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FCC Repeals Decades-Old Rules Blocking Broadcast Media Mergers (variety.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Washington Post (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source): Federal regulators rolled back decades-old rules on Thursday, making it far easier for media outlets to be bought and sold -- potentially leading to more newspapers, radio stations and television broadcasters being owned by a handful of companies. The regulations, eliminated in a 3-to-2 vote by the Federal Communications Commission, were first put in place in the 1970s to ensure that a diversity of voices and opinions could be heard on the air or in print. But now those rules represent a threat to small outlets that are struggling to survive in a vastly different media world, according to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai. One long-standing rule repealed Thursday prevented one company in a given media market from owning both a daily newspaper and a TV station. Another rule blocked TV stations in the same market from merging with each other if the combination would leave fewer than eight independently owned stations. The agency also took aim at rules restricting the number of TV and radio stations that any media company could simultaneously own in a single market. A major beneficiary of the deregulatory moves, analysts say, is Sinclair, a conservative broadcasting company that is seeking to buy up Tribune Media for $3.9 billion.
Tax plan? We're fucked long term even if we luck out short term. Net neutrality? We're fucked. Bringing back coal? We're fucked. This? We're fucked.
as soon as Trump got elected. For everyone that voted against him, I'm sorry. For everyone that voted for him, enjoy your media consolidation turning into propaganda. Sure, you'll ignore it, but people around you will get pulled in. And they'll vote for things way, way worse than this.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
... who actually misses broadcast TV, usenet, bbs's, and horrible, personal HTML 1.1 web pages instead of this centralized mess that we seem hell bent on creating?
Check your premises.
It's worth exercising a bit of reflection before deregulating. You're taking the bumpers off the bumper-cars. Somebody could get hurt. Remember the mortgage crisis?
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
will be party flavor controlled and all the indie ones will be labeled fake news and conspiracy sites.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Diversity of voices is important, but when >60% of the country gets its "news" from social media (and that percentage is growing), who owns the local TV station or newspaper becomes irrelevant.
They need to be tarred and feathered. NOTHING LESS.
that hates all things Trump. I don't think the lefties have anything to worry about. But they will bitch like little girls just the same.
Maybe after all this we can eliminate the FCC since there will be nothing left for them to regulate.
Zimbabwe is going to have more open media than the US inside a decade.
Your fucked mate. SAD!
In Germany they called the result of this Gleichschaltung: all media effectively delivering the same content (propaganda).
These days the fascists uniforms are suits...
"[The regulations] were first put in place in the 1970s to ensure that a diversity of voices and opinions could be heard on the air or in print."
Something like 2,000 newspapers endorsed Hillary Clinton and like 3 endorsed Trump. Clearly the regulations did not lead to any diversity of opinion whatsoever.
I'm all for diversity of opinion and free thought, but whatever we had wasn't doing it. Maybe time to scrap it and come up with something better.
Canada is right next door, and significantly more Socialist. Since they have the third-largest petroleum reserves in the world, their standard of living is pretty good, like other oil-rich countries. You might enjoy it there.
You have a good point - any major policy change should be made only after careful reflection and should probably be phased in gradually so you can nip it in the bud if problems come up.
That said, you probably couldn't have come up with a worse "example" for the way you were trying to take that. Here's a brief summary of the mortgage crisis:
Congress tried to force bank's to make loans to people who couldn't afford them via regulation.
Banks have employees who can do arithmetic, so they refused to put themselves out of business by systematically making loans that frequently wouldn't be paid back.
Congress, through more regulation, arranged for it to be PROFITABLE for banks to make money-spinner loans.
Bank's did the arithmetic and saw that indeed creating money-losing deals was now artificially profitable, so they did it - a lot.
The easy availability of mortgage money to people who previously didn't qualify meant that more people were in the market to buy houses.
The inrush of buyers temporarily increased housing prices (supply and demand).
Rising prices attracted speculators, which are buyers, further increasing prices.
When the rush of unqualified buyers was over and supply caught up to demand, prices fell. (The bubble is noticeably leaking)
People moving couldn't sell their house for as much as they owed, triggering foreclosures. (Pop)
Foreclosures further increased supply, depressing prices.
Rumors of reactionary legistlation, and actual legistlation, causes bank's to tighten lending standards.
Money dries up, and the velocity of money drops.
It all began with more regulation pretending that social desires would magically override arithmetic.
In the end, what was a popped bubble had a credit crunch added to it by emotionally-driven, reactionary regulation. The bank's didn't suddenly all decide to start making a bunch of bad loans to people who couldn't afford it because they all suddenly felt like going out of business. They started making bad loans because Congress-critters thought they could score political points by forcing bank's to do stupid, then realized bank's would only do so if Congress made it artificially profitable.
You gave an example of very poorly thought out policy change, but a case of MORE really dumb regulation, not less.
Diversity of voices is important, but when >60% of the country gets its "news" from social media (and that percentage is growing), who owns the local TV station or newspaper becomes irrelevant.
But people are getting their "news" from social media (which apparently includes internet-only news reporting operations) BECAUSE the broadcast news operations are ALREADY untrusted.
This, in turn is because the EXISTING regulatory regime produced exactly the non-competitive, single-point-of-view, broadcast media oligopoly that this regulation was SUPPOSED to prevent.
Since it didn't work, why bother with it?
Since it seemed to work BACKWARD (as often happens with laws and regulations), maybe eliminating it will actually IMPROVE the situation by lowering barriers to new entrants.
= = = =
Question for anyone who happened to dig into the actual rulemaking: Did this also eliminate the rule preventing a single owner of a set of broadcast outlets that, in aggregate, can reach more than about a third of the population? THAT's an even more powerful killer of attempts to start up broadcast media with non-mainstream viewpoints.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Maybe time to scrap it and come up with something better.
Maybe just scrapping it IS something better.
Regulating the broadcast media to "promote" divergent viewpoints got us the current monolith. NOT regulating the Internet got us an explosion of divergent views.
Robert LeFevre described government as "a disease masquerading as its own cure". Maybe regulation IS the problem.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
So now all the local over-the-air media companies can combine while your local monopoly cable company or telco will be able to only give you *fast* access to their chosen monopolists.
Welcome to FREEDOM! Freedom from choice in local over-the-air media. Where every channel is Clear Channel. And freedom from the choice of a neutral open Internet where access is the same no matter what site you are using. Where instead all your propaganda is provided by the highest bidder.
Welcome to the Cable Televisation of the Internet.
Old books (not connected via monopolist Internet access or over-the-air media) are looking better and better.
Facebook is billions of individual "Skinner Boxes." And if you use it you are the pigeon!
There are (or were) rules preventing one entity from owning more than a certain number of TV stations across the entire US. Has that rule gone away with these changes as well or is there still an overall restriction? (and if so, what is the number currently set at)
Any effect there? Seems like this is a win for AT&T which was potentially going to see problems with their proposed merger.
The left keeps blaming Trump for all this crap, yet the only reason why he's the president is because you cheated in the election and pushed Killary through as the primary, even though she was not a good candidate.
If you greedy bastards did not cheat, we would have a good president right now, one Bernie Sanders.
Good going idiots.
I actually already did move to a place that is culturally and politically more in line with my preferences. Check out Mahone Bay and Prince Edward Island.
...down the toilet!
What were financial regulators doing during the growing bubble? Deregulating! Who drives banking deregulation? The banks!!
I won't even entertain the rest.
Parent blames "Congress" when in fact, the financial regulators were deregulating banking. Congress did their part. Guess who was driving the deregulation? Banks.
Parent also has a rudimentary understanding of the problem that's fundamentally wrong in so many ways no one would read the wall of text..
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
He doesn't understand anything else.
Fucking dot head.
I bet this isn't what people have in mind when they think NWO. Their paranoia is focused on the wrong things (Psst, that's exactly how the NWO-people want you - focus on those Illuminati sticking chips in your neck, *thumbs up*)
"Everybody's naked underneath" -- The Doctor
You're not wrong about some of the mechanisms used and han nature that amplified the problem.
What exactly do you think caused it to suddenly happen at that moment? People have been "greedy" for millions of years. That didn't suddenly change. And guess what - it won't change in the future either. Here's a hint at what triggered it:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...
> this is the important part, trading mortgages as securities
Mortgage-backed securities have been around for many decades. They were quite popular in the 1970s. They were used in the events of 2006-2008, but they weren't new, so their existence wasn't the cause.
> The mortgage crisis was caused by get rich quick scam artists, corporate greed, and Wall Street traders who all wanted something for next to nothing. Financial businesses have a duty to accurately assess risks
Again, people have always wanted "something for nothing". That didn't change (and won't change in the future). What changed was the government arranged for banks to be able to make money off bad mortgages. "Accurately assess risks" you say. You know what happens to a bank that DOESN'T assess risk accurately and loans out the bank's money to people who can't pay it back? The bank goes out of business when they've handed out all their money - unless bad business decisions are made artificially profitable by government. The government wanted risky loans to be made, because "it's unfair that some people can't get mortgages".
Perhaps it IS "unfair"*, but it's mathematical fact that when you loan money to a bunch of people who can't make the payments, you end up with a bunch of defaulted loans and a big mess.
As I mentioned, the problem was greatly amplified by the number of investors and speculators attracted by the rising prices - rising prices that were caused by the sudden increase of buyers in 2006, people who previously wouldn't be able to get a loan because lending to them is a bad risk.
"Greedy" people, people who want to get "stuff" easily, will come up with easy ways of producing stuff, such as the printing press, combine harvester, steam engine, etc. Only when an outside force artificially changes by economy can someone continue to get more stuff by doing things that are actually destructive. The natural way to get more stuff, more easily, is by producing more stuff more easily.
* "Unfair" in the same sense that it's unfair that my friend who jogs daily can run a marathon, while I can't run a marathon because I don't exercise. Unfair meaning different outcomes, caused by doing different things.
I stopped paying attention to broadcast TV and print newspapers years ago, just as many others have. We don't need to worry about monopolies in broadcast media because nobody is watching anyway. They're all walking dead and just don't know it yet.
I, for one, welcome our new mouse eared media overlords.
So what you're saying is that all black people, and only black people, live in slums? Perhaps do you mean to say that black people don't pay their bills, so mortgages in black neighborhoods won't be paid?
The banks are required to lend mortgage money (basically, buy houses) in NEIGHBORHOODS where property values are falling and there is a high rate of default (people not paying their mortgage).
For a while, they were allowed credit for small business loans in areas that were failing (ie most of Detroit), but that was stopped - it has to be home loans in high-risk neighborhoods (what you apparently assume are "black neighborhoods").
To be very, very clear, since you're apparently living in the 1960s, it's not about "can't discriminate", it's "must discriminate". They are not allowed to ignore race and neighborhood, to not even ask that information. The banks are required to keep track of which neighborhoods are high risk make a certain amount of mortgage loans in those neighborhoods. If it starts coming in a little low toward the end of the reporting period employees are told "we must sell and close $4 million in mortgages in bad neighborhoods by December 31. Hustle to sell and approve mortgages to anyone in a risky neighborhood."
If that's the report I'm thinking of, it does a reasonable job discussing "how it got so bad". The sudden increase in home prices attracted more investors, etc. It lays out what happened after the ball started rolling, much as I did above.
It downplays what caused the initial jump, however. You don't just start in the middle at "the sudden increase in prices" and go from there, though. Something in 2006 caused that sudden increase. The massive increase in subprime lending, and therefore buyers, is the only reason explanation for that which I've seen.
Well the issue has been sufficiently politicized that it's difficult to assess expert opinions without a lot of research. However, CRA did increase the number of mortgages which would increase the prices of houses. This created a tempting opportunity for real estate investment. Once the financial industry schemed how to hide bad mortgages, the flippers and scammers were off to the races. At that point, a positive feedback loop can cause a rapid rise in prices.
Chris Mesterharm
Ajit Pai is obviously another puppet of corporate oligarchy control.
He has no real clue when it comes to doing a greater good for the peoples.
Dear Ajit, PLEASE step down. You are destroying man's ability to remain free human beings.
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.