Category: media ownership & consolidation

Just under the wire of the Thursday, Jan 2 midnight deadline, I submitted my comments to the FCC on the agency’s upcoming media ownership rules review. It’s sort of surprising it took me so long to get comments together, given that I write about this issue every week here on mediageek. But I wanted to…

Today’s Free Speech Radio News featured a segment on the upcoming FCC review of media ownership rules. I was interviewed by reporter Leigh Robartes for this report and Robartes also used a bit from my interview with Ivy Glennon on Dec. 20. You can download a 13 MB broadcast-quality mp3 of the whole show or…

This was the weekend for media ownership and consolidation talk for me on the radio. Last Friday’s edition of the mediageek radio show featured a discussion with Ivy Glennon on the topic of media ownership and community media. Ivy is an associate professor of communicaitons at the University of Illinois and a member of WEFT’s…

p>It looks like the media attention to the issue of ownership is slowly starting to ratchet up. Like all media coverage, these things tend to snowball — coverage begats coverage. However, these stories are still running in the business section or in media-specific arenas. I’m still waiting to see something on the front page of…

According to this Hollywood Reporter article, the FCC’s proposal to raise cable ownership caps wasn’t supposed to be public yet, and so “A top FCC official” is asking the FCC’s inspector general to investigate. Yes, we wouldn’t want the public to know how they’re getting screwed until just before they get jabbed.

Last week the interim Pacifica National Board released a statement expressing “alarm” over the FCC’s upcoming owner rules review, in light of Chairman Powell’s agenda for raising or eliminating several limits. Also, recent mediageek entries on media ownership and consolidation are gathered together on a single page, thanks to Moveable Type’s category archive feature. With…

The LA Times takes a look at FCC Commissioner Michael Copps, for a time the lone Democrat on the Commission, who is taking Chairman Powell head-on over Powell’s public stance in favor of loosening media ownership restrictions. Copps favors a much more in-depth and public review of current ownership rules, rather than the expedited backroom…

Mediachannel.org has put together a useful News Tracker for coverage of media ownership and the FCC’s upcoming media ownership rules review. Here’s a fun question for research: how many of these articles don’t come from the business section of their respective publications?

USA Today has an article on the FCC’s proposal to allow cable companies to reach as much as 45% of the national cable audience, up from the current limit of 30%. “The increase could spur the formation of more cable giants, such as the recent AT&T-Comcast merger. The new Comcast is the USA’s biggest cable…

As reported by Wired News and CNet, amongst many, Echostar, which owns the satellite TV Dish Network, has cancelled its plans to acquire Hughes which owns DirecTV. The merger would have consolidated the only two major players in direct-broadcast satellite TV in the US, so its death is a good thing. … However, what is…