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

Let's Remember

[MightyMartian]

Let's remember that Jesus loves large media conglomerates. Jesus despises a multiplicity of media providers in any given market. Jesus loathes a functioning marketplace, preferring monopolies that will supply money, trips, golf club membership and hookers to Senators and Representatives in exchange for screwing the average American. Jesus despises the average American. Jesus is all about the money, and that shows in His favorite country, the United States of America.

Re:Man

[sqrt(2)]

That's why we're not on Digg.

This is old news; Martin's tried this before

[postbigbang]

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.

Re:This is old news; Martin's tried this before

[postbigbang]

Oh, now that Craigslist and others have eaten their classifieds, and online communities do better news, they're starting to pay attention.

They do this by wrapping the Sunday Comics in tear-away ads, and other slimey things that their sales guys must drool over.

They launched a city site, and have all sorts of 'business partners' to feed and link content. Seemingly astute, but state of the art 1998.

Their website currently as a registration policy that makes the old WSJ and NYT premiums seem laughable by comparison.

I think I like their old crabby-assed publisher better. At least he knew how to pay reporters and do investigative journalism. The reporters are all but gone, and there hasn't been an investigative piece since the takeover. Why ruffle advertiser feathers, after all?

Ugh

[Dirtside]

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.

Re:Ugh

[Rick17JJ]

The Bill Moyers Journal on PBS had two recent shows about the problem of media consolidation. In case anyone is interested, here are the transcripts to those two episodes:

Bill Moyers Journal Transcript for November 16, 2007
Bill Moyers Journal Transcript for November 2, 2007

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.

Re:Media Monopoly Cartel

[Doc Ruby]

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.

Re:Media Monopoly Cartel

[Garrett Fox]

Interesting. Would you agree with me that (1) where no scarcity of "voices" exists, as on the Net, there should be no restriction on how many channels one entity can own, how many people they can reach, or what they can say short of fraud, libel, death threats etc.? And/or that (2) to the extent that the FCC or its successor has the power to control ownership of media, it will try to use that power to control content and should be restrained from doing so?

Where I'm most likely to disagree with you here is that I'm skeptical that we'll get "a freer society" from increased government control. Look at the nature of the coercion being used by/against the media, versus the coercion involved in the American Revolution as you refer to it. In the Revolution the people our (moral) ancestors fought were literally pointing guns at them and "declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever." In the case of modern media, the abuses you seem to be referring to are corporations doing things like lying to consumers, taking bribes for good press, or trying through legal means to change how they charge for their services (the Net Neutrality issue). There's no violence involved in those actions, and not even fraud in the last one, and there's always the possibility of an upstart coming along and starting their own media organization. (Fox News, for all its faults, was built as an alternative to what was seen as a monopoly of press opinion.) So, I don't think the comparison between "taming the rampant corporations" and "stopping the British from burning our city" is fair.

On a related note, I see the US health care issue in a similar way. If the current system is so bad, with government heavily involved in it, should we be imposing greater regulation that fossilizes delivery methods (eg. enshrining the idea that employers should pay), or finding ways to encourage people to invent a new free-market model that blows the existing one out of the water?

Re:Media Monopoly Cartel

[Doc Ruby]

You're going to have to explain how the market is served by your buying a transmitter to drown out the signal of your incumbent competition, broadcasting their format to their old listeners, but with your own ads inserted.

You make it easier for competition to form by protecting the market from domination by a cartel (among other cultivation). That requires regulation - proper regulation. We have living proof of how deregulation, except for regulations that enforce a billionaire's club barrier to entry, creates monopolistic conditions. Since you can't even recognize the basic necessary function of the FCC regulating signal noninterference, you're not going to get anywhere making equally naive pronouncements about government role in mediating an economy.

Re:Man

[dunezone]

Reddit is starting to turn for the worst also. This new breed of internet people are like locust, they go from one site to another, like locust, consuming all natural resources, and then they move on again, and their coming for us soon. Just like those aliens from Independence Day.

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.

Re:Pffft.

[countSudoku()]

Let the babies have their bottles. I dare any of the uber-corporations to erect a media outlet that does not suck donkey balls. If Ropert Morduck wants to own every station in my market, let him! I won't be listening to any of that garbage. I have iPods, CDs and superior satellite radio. What do I need with a Ropert Murduck? Sounds like a skin condition. Throw another media outlet on the barbie, douche!

Flocking

[paladinwannabe2]

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.

Re:Pffft.

[Cajun Hell]

That sounds a lot like, "It's a good thing that we have given the executive so much power, because our president is doing a great job keeping Americans safe from the Iraqi terrorists." It's ok for George's people to listen to your phone calls. But what do you do, once Hillary is elected? Suddenly you're paying for everyone's manditory healthcare insurance, farmed out to some no-bid-contract provider, and she is listening to your phone calls.

What do you do, when you justify centralization of authority, and then after that, the central authority becomes your enemy?

Principles, not examples. Safeguards, not circumstances.

What I mean is, some day, a leftwing commie hippie is going to own 66% of the media. That block will be diverse, too. One channel will be full of ads for marijuana, another full of ads for sex chat lines, and that's not counting The Satan Channel (even though it operates at a loss, subsidized by the sex chat lines).

Re:FCC creates its own necessity

[jnadke]

In the ideal world, there would be no government regulation. However, because radio waves are a government regulated commodity, Joe Schmoe can't hijack, for example, FOX's airwaves and broadcast his own competing opinion. Sure, it starts a "signal strength" battle, but energy is a limited commodity itself. Eventuall Joe Schmoe can win, only a smaller area. Many Joe Schmoes can pool their resources and win a bunch of smaller areas. To an extent, the Internet has given Joe Schmoe and Media Conglomerates a level playing field. For the first time, their voices can be heard equally. That is, until Net Neutrality gets bashed in the face. However, this is merely a leveled playing field. For every website/blog started by Joe Schmoe, the Media Conglomerates can start one. The Media Conglomerates still have the airwaves... which are protected from Joe Schmoe by the Government, thereby creating it's own necessity to regulate the Media Conglomerates.

That's Western innovation, baby!

[Chris Burke]

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.

In the East they have official state news sources like Pravda or Xinhua, while in the West we have a vast network of ostensibly separate and independent news sources which are ultimately through various obscured financial ties effectively the same thing! Go capitalism!

Oh wait I'm sorry I'm being cynical. After all, the NYT did sincerely apologize for being credulous parrots of anything the government wanted them to say. I'm sure that's all in the past now. I must have gotten my scandalous anti-American ideas from the liberal media.

Jesus also...

[Hamster Lover]

Jesus also loves you, but everyone else thinks your an asshole.

Contacting the FCC

[ZipK]

You can find the contact e-mail addresses of all five FCC commissioners here.

Re:Pffft.

[MrKaos]

While you might not care for Murdoch's brand of politics or his business style, it is difficult to argue that he has done anything but increase diversity in the media marketplace.

Perhaps for now, but like his now-dead compatriate, Kerry Packer, his unwavering faith in himself is a curse to you all because of his own mortality. Let me explain...

Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch were players in the Australian media market place, they each staked their claim but from different parts of the market - Murdoch from News Papers and Packer from Television stations, both were conservatives. They both expanded until they were eyeing each other off, Murdoch looking over some local television stations and Packer eyeing off some print news assets, there was only one thing stopping them, Cross media ownership laws. Now they had a common cause.

In Australia they lobbied tirelessly to have cross media ownership laws broken down until finally our previous conservative government gave in and relaxed the laws, the buying frenzy began even before the laws were passed, and as we regress to what is happening in Canada something happened that gave us a glimpse of post-media-mogul media.

Murdoch finally realised that the Australian market was just too small for him to play in anymore, and expanded into America, grooming his son for taking over the growing media empire.

Packer expanded into Internet gambling assets, bought into Fox and kept an iron fist on the control of the Nine network in Australia. When he was passing the media empire over to his son, you could see the glint of pride in his eyes. Then he died, James sold the nine network to concentrate on greener pastures (I guess he wasn't interested in his fathers passion), leaving nine as a shell of what it once was pwned by some faceless investment con-glomerate.

The legacy of both these men are the media cross ownership laws as a template for the world. The moral of the story is once the man with the passion dies you are left with the banal framework of the control he established and you might not like who/what takes over that control - that is what happened here.

Jesus doesn't like you

[Trepidity]

I have it on good authority that He looks poorly on the use of "your" where "you're" was intended. And don't even try to use an apostrophe when making plurals.

competiton on the airwaves

[falconwolf]

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.

If the FCC really wanted competition on the airwaves they'd allow Pirate and Micropower broadcasters. But instead the FCC does what it can to shutdown them.

Falcon

Re:FCC

[RabidOverYou]

The FCC is the Federal Buggy Whip Commission. They are regulating a bunch of dead, dying, or at the very least rapidly-changing businesses. The FCC getting in the action will help neither the businesses nor their consumers. If the radio/tv biz was made 100% unregulated, they'd still have less than even odds of surviving. The web will consume them. You're going to watch TV by browsing to www.desperatehousewifes.com. With the exception of real live stuff, podcasts will eat radio, and even the live will get done somehow or another. Heh, maybe all that free wifi will eventually work.

My fear of allowing the FCC to get up off the mat, is that they'll proclaim they're needed to regulate the Web. They're going to try to stick their nose in the tent.

-- Rabid.

libertarians and health insurance

[falconwolf]

healthcare/insurance corps have produced a "libertarian" hoax that is precisely wrong.

Neither healthcare nor health insurance were created by Libertarians in the US. The current health insurance industry was created by a Democrat, FDR. During WWII, because of wage and price control laws, employers couldn't pay employees more so to entice people to work in factories and other establishments the government allowed employers to pay for health insurance for the employees. And still today employer have an incentive to offer insurance instead of just paying employees more. If the laws favoring employer provided health insurance, they pay no tax on it, were gotten rid of and employers were able to pay employees more so they could buy health insurance on their own healthcare would be cheaper and more people would be more keen to hold costs down. And by allowing people to buy and pay for their own healthcare they will be able to decide what sort of coverage they want, if they only want catastrophic coverage they can pay less for it versus another person who wants everything covered. Then with more people paying more out of pocket they will be more willing to shop for lower prices. That's called competition, you know, what many blame on driving workers pay down? Let competition drive cost down.

Falcon