Neil Hickey, editor at large of the Columbia Journalism Review, does a little question-and-answer style overview of the issues involved in media ownership regulation. For the most part he makes things clear and honestly confronts reality, such as in these answers:
Q: If this subject is so important, how come the general public knows so little about it?
A: Because broadcast and cable news people practically never cover it….
Q: How do newspapers handle the story?
A: The great majority bury it in the business pages, if they treat it at all. DonÂ’t forget, many big newspaper companies own television stations and stand to benefit from deregulation….
But Hickey shows his allegiance to the commercial media status quo in tackling the question of restoring regulations — he says
“thatÂ’s not realistic. The deregulatory trend has proceeded so far in the last half-dozen years — since passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act — that itÂ’s irreversible. The goal, however, is: donÂ’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. Reasonable people on both sides can agree on minimum, necessary rules to preserve a diversity of news and opinion.”
Well, maybe, if the media industry were reasonable. But I don’t consider the quest to own every possible media property and establish monopolies at the expense of all else to be reasonable. And regardless of what they’re PR flacks attempt to spin out, that is what every major media conglomerate is after. Sure, they tolerate and give lip service to competition because it’s an entrenched element of the dominant ideology, but if they could slay the competition and have a legal monopoly with the flick of a wrist, any one of them would. They only nominally respect the existence of competition in their sector because the law nominally requires it. The only time they fight for competition is when they want to move into a sector — like cable TV or residential phone service — that they’re currently barred from. As soon as they’re inside they’ll fight to the end of the earth to keep all competitors out.
The ruling media conglomerates are myopic, foolishly greedy and give absolutely not a shit about you or me. That’s not reasonable, so I refuse to hope for a reasonable outcome.
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