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House Overturns FCC Media Consolidation Plan
son_of_a_general writes "Looks like the House of Representatives just overturned the FCC's media consolidation rules, previously covered on Slashdot here(1), here(2), and here(3). The article over at CNet shows that the House passed a bill that overturned the rules, by a 400 to 21 vote. All is not clear yet, however, as the bill still must pass through Senate and face being signed by a President who has already indicated that he may veto."
It doesn't matter if the bastard vetos because congress can say screw you in a 2/3 majority, which they no doubt have. the senate is the real decision maker at this point as the house seems to already have its mind made up.
Please, can the government make one good decision this year, please??? I mean sure, it's just a correction of a previous bad move, but it's something. Gotta set the expectation bar low to achieve satisfaction.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Even if this bill only rejects funding of the recent FCC decision, having such a lopsided vote will have to sway some lawmakers. Even if the Senate is a more deliberative body than the house, with this much opposition in the House, I'm fairly certain that the Senate would pass this with at least 67 affirmative votes, overriding the threat of a presidential veto.
The only way I could see this getting messed up is if the language gets neutered in a compromise bill, though, so we're still going to have to speak out to our local Representatives and Senators to let them know what we think. And with any luck, they might even listen.
From CNet: Powell and his allies at the FCC have offered two major justifications for relaxing ownership restrictions.
At the time of last month's vote, Powell said the United States needs "modern rules that take into account the explosion of new media outlets" and are not tied to a "bygone black-and-white era." Technology offers a wealth of media alternatives--such as the Internet, 802.11 wireless networks, XM and Sirius satellite radio, DirecTV, hundreds of cable channels, low-power FM radio--that were not available a generation ago, the argument goes.
While it's true that these options may (or may not) have existed a generation ago, it is my considered opinion that most of them are on the fringe, expensive to break into and maintain, and have yet to prove themselves viable. Why should big-biz media interests be allowed to further control the media that is already established and has a wide audience, while the independent interests would be force to assume take all the risk to develop new channels? Especially when those new channels would probably get swept up (by another FCC gazelle-style roll over) by the big-biz outlets once they were established as viable?
Go House. I'm surprizingly proud.
GMFTatsujin
The article says that they only rejected funding for FCC programs that allow consolidation of this type... a slight difference
"Rejected funding" is really just a code word for using a budget bill to eliminate something mostly unrelated to the allocation of specific amounts of government funds. The effect of this bill is that the FCC cannot spend even one dollar of government money to implement their plan, but rules that are already in place say that things like the FCC's plan cannot be privately funded. Therefore, they have $0 to implement the plan. Thus, the plan is void and will be replaced with whatever plan the funding has been allocated to (in this case, the old FCC rules before the recent change).
It's the same effect as making a gun legal, but outlawing the specific ammo for it. Sure, you can legally own and use the gun, but if they've banned its ammo, then they've effectively banned the gun. If you're hellbent on owning a projectile weapon, then you'll have to buy whichever one you can legally buy ammunition for.
And yes, as I'm sure you're thinking, politicians really DO play some damned stupid games. The mating rituals of various brightly colored birds and amphibians are simple and logical by comparison.
I'd have to disagree. Allowing huge media conglomerates to own more media outlets is not a good thing. The media has been, from the beginning of this country, the watchdog of government. It's changed, for the worse, into more of a cheerleading outfit these days and that's not a good thing and consolidation can only make it worse by allowing for less diversity and less opposing opinions. The media is supposed to keep the public informed and keep the government in check but that is less likely to happen with local issues and opposing views when the media becomes more national and less diverse. This is bound to happen when a small number of corporations own most of the media outlets across the country.
The media as a watchdog is much more important than the media as a business.
Time makes more converts than reason
or is anyone else wondering if the real reason many lawmakers voted for this bill was to prevent a single corporation from being able to control the politicians' access to tv ad space? The result is the same, so I guess i'm not really complaining. But it would be great to see if lawmakers were taking media conglomeration into more serious consideration than their own ad space.
Actually there is a systematic bias in the media. It's hard to pick up on, but if you watch it a lot, you can pick it up.
It's simple. The bias is their POLITICAL neutrality. How can neutrality be a bias? Quite simple. That neutrality rewards the extremists and punishes the moderates. Those that are willing to go to extremes find that their ideas and arguments are given equal credence to a moderate idea. Even if all the facts and fingures go against it. Must keep the neutrality!
Put that on top of that these sources are looking for viewers, so information gets pushed down, and entertainment gets pushed up. Meaning that the nuances of tax bills and foreign policy go pretty much unnoticed.
What we want is reality neutral. If something is BS..say it. Give the facts, and let us decide from that. Don't cover up facts in order to give the impression of political neutrality.
This is not a sound argument. First of all most of those "500-plus" channels are all owned by a few conglomerates. There is FOX, FOX NEWS, FOX SPORTS, and there are 5 HBO's and 5 Showtimes, and then there is AOL Time Warner and so on and so forth. There were only a few stations in 1973 because the technology was still in its infancy and the demand was not as high as it is today. It is important to notice that those stations were all owned by different companies so in that respect it was more diverse not less. More stations != more diversity.
Time makes more converts than reason
No, but a Veto override shows three things:
1. The President's whips at the capitol are not sharp enough to keep his people in line. This puts out the word that pressure from the White House isn't the be all end all. A veto-override literally opens to the door to other bills that normally would be DOA because of Veto-threat.
2. The President's grip on Congress is weak, or non-existant. The President uses his bully position to get congress to do things. Everyone knows who the President is. But it takes weeks of concerted effort for Senators and especially Reps. to get a point across. POTUS is the most quoted person on the nightly news. But a veto override shifts this balance more towards Congresscritters.
3. The President's advisors and calculators took a bad risk on something that should be straightforward. Few veto overrides are razor thin. This means that either the Administration is ignorant, arrogant, or capable of miscalculating remedial details. All of these things are bad, and are hammerred on by major media outlets.
Much of this is froufrou. While I take some sort of glee in the fact that the *partial* rollback measure was attached as a "rider" to a spending bill - just like how Congress screwed LPFM back in 2000 - similar legislation must still be passed by the Senate, and then survive a conference committee, a veto, AND an override, in order to actually happen.
Symbolically, this is a very good thing (as well as being somewhat historic in a political sense), but in the real world it will likely get axed in the dead of night by the real string-pullers in Congress, and what the FCC did will stay in place.
That is why just ignoring the FCC to begin with makes for more fun. (viva microradio!)
Seriously tho, if you want the scoop on the politics you can get near-daily updates from media reform lobbyists working the Hill. I don't know if they keep archives of their reports, but I do remember seeing that more than this rider was in play at one time. One other proposed amendment (sunk before getting to the floor, I believe) would've rolled back most if not all of the FCC's changes, but the one that made the cut was the weakest of the bunch.