FCC Chairman Tries For More Media Consolidation

An anonymous reader writes "FCC chairman Kevin Martin wants to relax rules on how many media outlets one company can own in one market. Democratic commissioner Copps wants to rally the public to stop media consolidation. He says he's 'blowing a loud trumpet' for a 'call to battle' to stop the FCC from giving big media a generous Christmas present."

Comments

Media Monopoly Cartel

[Doc Ruby]

The US already has a media monopoly cartel:

In 1983, there were 50 companies that owned nearly all of the major US media sources. Today, only five corporations, "The Big Five," absorb the lion's share of the 37,000 different media outlets (daily newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations, book publishers, and movie companies) in the United States. According to Bagdikian, the number of media companies dropped drastically due to many recent mergers and acquisitions. In 1983, the biggest media merger in history was a $340 million deal involving the Gannett Company, a newspaper chain, which bought Combined Communications Corporation, whose assets included billboards, newspapers, and broadcast stations. Then, during the 1990s a small number of America's largest corporations purchased more public communications power than ever before. In 1996, Disney's acquisition of ABC/Capital Cities was a $19 billion deal -- 56 times larger than the 1983 deal. In 2001, AOL's acquisition of Time Warner dwarfed even this deal at $182 billion, ten times the price of the 1996 Disney deal and 537 times the price of the Gannett merger.

[...]

99.9% of the 1,468 daily newspapers in the United States are the only daily in their cities. As Bagdikian explains:

That 99.9 percent of morning papers are monopolies in their own cities understates the problem. Owners exchange papers with each other or buy and sell papers so each can have as many newspapers as possible in a geographic cluster. This permits individual owners to have something close to a monopoly for daily printed advertising in that region and in many cases to use one regional newsroom to serve all their papers in that cluster.

These media monopolies present our entire society through their filter of corporate priorities:

(1) ensure that the parent company is never cast in a negative light, and (2) find ways to plant positive news items about the parent company. Bagdikian details several examples in which journalists were fired and stories killed simply because the subject was in some way injurious or potentially injurious to the parent company. For instance, a survey by the American Society of Newspaper Editors found that 33% of all editors working for newspaper chains said they would not feel free to run a news story that was damaging to their parent firm.

And of course that "info monoculture" dictates politics that can be rigged most easily by a single political party, so long as it is thoroughly corporatist. Which is why the US government is getting rid of the rules that protect a free market of consumers and diverse startups, in favor of corporate anarchy.

Diversity.

[headkase]

I just finished reading The Wisdom of Crowds. Great book, highly recommended. Anyway in the context of group decisions the book postulates that one of the fundamental requirements to make good group decisions is diversity. Without it you end up in the "me too" situation where opinions cascade through the group simply because there are less building blocks to improve on. With less diversity there is less granularity to approaching a problem leading to situations where a groups decision doesn't fit the original problem as well as it could have.
Right now the book is just a proposal - it will take much more time to empirically test the ideas put forth in it.