, True Romance
The parent comment is not a troll.
"And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" - HST
I don't think so. Ownership by the *State* is the central tenet of Communism. Everything owned by the government. What you're talking about is corporate monopoly, not a form of government.
You are correct, when the government owns the corporations, it is communism. When the corporations own the government, it is facism.
"You don't need a weatherman/ To know which way the wind blows" -Bob Dylan: Subterranean Homesick Blues
Murdoch was an Australian citizen. He started out inheriting 1 daily newspaper in Adelaide, Australia. He grew to control most daily metro & regional newspapers & magazines in Australia.
He also bought some UK newspapers and had a large run in with newspaper unions that he won with help from British PM Margaret Thatcher. He also eventually took control of BSkyB, the leading UK satellite service.
When he went to the US and bought 20th Century Fox and established the Fox brand through TV station acquisitions he had to change his citizenship to US as a requirement to own as much media as he does.
News Corporation, the parent company of the various media holdings, is still an Australian company.
Cheers VikingBrad
I believe many would agree that the status quo is in a rather sorry state in itself. The deregulations set today will accelerate the homogeneity that exists on the air today. Who trusts which major news network today on US airwaves? I can only trust watching programs such as Jim Lehrer, Charlie Rose, Bill Moyers, BBC World News, and other not-widely-known-to-most-Americans programs; I'd rather listen to their non-hyped programs, even if any of the aforementioned sources present an ideology different from mine. We're all human; we have differing opinions; the major networks do not exactly orient themselves towards actual debate and discourse but to fluff and ratings boosters.
I just hope those from the House and the Senate who opposed today's ruling will act upon blocking these measures, if they have the capacity to do so. If not, I hope someone protests the ruling in the U.S. District Court in Washington.
Google News
BBC News
He has openly said that he doesn't know what "public interest" means, and prefers to let the market decide these things. He is grossly incompetant. Nepotism and cronyism are not how you find qualified people. Since the FCC has refused to regulate the media, which is what it was created to do in the first place, why isn't it just abolished? It serves no purpose.
How ya like dat?
Does anybody have Michael Powell's home telephone number/address?
I'd just like to send him a thank you card.
http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
The FCC commissioners who voted for this only care about what Bush tells them to do. Bush cares what his political campaign contributors and spin doctors and handlers tell him to do.
Where did you get the idea that Bush cares what we think?
Tech Public Policy stuff
What is with the bias against large companies?
Large companies are powerful. Power corrupts. Yes it sounds trite but it's as true as can be.
Of course a company lives for profit, and that is a motivator for the company to make customers happy. But as a company grows, and it has more power, making the customer happy is _not_ the only way to make a profit, and not even necessarily the most efficient.
Most large companies eventually drift away from customer focus, and instead spend their energies on damaging competitors, manipulating customers' expectations, and lowering service quality. I'm not going to waste my energy listing examples as I'm sure anyone reading slashdot is quite tired of the topic.
I believe in the free market. But the free market is not the end-all-be-all solution. It's far too simplistic to claim that free market pressures alone will keep everyone in line. If that were true than there would be no need for any laws at all. But society has found it beneficial to keep, say, the CEO of one company from firebombing their competitors' headquarters.
An extreme example, to be sure, but illustrative: without any regulation things would get out of hand. Good laws _encourage_ the free market. Keeping diversity in the marketplace is _good_ for the free market.
The FCC just blew it.
How much good? Impossible to quantify but obviously more good than not doing anything at all. There are over 700 posts about this new in Slashdot today (not including previous stories) and it would take about the same amount of time to post here as it would in submitting the online petition. Second, simply filling out and submitting an online petition is just the first level of participation. If 700+ additional people actually contacted the offices of the 3 republicans in favor of this FCC move and told them they would vote against them based solely on this single issue, then I believe the impact would have been much greater. Enough to turn the tide? Nobody knows because it didn't happen. Most importantly, what do you propose as an alternative to even doing the bare minimum? No action? Just lay down and watch the USA turn into something similar to communist China where people are afraid to voice their political views in fear of the consequences?
If any one tells you de-regulation is necessarily a good thing they are being ideological. However, looking at the actual functioning of any particular market, it happens to be the case the de-regulation is often a good thing. IMHO, the onus must be upon a regulating authority to prove that their activities result in an outcome at least better than that which the unregulated market would produce, on measureable criteria, that at least a majority of citizens agree are desireable.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
Around where I live, the most popular AM radio station here is decidedly left-wing (in fact, it's one of the largest and most popular station in the western US). They only have one conservative talk how host (he's their best one, too), and he's libertarian, not Republican. And he's pretty reasonable too. KGO 810 AM.
But then again, this is the SF Bay Area, so maybe that's to be expected. Maybe the right-wing stations are located in more conservative areas?
Where I live now (the boonies), we can choose from Time Warner Cable or Charter for our programming, and we can still choose between digital and analog either way. We can also select between those two and Road Runner for high speed cable access. As per cost, for 58 channels and cable Internet (1.4 mbps), we pay $70 (includes equipment). Prior to 1996, we paid $60 for 40 channels and no Internet.
Now take Phoenix Arizona. I could choose between Cox (or Cocks if you've ever dealt with them) and Cable America, and prices and services were comparable at $70 for digital cable and high speed internet.
I'm still wondering how this equates to utter media domination. There are 8,539 FM radio stations, thats up from 5,665 in 1990 (that's BEFORE regulation) and the "big boys" are prohibited from owning more under the new rules anway. Major corporate radio is responsible fore less than 40% of total ownership, and people are capitalizing on the uncertain attitudes of listeners when it comes to corporate radio, thanks to demagogues like you.
That is complete and utter unsubstantiated bullshit. Clearchannel promoted DC and underwrote their world tour. A number of clearchannel stations which specialize in country music may have boycotted them after that stupid bitch Natalie Mains ran her mouth, but eventually the public demand forced those few music directors who made that decision to start playing them again.
As for this "defending the Constitution" tirade of yours, please remove your cephalis from your anus. This was a political decision by a corporation - which is an excercise of their free speech. The constitution protects us from the government, not ourselves. If you had actually read the constitution, you'd notice the part where it says "congress shall make now law...". It's in the Bill of Rights...the first one...if you have trouble finding it, let me know.
Stop being anti-capitalist and swallowing hook-line-and sinker everything you hear on SlashDot.
I'll grant you that I was wrong when I said that the FCC was decreasing regulations of radio industry but:
THEY ARE KEEPING THE REGULATIONS THAT ARE IN PLACE FOR RADIO!!!! Therefore they are RE-regulating radio.
this is wrong. My boss didn't fire me today. Does that me he re-hired me? I didn't divorce my wife today, does that mean I re-married her? If the FCC had put the old ownership rules back in place, that would be re-regulation.
I remember when Neal Boortz (Libertarian) was on Donahue's show (several times) on MSNBC, he was shouted down every chance he wanted to say a single word. He was basically on to be the center of a 2-minutes-hate segment brought to you by Big Brother MSNBC.
Noone mentions this, since, while Neal is fairly "conservative" (he's really not that conservative), he's not a member of the republican party, so he gets no time from the Fox News Channel. Of course, MSNBC never apologized for the incident, because noone heard anything about it. The odds of CNN, ABC and all the others pulling their fingers out of MSNBC's ass to help a "conservative"? 0. Odds of FNC covering for a non-republican? 0.
Truely independant voices get no airtime, while those who sell their souls to the two corporate parties (Democrat/Republican) get a shot.
Only in slashdot are posts of solidarity modded at -1 Redundant, while posts of antagonism are modded as -1 Flamebait.
"And Canada does have the best health care system in the world!"
"Yes! Canada DOES have the best health care system in the world!"
(Kids in the Hall fulfilling their Cancon requirement)
----
"I used to listen to Null Device before they sold out."
And if I could mod that up to funny I would. That was good!
Om, nomnomnom...
Uh no. It's not government that needs fixing. It's the citizens who do. Citizens have pretty much disassociated themselves from any kind of responsibilities, trying to have government do it for them.
Lets see:
* there is a reduction in parenting. Citizens are parenting as well as they used to. There has been several studies on this.
* The rise of special interest because citizens no longer care about issues.
* Citizens have generally become apathetic to anything except their next meal and taxes.
Voter turnout continues to be very low. Why don't anybody care about things? Let me ask you about that? What happened to vigorously participating in our government? I guarantee you, if people participated government would be very watchful of what they do.
sri
...yeah, I goofed the math...the 8000 number is for radio stations that are incorporated. The overwhelming majority of stations are sole proprietorships, joint ownerships, or 501c (public radio).
To supply the "if you're wondering" part that seems to have gotten lost. Global warming and ozone depletion have nothing to do with each other, all it takes is some homework and/or a basic knowledge of chemestry to know this.
In very simplified brief terms, and devoid of complexities that would require a physics lesson:
Ozone depletion:
Cause: Breakdown of the Ozone (O3) molecule caused, in large part, by man-made chemicals that have made their way to the upper atmosphere.
Effect: Ozone 'blocks' (I'm skipping the physics lesson) Ultra Violet radiation, less Ozone = more UV. High levels of UV radiation are harmful to essentially all life on earth because UV radiation can cause celular damage.
Greenhouse effect:
Cause: Increase in atmospheric gases which act as an insulational layer for the earth. To grossly simplify, (fractional)absorption and re-emission of Infra Red radiation that would normally escape into space, so that it instead is re-emmited back toward earth. Heavy industry has caused larger levels of "greenhouse gases" to be released into the atmosphere then normally occur in nature.
Effect: Global temperature increases by a small amount, amount may be large enough to effect systems in unstable equilibrium, or those which are near boundry conditions.
Granted, it would be highly unlikely for conditions to accur that would result in the total melting of the polar ice caps. But that's not what's important.
What's important is that with the following words "a whole 300 feet. No big loss." You completely destroy any creditability you ever had.
Stop and think for a minute how many major world cities are at LESS then 300 feet of elevation?
I suppose "No big loss" is a subjective value call, but I think the majority of people would consider the loss of the majority of major cities in the world, as a big loss.
Building a better backup.
Zettabyte Storage
Let me guess, you've never heard of Noam Chomsky, have you? (Or if you have, heard or read what he has said directly and not from what a conservative pundit tells you about him?)
You like Fox News, right? None of Alan Colmes arguments have displayed logic or reason to you? Or Pat Buchanan's opponent on MSNBC (can't think of his name).
Take out all of the showmanship and entertainment value of Rush Limbaugh. Would he still be as popular if he used his *ahem* unique version of logic and reason alone without these things? I can think of some excellent, logical conservative pundits out there. A friend of mine recently introduced me to a smart bloke by the name of Bob Lonsberry. But you have to admit that a lot of the louder mainstream right-wing talking heads out there get popular through entertaining people and keeping them feeling good about their country no matter what it does.
It is your right to hate all things liberal. However, you might want to make an honest objective attempt to know what you are hating before you continue to do so. After I began looking into the conservative viewpoint which I didn't understand I found many constructive challenges to my views and other points I found I agreed with which I never knew were conservative ideals. Quite honestly the thing which prevented me into looking into conservative philosophy the most were those conservative blow-hards screaming their logic and reason in my ear and blinding me to the true conservative thinkers who were out there. You can find quite similar results from the liberal side of things as well.
Happy people make bad consumers.
Pretty much the rest of everything.
.
I know, I know. .
Michael K. Powell is Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. He was sworn in as a member of the Commission on November 3, 1997. He was designated Chairman by President Bush on January 22, 2001.
Mr. Powell, a Republican, was nominated by President William J. Clinton on July 31, 1997, and confirmed by the United States Senate on October 28, 1997.
There is an agreement on power sharing at the FCC that gives 2 commissioners to the majority, 2 commissioners to the minority and the chairman to the President or something like that. Mike Powell was appointed in 1997 by Bill Clinton because the Republicans told him to do so. Had the President at this time been an armadillo, Mike Powell would have been appointed by an armadillo...
SNS Not Sig
so plans are around long enough to reach fruition, rather than cutting down a crop mid-season and planting something else.
It makes a lot of sense. It's a time-weighted balance or a time series. A moving weighted average.
Here in Ontario each new provincial government seems to dimantle 25% of the structure build by the prior government, seemingly out of vindictiveness.
Thanks for the book tip, friend! I don't know how I missed The Dosadi Experiment, considering how much I enjoyed the first few Dune books, so many years ago. I'll read it this summer.
Esteem isn't a zero sum game
Pleas, someone mod this up, this can not be hidden from the world.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
I live in San Diego, a market with about 17 English language FM radio stations and Clear Channel owns or operates about 10 of them. And between the CC stations, each station has its own radio format- the only "duplicates" come from non-CC stations who have the same format (Classic Rock, Alternative, Country and top 40)
I find the diversity in music on radio to be appealing; enough so that I don't buy cds anymore because I have no need to. The radio stations play music that I like, there's enough variety in the different stations where if I'm in the mood for rap, I can listen to the rap station, or Tool & tune in the rock station, etc. Some _songs_ appeal to different genres (Tool, for example, is played on the "alternative" and the "heavy metal" stations; Jimi Hendrix on the Classick Rock & Heavy Metal stations) but for the most part, a song would have to be a current hit (and huge) to hear it frequently in listening to a specific station for 3 hours. The only formats that dosn't get any airplay are Classical music and "Big Band" but both can be found on AM stations, and classical music has a part time home on the NPR station.
I bemoan the quality of radio only because of the lack of good new music, but I place that blame at the feet of music producers and not of the radio stations. The music I hear on my radio suits me fine. Its not perfect, but it's not inferior to pre-Clear Channel days when there were 6 stations playing Adult Contemporary/Top 40 instead of the current 3 stations we have now.
Look at all of the artists who produced good music during the 80s and 90s and their attempts in the past 5 years to follow up on that success. It's not Clear Channel's fault that Michael Jackson's music sucks ass now, that Madonna doesn't know what the fuck she's doing
Pretty much the rest of everything.
Like what, exactly? Outside of Oprah style tv, which is more feminazi than liberal.
Has the FCC EVER pulled the plug on a commerical network?
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
"If 700+ additional people actually contacted the offices of the 3 republicans in favor of this FCC move and told them they would vote against them based solely on this single issue, then I believe the impact would have been much greater."
You must be misunderstanding what's going on. The FCC received SEVERAL HUNDRED THOUSAND messages from people objecting to this. Over 99% of all input they received was opposed.
The fix was in. This is the Bush administration we're talking about. You know, the one that got into office with almost exactly half the vote - they are doing everything for one side, and one side only. Period.
Interestingly enough, if Fox News was owned by the US Government rather than Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorporation, they couldn't very well have refused to air any advertisements critical of the FCC vote, could they? (Rupert did.)
The First Amendment would protect us from a Government-owned media source, but it is powerless against Government party line coming out of the private sector. Didn't Eisenhower warn us about the military-industrial complex? He didn't forsee that the media would become part of it, though.
You want free speech? Get a state-owned last-mile IPv6 backbone for everyone, free. Constitution will protect us from there.
Or else keep proudly serving your corporate masters. We all know they have the consumers' best interests at heart...
There are no corporate parties.
The majority of the parties funding comes from what?
Hope you aren't a bettin' man, because I've seen Ralph Nader (trumped up beyond his miniscule support) and different Perotista/Reformers on FNC at various times.
But, they didn't cover for them. Being reported hardly counts as having someone cover your back.
Nice to meet 33% of the audience for Donahue's thinkless show!
I only watched it to see Neal Boortz on TV (interesting character to watch).
Only in slashdot are posts of solidarity modded at -1 Redundant, while posts of antagonism are modded as -1 Flamebait.
I found it strange to see Sen. Hollings (Disney) speaking against this ruling on C-Span. Given that his one of his primary campaign donors is one of the big four broadcast companies (ABC). This caused me to wonder what interests he would have in opposing this ruling. So, who besides the public loses with the 35% to 45% change? Advertisers, with a reduced level of competition between advertising mediums prices for advertising can only go up. So who advertises? Pretty much friggin everybody who contribues to campaingns. Oh, and politicians when running for reelection. I don't thik this ruling by the FCC will survive to be implemented.
"There is nothing to do it. But to do it." -Floyd Pepper
true, when they are jobs.
when economy is shrinking, short term effect is not as clear (understatement).
remember we needed the new deal and WWII to clean up the economy after the market ruled in the 30s.
As my (cycnical) economics lecturer once said 'The natural state of bussiness is oligopoly. It gives the illusion of competition to shut up the masses while giving the power of monopoly to the owners'.
In my next incarnation, I hope to come back as a code monkey.
I can think of London, New York, Tokyo, Los Angeles, most of Hawaii, Orlando, Sydney, etc. So, yeah, a lot of cities would go away... but they wouldn't go away over night. It would take a long, long, long time for them to disappear under the ocean, and during that time, those people could move...
Check out www.globalwarming.org. It's a very informative site.
"It's better to have a gun and not need it than need a gun and not have it." ~ Christian Slater, True Romance
What is with the bias against large companies? It always amazes me that almost everyone on Slashdot is against any large company simply BECAUSE it's a large company. What's so bad with a large company controlling more of what you see and hear? Think about it logically... which might be tough for some of you government-school-educated youngsters... A company is concerned with profit. Profit comes from customers. Customers come from people that are pleased with what you provide. If you don't please people with what you provide, you don't get customers, and you don't make a profit. If you don't make a profit, you go out of business, and someone else takes your place. The Big Corporations aren't the enemy... the public is the enemy. If the public is diversified enough to demand more variety in their television and radio, then the Big Corporations will create more programming to suit those needs. If those needs aren't being filled, a new company will be formed to fill them (and at worst, the Big Corporation will buy the small company when it becomes a menace to their profits, but the Big Corporation will keep the programming that made them successful, thus increasing their profit). I don't see how politics has anything to do with the FCC's decision, but as long as you bring it up, nobody said anything when ABC, CBS, and NBC were the only stations in the market, so why worry now that Fox (and Rupert Murdoch) are becoming successful? Again, the law of supply and demand kicks in. Step 1: Demand conservative-biased news reporting. Step 2: Supply conservative-biased news reporting. Step 3: Profit! >Why is this so difficult to understand? I don't think it's the understanding that's the problem. The problem is that "understanding" isn't enough to make a person except any information from one source. "This is how business works"? Give me a break. When a business doesn't listen to it's customers and the customers get fed up, they will leave. Considering the FCC is a business, I don't expect many people to favor them in the right in years to come. >With all the coverage it's getting, you can >hardly say that the "current regime" is "NOT >interested in anything that might produce news >media that isn't 100% behind" them. It's the >simplest of economic rules and it's been >working since the dawn of time So because people have been racist to each other from the beginning of time, we should have just ignored Martin Luther King and Malcolm X out of simplistic laziness? >Why are you so afraid of a little competition >from someone who obviously understand economics? It's not the fear my friend. It's the mere fact that there is no competition, and it's not just done by the consumers in terms of their choice. It's in the way they advertise, and in the way they bully out local businesses. I don't honestly think you know what your talking about, and one other person I know at work has told me this dumbshit. But then he lives in the suburbs. :)
The point is, I should be able to get my news from other sources. Not one. Regardless of how the world does things, it's still wrong.
-matt
insteading of spewing what sounds like second-hand drivel.
You pretty much hit the nail on the head with that one. I have never understood why I get moderated the way I do on slashdot, really. My best posts usually get a 3 or less, while my ranting and drivel is either a one or five. The moderation was much better when it was a smaller site.
The only person I was truly trying to get through with this particular post was the parent (abcxyz). I went about it in the wrong manner, as you pointed out. I should have pointed them to newssites like Guerrilla News and articles relating to why this is bad other than spewing what I gleamed from them.
Again, I don't understand why some posts are moderated the way they are. I definitely agree with you on one thing, if I make a point and want to be taken seriously, I must bring out facts, and have them lined up to back up my hypothesis.
Now if this post gets moderated past 5 hell is truly freezing over.
What's the matter? Have you run out of arguments? Why don't you go to rushlimbaugh.com and copy some more.
You know he's fully qualified to feed us his opinions, what with him going all the way through 12th grade, and all.
- Hail to our fearless misleader! Fool speed ahead!
Okay, that was not as funny as this, but it is still funny.
Thanks for calling me Stalin too, but I will decline the invitation to join your camp.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
No its not wrong. It came time for the regulation to change...being either stopped or continued in the same or different fashion. If you were employed under a contract....it would be RE-newed....like RE-REGULATED, because it would be coming time to change like the regulation. A marriage doesnt fit unless you wanted to look at it as re-marriage if marriage had a finite time that it is reconsidered. This is very elementary stuff.
It's called the free press. Let CNN say what it wants to say.
... and the food at Burger King is far superior to McDonalds, but untill you go check out a real restaurant you won't know what your missing.
That's good in theory, but if the big media conglomerates use their market dominance to pressure out all sizable encumbents, you get a problem. The more market share available to them, the worse that situation gets, hence the problems with the FCC increasing the allowable market share. All the same arguments that have been made for content becoming more generic applies to the news as well.
Nothing more sinister than the idea of daring to defend the First Amendment to the Constitution; something you would want to take away from CNN because you want the content of their reporting censored.
The issue is not CNN's right to free speech, it's market dominance by a single conglomerate. You can't tell me you wouldn't see problems with one big corporation gaining a monopoly on all media. This is just the same problem to a lesser degree, all the same issues can and do arise.
No, it was not. It was rather left-wing and anti-Bush (and this anti-Iraq)
Bull, get news from other non-american stations and see just how anti-Bush their coverage has actually been. BBC and CBC are both good references and even as stations of American allies they show a strong contrast to the pro-Bush programming on CNN.
Because the accusations are true. The facts about the French government's close alliance with Saddam and their support of his mass murders were well known.
Check the BBC for the list of accusations falsely thrown at France from the American media. Also make sure to notice that American officials only deny making the accusations and don't argue that the accusations really were false. And french support of mass murders hasn't been suggested by anyone save yourself. Might as well blame the good old US of A for selling Saddam his WMD too then, surely he has some left over from his 'allies' in the Iran/Iraq conflict.
Fox is more trusted, as it is fair and balanced and shows both sides (instead of mainly the left-wing as CNN does).
Please quit with the Marxist line. We all know money cannot buy happiness. We all know that it is hard to be happy, if you cannot pay the bills. We all know that money can rent happiness for a bit. We all know that everyone in the US can have anything they want, they just have to work for it! We all know that in a Socialist State, the government decides what you want, what quality you want, and what quantity you need, and what to do with you if you happen to dis-agree with the government!
My objective is to reduce the power of government to screw up our lives.
This so-called de-regulation of the FCC is fine with me. As long as I have the liberty to vote with my feet. All monopolies cause their own death. Often the politicians think they need to be seen as effective, and step in with more regulations to either breakup or support the monopolies. But death of a monopoly is inevitable.... It just may not happen in the time frame we desire.
- High Tech workers, please say NO to Union Carpenters, their Union sees fit to control our compensation.
I would say the market consolidation is Fascism.
Not in the You are a [Fascist/Nazi/Commie] name calling most often seen when these labels are thrown around. Most people throw around Fascism as a dirty word, not knowing what the attributes of Fascists. Fascisism (as I understand it), is a union of like minded individuals who agree to allow no dissension in the pursuit of the common cause.
Here is what , says.
1. often Fascism
1. A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.
2. A political philosophy or movement based on or advocating such a system of government.
2. Oppressive, dictatorial control.
Word History: It is fitting that the name of an authoritarian political movement like Fascism, founded in 1919 by Benito Mussolini, should come from the name of a symbol of authority. The Italian name of the movement, fascismo, is derived from fascio, "bundle, (political) group," but also refers to the movement's emblem, the fasces, a bundle of rods bound around a projecting axe-head that was carried before an ancient Roman magistrate by an attendant as a symbol of authority and power. The name of Mussolini's group of revolutionaries was soon used for similar nationalistic movements in other countries that sought to gain power through violence and ruthlessness, such as National Socialism.
- High Tech workers, please say NO to Union Carpenters, their Union sees fit to control our compensation.
. What is the timetable in the FCC regulation for the police and military to storm the independent radio stations
I am not a lawyer, nor a FCC licensee, but I would imagine it goes something like this...
1. File a complaint.
2. Restrict the FCC license.
3. Suspend the FCC license.
4. File an order of "Cease and Desist".
5. Take the former licensee's bond
6. Start a media campaign aginst the bad former licensee.
6. Take the now deceased licensee's property (by force if necessary).
- High Tech workers, please say NO to Union Carpenters, their Union sees fit to control our compensation.
Thanks for calling me Stalin too, but I will decline the invitation to join your camp.
No problem. Thanks for acting like Stalin and proving to the world how dangerous you psychos truly are (as if we needed any more proof).
Man , this is getting ugly. I feel like I'm winning a boxing match in the Special Olympics. Or like the US military blasting the shit out of an Iraqi marketplace. It's sad to go up against an unarmed opponent. I'll leave you alone now since you've obviously run out of anything to say that even approaches a point. Go lick your wounds.
- Hail to our fearless misleader! Fool speed ahead!
People don't want good, unbiased news coverage. They want to hear stuff which reinforces their existing worldview.
You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
It was until recently. About a year ago, the CRTC (the Canadian equivalent of the FCC) ruled that so-called grey-market satellite recievers were no longer legal. The argument made was that it was competing with Canadian satellite providers, which is true...if only because, in my opinion, our Canadian satellite providers suck.
I just want to take over the world...Why does that automatically make me EVIL?
If your company buys it's advertising from the inexpensive independant stations, instead of my big consolidatated group of stations. A team of investigative reporters will investigate you, your company, your family, your business associates, your financial holdings, and run a massive media campaign aginst the list.
But then again, if you owned a business, it would not need to be spelled out to you...
Without a license to practice law, this would be called Racketeering.
- High Tech workers, please say NO to Union Carpenters, their Union sees fit to control our compensation.
No, jobs come when people create them. Increased unemployment creates future business growth, since some people who can't find jobs create their own businesses.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
If all we /. users stop listening to CC they still have millions of sheep out there who don't know any better to advertise to.
Who said anything about Slashdot readers?
The original question was: "Are we, the general public, capable of sending the right messages to the large corporations, or are we cattle [...]" to which I responded: "whatever you think Clear Channel is today is whatever the consumers wanted."
The "we" in the original question referred to "the general public", as did the term "consumers" in my initial response, as did the "we" in my later response, as did the "millions of sheep" in your post. None of that referred to "Slashdot readers", who are so obviously irrelevant to the discussion I hardly understand why you brought it up.
I hope this helps you and at least two others who had trouble comprehending the same line grasp the context of the discussion. I repeat, Clear Channel's stated objective is to cater to its customers (advertisers), but it cannot do so without getting itself a good number of listeners to advertise to. Therefore, Clear Channel's success means that a lot of people ("general public") do like their stations. If you think that makes them "sheep" or "cattle", then you've answered the original rhetorical question.