Kevin Martin, chairman of the FCC is a man in a hurry to help big corporations consolidate their hold on the major media and drive smaller players out of the market.
Yesterday, Martin and his Republican associates on the commission did the dirty deed in behalf of their corporate masters:
Despite warnings from Congress and media watchdog orgs, the FCC voted 3-2 on Tuesday to approve chairman Kevin J. Martin's landmark proposal loosening the ban on newspaper-broadcaster cross-ownership and allowing companies to own both a newspaper and TV station in the nation's top 20 markets. link
Here's a quick backgrounder made prior to the vote, if you haven't been keeping up:
To further get you up to speed Salon magazine posted an interview with Democratic Commissioner Michael Copps full of good information.
Regarding the new rules effect on public dialogue Copps says:
It's bad for the political system whether you're a liberal, a conservative or a moderate, when the number of voices and diversity is diminished in our country. That's bad for our civic dialogue, if a few companies have too much control. We've witnessed a tremendous amount of consolidation already. This consolidation involves not just owning the various channels of distribution, stations and the channels, but also vertical concentration, so they control the production and the content. If you have a lock on the content and a lock on the distribution, that's a recipe, and it always has been, for a monopoly or at least an oligopoly. That's what we have in our media.
Copps makes the case for why this is important to us:
When I go around and talk to people, I say, people in this audience may have a lot of different issues that they think are the most important issue confronting America. Maybe it's the war in Iraq, or maybe it's, how do we create high-paying jobs? or how do we insure our 40 million people who don't have healthcare? how do we educate our kids? how do we pry open the doors of equal opportunity further? If those are your priorities, that's fine.
But then I say, your No. 2 issue has to be this media issue, because all those other issues you care about that I just mentioned are funneled and filtered through big media, if they're lucky enough to get in that funnel at all. They're lucky to even be covered by big media. Then they're covered with the slant of a few particular companies. And it's not so much a political slant as it is a commercial slant. It's a commercial bias of all this that I think is the problem, selling products to a particular demographic.
Frankly, I wish I could post more of this interview (but I won't because of fair use issues), so go and read it. I'll be right here waiting.
Ok, back? Good!
There have been quite a number of congresspersons who have cried foul and vowed to nullify the FCC's action.
Four Presidential candidates in the Senate (Biden, Dodd, Obama and Clinton) are cosponsors of a bill which along with its companion bill in the House would reverse the FCC’s actions. There's more on the House bill here.
Our congresspeople and candidates need to hear from us. Here's a convenient way to join a mass emailing.
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