Slashdot Mirror
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."
Perhaps it's Sneaky Time to do this on Holiday Break (for Congress, anyway) so that he won't catch too much hell.
It would make a nice present for Murdoch, and the other media gluttons.
Where I live, we have a newspaper monopoly brought to you by Gannett and the quality of the newspaper plainly stinks, now that they've put all of the competition out of business.
That pesky competition stuff seems all too familiar at the FCC these days. It makes one wonder what might happen if the FCC had the interests of the American consumer in mind, rather than that of the media and telco mega-corps.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
A strong, independent media (meaning: lots of independent sources for news and commentary) is essential to the health of a democracy. (Or even a republic.) Many points of view allows the (cliché inbound!) market of ideas to determine what's best. When there's only a handful of humongous players in that market, they all tend to have an identical set of interests and will likely end up as an oligopoly, much to our detriment.
Media consolidation is, overall, a Bad Thing.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
People tend to flock to where the group-think is. Very few people want to be challenged about what they believe on a daily basis- it takes a lot of work, especially if you're willing to admit the possibility you might be wrong. Slashdot tends to have a variety of (highly nerd-centric) views, so it's easy to find a bunch of people who passionately agree with you on issues that most people don't care about: File sharing, the best Star Trek Captain, Emacs vs. Vi, etc. There will be the heretics who disagree with you, but you can always mod up those you agree with and ignore the rest.
That being said, Slashdot would be horrible as my only news source. It's got a huge number of opinions, but most of them are the idealistic ravings of an intelligent but dysfunctional individual with minimal real-world experience. (Something like 80% of non-troll posts are in this category, including most of my own). Then you've got the corporate shills, the grammar Nazis, and the occasional individual who knows what he's talking about. Plus, there are all these rambling posts that are almost on topic, but don't really address the issue at hand- not to mention the article.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
Like I said, you're describing a corporate anarchy. It is precisely the deregulation that the story we're discussing documents that has allowed the media consolidation I just detailed.
The early US had lots of media competition, but it had no corporations. Corporate personhood, which offered legal protections to corporations, wasn't invented until 1886, when a railroad monopoly faked a legal ruling in the newspaper monopoly it owned, on which the entire corporate scam is based. Within a generation, monopoly corporations had so abused America that they were finally regulated a little with "antitrust" laws, but they've steadily crawled back to unprecedented power and consolidation.
Early America also had no "truth in advertising" or other consumer protection, and frequent ripoffs and unchallenged political abuses. It was also a relatively small country (0.3% in 1776 as in 2007), though the ability to independently publish was very widespread. But as conditions for publishing improved, that power fell into increasingly monopolistic hands. As is the case with all power when the people don't organize to protect ourselves from it - which is exactly what we started America for.
You're right about tech making the FCC's mission irrelevant, if noninterference is part of the tech. I impatiently await phased arrays freeing spectrum myself. Though we'll still need our government to prohibit unhealthy radiation emissions from telecom products, but that should be part of the FDA, the Health agency, or a product safety agency. But you're confusing the FCC's role in controlling content, which is already irrelevant with media client filter tech, widespread tagging activities and busybody ratings orgs, with the FCC's role in controlling the market itself. The media is a unique industry for control by government, because it is so integrated with our government structure that it's still referred to as the Fourth Estate, even though the first (clergy) is (officially) gone, the second and third merged. When spectrum management is unnecessary or minimized, the FCC should be replaced by a "Telecom and Media Agency" which oversees media, prioritizing market protections, consumer protections, primarily discouraging monopolies and cartels.
A bottom line example: without decreasing government protection, this media cartel is threatening the Network Neutrality that makes the Internet the most accessible, diverse - and therefore essential - info source in our society. Markets don't protect themselves. We establish governments to protect ourselves from predators, like the corporations that control most of the media. When we beat them back with better regulation, we'll have a freer society and better media, through increased competition among all of them. Rather than the cozy relationship where the media and government mutually exploit each other to their mutual benefit, entirely at the public's expense.
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make install -not war