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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 One long-standing rule repealed Thursday prevented one company in a given media market from owning both a daily newspaper and a TV station.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.
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.
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
You seem to think accurate reporting is "bias" if it rightly reports truths you dislike. All scientists also are very biased by your definition of bias.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun