FCC’s Slippery Slope Ownership Rule Slapped Down
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Democrats, Law, Media, RepublicansI’ve always been of the belief that the more consolidated the media becomes, the less diverse the news gets. Recently the FCC ruled that media organizations could own a TV station and a newspaper in the same town in the top 20 media markets, thereby controlling a significant portion of the news.
Troubling? I think so, and so did the Senate.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate Thursday night voted to nullify a Federal Communications Commission rule that allows media companies to own a newspaper and a television station in the same market.The unusual “resolution of disapproval,” sponsored by Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., and 26 other senators, was approved by a voice vote. The measures sponsors include both Democratic candidates for president, Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois. [...]
The FCC decision allows one company to own a newspaper and a broadcast station in the nation’s 20 largest metropolitan areas. The TV station may not be among the top four in the market, and post-transaction, at least eight independent media voices must remain. The rule replaced an outright ban on cross-ownership.
The argument for the FCC’s actions?
Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said he was “disappointed with the Senate’s action” and would recommend to the president that he veto the bill.“The FCC’s approach modernizes a 30-year-old rule in a way that improves the financial viability of the newspaper industry, which faces an increasingly competitive media market,” he said.
Listen folks, the financial viability of the newspaper industry has less to do with media consolidation and much more to do with the fact that their “black and white and read all over” coverage is usually a day after the fact and younger generations just don’t care to pick up a paper in the morning if they can get personalized news delivered to their inbox. And already the smart papers are transitioning to more fluid, online operations that can pump out hyper-local news.
In other words, we should be striving for better media organizations, not bigger media organizations, and I’m glad to see the Senate finally doing something about this slippery slope.
This entry was posted on Friday, May 16th, 2008 and is filed under Democrats, Law, Media, Republicans. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
May 16th, 2008 at 11:12 am
The phrase that leaps to mind here is “buggy whip perspective.’ Isn’t technology making this an obsolete 20th century distinction? Consider:
Can a TV station have a website? If they can, then why can’t they have a newspaper?
Can a newspaper have a website? Can this website have video and audio? Does that count as TV? Explain.
I understand the goal here, but 21st century media developments are bulldozing attempts to achieve it using outdated distinctions. Reportage is converging on multimedia presentation, and any regulations which rely on what the primary medium of an entity used to be is just wasting everyone’s time, and maybe messing things up badly by inadvertently picking undeserved favorites.
May 16th, 2008 at 11:25 am
Kranky — That is a very good point, but it’s such a buzz-kill for us corporation-haters.
May 16th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
I see your point, but this isn’t not exactly buggy whip. Because what we’re talking about is not only the distribution of the content, but also control of content creation itself. In other words, putting your TV content on the web is merely extending it to a new audience.
What this ruling stands for is the idea that corporations shouldn’t have that kind of influence on the content creation in a specific market. And let’s face it folks, the reason they FCC ruled this way in the first place is they were lobbied by the media corps to expand what they could own because there’s nothing left. We should have more diversity, not less. Again, I applaud the decision.
And Dos, I like the idea of corporations. Truly. I just just don’t love corporations trying to consolidate entire industries into a few companies. That doesn’t make for a better product, it simply makes for a more homogenized, cost efficient one.
May 16th, 2008 at 1:09 pm
Consolidation is inevitable. We have laws against monopoly, but we have little choice but to tolerate oligopoly. It’s the rule, not the exception. Coke and Pepsi. McDonalds and Burger King. Folgers and Maxwell House. Post and Kelloggs. Virtually every mature consumer-based product (and make no mistake, that’s what media is) settle down to 2 or 3 dominant entities and maybe a horde of niche also-rans, market-share wise. Next time you visit the grocery store, notice that every section devotes 90% of its shelf space to 2 or 3 dominant brands and has a little section for the niche guys. That’s how it works out. Not my rule. Just pointing it out.
A market that is regulated to protect inefficiencies tends to be more costly for consumers and protect approaches that deserve to fail.
Further, your argument does not address the issue of convergence at all. People watch TV and read newspapers on their computers already. What will the regulators say when the nascent dominance becomes overwhelming in fact? Will they say that you can’t own the NY Times web site and the NBC website, but that you can own Yahoo and Google? What’s needed is an overriding principle that makes sense in the modern 21st century context. And like I said, history suggests that while we ought to do what we can to prevent monopolies, oligopolies are far too omnipresent to even try to attack.
The only sensible answer to media consolidation, if you fear it, is to contribute to media outlets that do a better job of producing the sort of content that the main market wants, or to produce great niche content to fill the larger void that is created when consolidation saps some of the variety from the market as it was prior to consolidation. That’s precisely what blogs do, by the way.
I don’t worry that much about media consolidation at this point, because having 3 or 4 politically biased and informationally inadequate national entities isn’t much worse than having 7 or 8 plus a few big market regionals. The one thing I do worry about is where the revenue will come from in the future to fund good independent journalism.
Fortunately, the media really does have its own set of idiosyncratic motivations that preserve the adversarial relationship. If the result of consolidation is Pravda1, Pravda 2, and Pravda3, the market will respond. Just like it responded when you could have any beer you wanted, as long as it was Budweiser. Took awhile, though.