I’ve just seen a glimpse of television conglomerate Sinclair Broadcasting’s plans to centralize and de-localize local news at its stations. Sinclair owns and operates 63 stations across the country reaching 25% of the national broadcast audience.
Your local news may soon come from Maryland.
“The Bush administration’s top official for telecommunications policy let lobbyists for wireless companies help pay for a private reception at her home and 10 days later urged a policy change that benefited their industry, according to documents and interviews.
“The official, Nancy Victory, an assistant commerce secretary, said she regarded the lobbyists as friends and cleared the arrangement in advance with her department’s ethics office. She did not report the party, held in 2001, as a gift on her government ethics disclosure form.
“‘My friends paid for this party out of their personal money,’ Ms. Victory said in an interview with The Associated Press.”
Victory, indeed.
Media writer Frank Ahrens asks, “Can XM Put Radio Back Together Again?”
I still haven’t heard it, but would like to check it out. My concern is audio quality, since XM uses a lossy compression schema to cram in so many channels, and I understand that the bitrates are relatively low. Of course, the test lies in the listening.
A much bigger test lies in store for Sirius satellite radio, XM’s competitor. John at DIYmedia.net notes that the company just sold out to its creditors in exchange for $700 million of debt and $200 million cash.
It could just be that satellite radio is a little too late (and too expensive to launch). Not to knock on radio, but with mp3s, file sharing, streaming radio and audio services bundled with cable and satellite TV, I don’t know how many folks are willing to shell out that extra $10 for subscription radio. It’s not that the service isn’t necessarily worth it (and I’m not saying that it is worth it), so much as it’s one more thing.
You know that a particular issue is getting traction with the broader public when the New York Times’ crusty old conservative commentator opines on it… and he agrees with you.
William Safire’s Sunday column is “On Media Giantism,” where he comes down squarely against loosening media ownership restrictions. In fact, his leading complaint is that newspapers and other mass media aren’t covering the issue of media concentration, although he notes that USA Today published an article. I’ll point out that the USAT article — and articles in the New York Times, for that matter — all appeared in the business pages, not as part of the general national news. Where and how a story is covered is almost as important as whether it is covered in the first place.
In advocating against lifting media ownership restrictions Safire, of course, takes an admitted “pro-business” approach:
“But while political paranoids accuse each other of vast conspiracies, the truth is that media mergers have narrowed the range of information and entertainment available to people of all ideologies.
Does this make me (gasp!) pro-regulation? Michael Powell, appointed by Bush to be F.C.C. chairman, likes to say ‘the market is my religion.’ My conservative economic religion is founded on the rock of competition, which — since Teddy Roosevelt’s day — has protected small business and consumers against predatory pricing leading to market monopolization. “
While I’ll never become a Safire ally, I can’t argue much with his reasoning, and only hope that his writing about it will wake up a few more people.
Yesterday was the first public forum on the FCC’s upcoming media ownerhip review. This one was sponsored by the Columbia University School of Law (not the FCC), and, according to CBS Marketwatch apparently had several hundred attendees in addition to lots of speakers. Columbia has archived videos of the forum on-line. I watched a little […]