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Court Blocks FCC Media Ownership Rules
Dr. Mu writes "According to this story in today's Seattle Times, 'The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia blocked implementation of FCC regulations that would have allowed companies to own more radio and television stations in the same market, and directed the agency to rewrite the rules.' In the interim, the FCC has already granted waivers to the old (1975) rules. It's unclear whether these waivers will now be revoked. Nonetheless, this ruling spells relief for smaller media interests and the diversity they provide."
Can someone explain why allowing one company to own newspaper and TV in the same area is bad?
The problem with media consolidation is apparent by looking at the current state.
There are a only a couple of TV news networks which are nationwide. This means that if somebody, say for example, the Saudi Arabian government wants to suppress stories which make them look bad they only have to buy off a couple of people to do so.
This happened just recently. Have you noticed the barrage of commercials that have been airing recently saying basically, be nice to us we own a huge chunk of your country?
Now, given that corporate officers sole responsibility is to "enhance shareholder value", they would open themselves up to lawsuits, if they did accurate reporting on the Saudis since that would be throwing away about $100,000,000 in ad revenue.
Given that the Saudis are the primary funders, supporters, and suppliers of terrorists that is far more newsworthy than anything else they report, but you don't see it.
If they had to deal individually with a whole group of people, then it's far more likely that one or more of them would have a scrap of integrity and/or a scrap of patriotism, unlike any of our big news companies.
Fox news takes a lot of heat because they are just a mouthpiece for the administration, but the others aren't much better. It isn't economically optimal for them to report the news accurately, and investigative journalism is basically dead in America.
That, my friend, is one of the clearest signs possible that this country is degenerating into Fascism which is the merger of state and corporate power.