Category: media ownership & consolidation
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FCC To Start Issuing Backed Up Indecency Fines
It’s been rumored for a while, but apparently now it’s official — the FCC’s Media Bureau is going to start issuing broadcast indecency fines from 2005. They’ll be done in packages which will each be signed off on by the FCC’s Commissioners, and are supposed to provide a little more guidance on what the FCC…
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Catch Up on Your Indecency
Last Thursday the Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing on “Decency,” and the hearing’s video is now available on-line at the Committee’s website, along with printed statements from the invited guests who gave tesimony. I did short report on the hearing on last Friday’s radioshow, available for listening online. You can also read that headline.…
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Government Handouts and Playing Hardball with Cable and Satellite Win Big Money for Nexstar & Sinclair
Nexstar is this year’s Sinclair Broadcast Group — a medium-sized TV station owner getting aggressive about squeezing cash out of stations any way possible. Nexstar isn’t as outwardly political as Sinclair is — there’s no Nexstar equivalent to Mark Hyman‘s The Point — although it recently refused to air NBC’s controversial “Book of Daniel” on…
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mediageek radioshow headlines: Indecency at the Senate; Google Won’t Pay Telcos; Stern Back on FM… Pirate FM
These are the media news headlines as read on the mediageek radioshow on Jan. 20, 2006: Indecency Day at the Senate Commerce Committee; Consumer Groups Prefer A La Carte; Google Says It Won’t Pay Telcos for Consumer Bandwidth; Stern Gets Pirated. Indecency Day at the Senate Commerce Committee Decency, and indecency was the big topic…
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Satellite, Cable and TV Stations Betting Viewers Like Chips in a High-Stakes Gamble
On last Friday’s radioshow, former WCIA news director Ken Schreiner and I talked about how TV station owners like Nexstar (WCIA’s owner) and Sinclair are trying to suck money out of every stream they can find. These midsize owners leveraged the hell out of themselves in order to buy up stations, and currently aren’t turning…
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On Friday’s Radio Show: Independent Video Producer and Ex-Nexstar Employee Ken Schreiner; More Nexstar Bullying
I initially invited Ken Schreiner on the program because he’s a local guy who completed a feature documentary on the relationship between people and wild animals that he’s distributing on his website, along with other videos he’s produced. Only after extending the invitation did I realize that Ken used to work for our local Nexstar-owned…
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News Headlines from the Jan. 6 Radioshow: New FCC Commissioners Sworn In; No Indecency Fines for 2005; CBS Splits from Viacom; Texas Is IPTV Frontier, but Problems Ahead for Public Interest
These are the media news headlines as read on the Jan. 6, 2006 edition of the mediageek radioshow: FCC Commissioners Sworn In On Jan. 3 Michael Copps and Deborah Taylor Tate were sworn in as FCC Comissioners. This will be a second term for Copps, a Democrat who has been on the FCC since 2001,…
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Podcasting and the Revitalization of Radio
Radio has been declared dead many times, especially with the rise of the internet. When streaming audio became practical in the late 90s it was often declared that every person with a ‘net connection would have her own station. The birth of satellite radio, with hundreds of channels of narrowcasted nationwide channels, brought more exclamations.…
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Radio News for Sale
As discussed on the last two radioshows, Clear Channel’s Madison, WI news/talk station WIBA has sold the naming rights of its newsroom to AMCORE bank. Kristian Knutsen has been hot on this story, writing three stories for the Daily Page blog of Madison’s alt weekly Isthmus.
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No Surprise, NPR Smears Florida Pirates
In the 1970s NPR lobbied the FCC to get rid of low-power FM radio, and in 1978, the Commission did. Then in 2000 NPR lobbied Congress to hem in the new low-power FM service, and Congress did that. Now it’s 2005 and it should be no surprise that the public radio network would air a…