mediageek

Category: media ownership & consolidation

  • FCC Workin’ Too Hard

    Last week the FCC seemed to be in overdrive, having an open meeting, issuing rulings and putting out proposed rulemakings like mad. We covered most of it on last week’s radioshow, but for those who prefer to read I’ll post the text of the news (something I probably don’t do often enough). Click MORE to…

  • Seattle Times Columnist Says “Rein in FCC”

    Once it a while it’s nice to see a well-informed column in a major US newspaper that takes the FCC to task for its media ownership stupidity, like this one by the Seattle Times’ Kay McFadden: “Red, white and blue in the face: We must rein in FCC.” The onely detraction is that it’s an…

  • Summary of Court Decision Against FCC Onwership Rules

    The Media Access Project is the public interest law firm that represented Prometheus in their suit against the FCC. They’ve posted a useful summary of the Court’s decision in PDF format on a page with links to their statement, the full text of the decision and various press accounts. As the summary makes clear, the…

  • The FCC “Driven More by Marketplace Ideology than by… Communications Laws”

    Salon’s Eric Boehlert, one of the best journalists working the media beat for a mainstream outlet, reports on the Court’s decision on the FCC’s ownership rules. A choice tidbit: “The court’s finding on Thursday highlights what critics had been suggesting all along: that the FCC failed to do its legal homework — and therefore the…

  • More on the FCC Court Decision: Prometheus’ Press Release & Link to the Decision Itself

    Looks like I have some fun reading ahead of me tonight, since I’ll want to be able to comment cogently on this decision on tomorrow’s radioshow. In the interim, you can read the court decision yourself — the Media Access Project has a pdf of it hosted on their site (warning: it’s 218 pages). Prometheus…

  • Court Overturns FCC’s Loosened Media Rules, Sends Them Back for Review

    The Third Circuit Court of Appeals today overturned the FCC’s loosened media rules, ordering the FCC to take a second shot at it. According to a post at Reclaim the Media: Andrew Jay Schwartzman, President and CEO of the Media Access Project, and lead counsel for the citizens groups in Promtheus Radio Project v. FCC,…

  • A Forgotten Anniversary

    Mediachannel’s Danny Schechter reminds us that today is the one-year anniversary of the FCC’s decision to further loosen media ownership regulations. He observes that the mainstream media “seems more obsessed with self-censorship than self-regulation” — to whit: Conservative groups seized that Super Bowl moment to flood Congress with more than 200,000 emails demanding that something…

  • Champaign-Urbana Alt. Weekly to close — Are these papers sustainable?

    I got word tonight that one of our local alternative weeklies, the (poorly named) Paper, will be closing in two weeks. The Paper is sort of the heir of a previous alternative weekly that started like as The Optimist in 1995 and was killed off by radio giant Saga Communications, which owned it for the…

  • FCC Sees the Light on Calvary Chapel Apps for LPFM

    The Calvary Chapel of Twin Falls, Idaho is the single largest abuser of FM translator stations, also known as repeaters. They’re low-power FM stations, typically around 10 watts, that are licensed only to rebroadcast the signal of full-power station. With commercial stations, translators have to be within a certain distance of the full-power station. But…

  • House Rep Fires Another Shot for Media Ownership Reform

    Rep. Maurice Hinchey of New York introduced a bill on Tuesday that would repeal the FCC’s rewrite of media ownership rules. The bill would also eliminate the Congressional requirement that the FCC hold a biannual review of media ownership rules, which triggered the FCC’s rewrite last year. According to radioandrecords.com, Hinchey’s bill also, “aims to…