- Just two days after the September 11 attacks on the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon, the FCC began to eliminate the last remaining
shreds of regulation on media concentration. With all eyes elsewhere, the
FCC voted unanimously to "review" laws that prohibit the same
company from owning both a newspaper and a TV station in the same geographic
area, and laws that limit the percent of the national audience that a single
cable company can reach.
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- FCC chair Michael Powell has made no secret of his desire
to abandon any substantive public interest restrictions on the dominance
of big media corporations, claiming "the oppressor here is regulation."
(See "Their Man in Washington," http://www.fair.org/extra/0110/powell.html
.) He even presented this latest move as a patriotic act, declaring, "The
flame of the American ideal may flicker, but it will never be extinguished...We
will do our small part and press on with our business, solemnly, but resolutely."
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- Pressure to drop the cross-ownership ban comes from companies
like Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., whose recent acquisition of station operator
Chris-Craft puts it in violation, giving it two TV stations and a newspaper
in New York City. (News Corp. already had a waiver to operate one TV station
and a newspaper in New York.) There are more than 40 markets with newspaper-broadcast
combinations already, most 'grandfathered' in when the law was written
in 1975. Other companies in violation of the law include the Tribune Co.
which owns TV-broadcast combinations in Los Angeles, New York, Orlando
and Chicago.
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- Powell has called the cross-ownership ban "extremely
prohibitive," and said he sees no reason a city's TV station and newspaper
shouldn't be controlled by the same company. Indeed, media corporations
routinely make deals that violate existing law, so confident are they of
the current anti-regulatory climate-- "skating where the puck is going
to be," is how one industry analyst described it (L.A. Times, 9/14/01).
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- Besides the wholly predictable result of a single company
controlling a town's TV stations, radio stations, cable company and only
newspaper, critics warn that elimination of this rule will essentially
signal the absorption of the newspaper business into the television industry,
with a negative impact on the quality of print journalism. Newspaper companies
"see savings in news gathering by combining with TV stations as a
big plus," an industry analyst told the L.A. Times (9/14/01), giving
an indication that the newly merged megacompanies would provide communities
with less news, not more.
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- FCC reviews include a mandatory public comment period
to give Americans a chance to weigh in on proposed regulations. Examination
of some previous public comment periods shows that the comments received
are often few and are overwhelmingly drawn from media companies and industry
trade organizations.
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- The deadline for comment on the cable ownership cap has
been extended to January 4, 2002; FAIR will release more information on
that soon. More urgent right now are comments about the newspaper-broadcast
cross-ownership ban, which are due by December 3.
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- At a time of crisis, the dangers of such overwhelming
concentration in media are more glaring than ever. The changes underway
will make U.S. media even less diverse, more commercial and less accountable
to the public.
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- ACTION: Please let the FCC know that lifting the cross-ownership
ban to allow further media consolidation will not serve the public interest.
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- Because the FCC has time-consuming requirements for email
comments which require that people format their message in a certain way,
FAIR created a form to simplify the process. You can submit comments to
the FCC about cross-ownership at: http://www.fair.org/mailform.php
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- For more details on the FCC's efforts to weaken ownership
rules, see the Center for Digital Democracy's in-depth resources: http://www.democraticmedia.org/issues/mediaownership/index.html
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