Greetings, lots happening today, the day before a four-part deregulation proposal is to be discussed and decided at the FCC. This could homogenize local news. And that’s not all on the agenda for tomorrow — the FCC is also scheduled to vote on NTSC3.0, which could “authorize billions for the patent holders [at Sinclair broadcasting] and saddle consumers with the bills.”
The consumer-impacting meeting tomorrow is getting some press. Let’s hear from the diversity of viewpoints today while we still have a diversity of viewpoints.
Here are the links:
Broadcasting & Cable magazine covered the Sinclair/Tribune merger debate and panel today on Capitol Hill hosted by the Georgetown Law’s Institute for Technology Law & Policy. Worth reading in full. Here’s a choice graph aka wakeup call for those of us who (like me) were internally starting to feel sympathy for those poor TV station owners getting left in the dust by the enormous profit margins Google, Facebook and Internet sites achieve with targeted ads. Thinking TV station owners get nothing in return for serving the local community, a reminder to us they get quite a lot:
Goodfriend said that since broadcasters got a free monopoly form the government--spectrum, which they didn't pay for, and could sell for billions, along with a government-guaranteed monopoly on network programming for affiliated stations, and guaranteed carriage via must carry, the quid pro quo was that broadcasters had to serve the public interest, and that included free programming, local news, and viewpoint diversity.
CNET published today an explainer: How a massive broadcast merger could affect your local TV news. As explainer articles go, this one is high quality. The subheads are as follows:
- Intro
- Who are these companies again?
- Why are people concerned about this deal?
- What’s the connection with Trump?
- Are the Democrats worried about that connection?
- What’s going on with the FCC on Thursday?
- Anything else?
- What else has the FCC done that might benefit Sinclair?
- Why should consumers care about what Pai is proposing with the new changes to media ownership?
- What will happen next?
Deadline Hollywood put out “The Eve of Media Madness”: Sinclair-Tribune Deal Nears Key FCC Crossroads (the writing in this covers a lot of ground and is colorful. A magazine with “Hollywood” in its name knows how to entertain, even in technocratic industry pieces like this.) Article covers this same issue, tomorrows vote as a microcosm of the long term issue of the possible Sinclair-Tribune merger. The merger would “make Sinclair — already the No. 1 local broadcaster — an even bigger behemoth, with stations covering 72% of U.S. households.” And the deregulations to be discussed and decided tomorrow, could in Deadline’s words “be a glide path for Sinclair Broadcast Group’s pending acquisition of Tribune Media, which is midway through its regulatory review.” The article opens with a summation from former (George W Bush-appointed) FCC Commissioner Michael Copps:
As a group of 15 Democratic senators is calling for a federal investigation of the FCC’s review of Sinclair’s pending acquisition of Tribune Media, and former regulator Michael Copps is warning of Thursday’s pivotal FCC meeting, “We are on the eve of media madness.” Ties between the regulatory agency and President Donald Trump are at the center of the fight.
The Verge: The FCC is having a terrible month, and consumers will pay the price. This OpEd gets to the point with great clarity, and elegantly folds in consumer-impacting yet probably little-known (to me, at least) issues like discontinuation of copper networks. All without using too many words. And you understand why this writer knows this stuff so well and expresses it so succinctly, when you see the conclusion (and author bio):
The Last Word
If you are a supporter of fast, fair, open, and affordable networks, November will be a bad month. And December will be, too. So, keep calling your representatives and senators and tell them that you oppose pretty much everything this FCC is doing.
Gigi Sohn served as counselor to former FCC chairman Tom Wheeler from November 2013 to December 2016.
This Bloomberg editorial The FCC Vote That Puts Local News at Risk opposes most of what's to be voted on tomorrow, but lets up a bit on the idea of cross-media ownership. I too thought since we opposed so much of tomorrow’s proposal we could relent on one of Pai’s ideas to deregulate cross-media ownership. When I think of the owners who bought up and diluted the local radio programming here, cross ownership sounds much less reasonable than it did a few days ago. To allow these companies who bought our radio stations to then buy up our main newspaper sounds ominous. And as John Oliver reminded us, so much news starts with newspapers.
Well at least people are paying attention and tomorrow’s meeting got some press.