Made you look
No, actually I decided to write this entry after getting into an exchange on a comments this afternoon about media consolidation. I said consolidation doesn't really upset me as a politial issue, but does as a consumer.
My fellow poster was horrified and said she assumed that meant I had no problem with being force-fed news that was gathered, edited, filtered and delivered by one mega-media monster
I kind of laughed at the assumption, since that's clearly not the case nor the intent of the consolidation efforts. But it seems to be a common meme here that this is the goal of media companies. Or that Dean lost because of opposition to media consolidation. Or that "the media" would never allow any candidate who opposed consolidation to win the presidency.
I find this rather bizarre and wrong, because it misunderstands both how the news we get is made and what is really wrong with media consolidation (full disclosure: I've drawn checks from The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and Hollinger International [fuck you Conrad]).
Media consolidation as it now stands is about how much local market share any one company can hold in any one market. The Tribsters, for example, can own a newspaper and a TV station in Chicago because under the new rules they aren't gaining circulation and viewership that combined reach more tha 39 percent of the total readers or viewers in the Chicago market.
Basically, this has nothing at all to do with the news report either WGN or the Trib produce. They may share resources or collaborate on projects, but they gather news independently and report it independently.
Decisions in the news business are made by editors (Faux News in this paragraph is the exception) and reporters. I've yet to work in a newsroom where we waited for orders to come from the executive suite before we figured out what lede to take on a story. News comes from the bottom up: reporters get it, line editors fix it up, section editors decide where to play it.
Now, do editors get a bug up their ass and push reporters to do certain stories? Sure. Look at Howell Raines and the Augusta story from last year. But they do so at their own peril. Raines got raked over the coals by his peers and the public for going on and on about it. And usually those instances are localized. For example, Raines wouldn't call up the Washington Post and say "Hey, lets jump on this story together and get a woman into Augusta." Why? For one thing, they're competitors, editors pounce on stories because they think it will give them an economic edge.
The point is, consolidation has not yet reached the tipping point where we're all getting out news from the same four guys. In smaller markets this is very much a concern. But some of the onus is on the unhappy consumers here. Seek out alternatives, write letters to the editor, nag assigning editor to cover what you think is important. Those things do affect coverage. In the end, the whole business is about getting more people to look at what you make than what the other guy is making, which makes consumers incredibly powerful when they're willing to make their voices heard.
I worry about Comcast buying Disney because it takes a long time to make a movie or an album, and that gives the suits a long time to interfere. News has a built in resistance to this though because it happens quickly and it's made by incredibly competitive people who get paid relatively little to tell the truth. What we get is often compromised by time, by the limitations of the reporter and by biases. They have opinions too and frequently they show up in newspages where they don't belong. My biggest beef with national coverage is that it relies too heavily on "he said, she said..." without saying "but the reality is...."
My biggest worry is in those areas where the suits do make the final decisions. Radio, where fully integrated pseudomonopolies push onto the airwaves the music they've already paid for. Movies, where suits green-light movies they think will play best on the cable channels they've just bought up.
But I don't worry about corporations driving the news. Love them or hate them, newspeople still make those day by day, sometimes minute by minute, decisions that decide what we'll read or see. The easiest way to get two reporters to disagree is to ask them the same question. Reporters all think they've got the greatest insight into candidate A or B. And they're going to do everything they can to get that into print as fast as possible, before it occurs to the other guy.
They're frequently wrong, and being a news consumer can be incredibly frustrating. But in 25 years of newspaper reading, I've yet to pick up the Trib and think I'm just reading what the suits sitting high up in the Tribune Tower want me to. It's a lot more complicated than just that.