Category: The FCC
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Benton & SSRC Reports: Concentrated Ownership Does Not Correlate with Better, Diverse Media
Benton Foundation and the Social Science Research Council released their four reports on media ownership and concentration today. Without a doubt these reports explode the lies that the FCC majority, National Asociation of Broadcasters and major newspaper owners have been trying to push. The big media contentions, that more concentrated ownership results in more variety…
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Reports, Reports Everywhere, but Not One from the FCC
On Wednesday the Media and Democracy Coalitionreleased a series of reports focusing on the economic effects of industry consolidation in twelve states. Not surprisingly they find that media consolidation is bad: The research finds that in every one of those states, most citizens already live in highly concentrated media markets with few choices for news…
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Federal Consolidation Commissioner
It isn’t enough to drag his feet on obligations to inform and engage the public on the media ownership proceeding. Now FCC Chair Kevin Martin is ready to sign off on the proposed AT&T – BellSouth merger without imposing a single condition. While he may have a bit more political savvy than his predecessor, Martin…
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FCC ‘Splode!
Well not quite, but according to celebrity communications prof. Robert McChesney, the “FCC Scandal Explodes with Second Revelation of Suppressed Media Ownership Research.” Bob knows how to use a little well-placed hyperbole now and then. Like I pointed out yesterday, Bob notes that, “This scandal could not have hit the FCC at a worse time…
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FCC Buried Media Ownership Report
I’m on vacation and trying to stay off the internets, but this one just shouldn’t be missed. Back when the FCC made its first stab at revising media ownership rules, then-Chairman Powell and his fellow Republicans argued that localism and service to communities was an entirely separate issue than who owns the media outlets that…
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FCC Chair Says He Wants Public Comment on Media Ownership, But Is Doing His Best To Undermine IT
As Matthew Lasar points out, media activists are wasting no time reaching out to the public at large in order to educate about media ownership and listen to public opinion on the issue. Of course this happens while we wait for the FCC to finally announce the public hearings on the issue that its promised.…
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Same News, New Channels — A Different Sort of NewsCentral
Those Google News alerts are occasionally worth something…. Today my alert set for “Sinclair Broadcast Group” brought me this little gem from the PR Newswire, announcing that my local Central Illinois Sinclair-owned stations will now be producing the 9:00 PM nightly news broadcast for the local FOX affiliates, too, which are not owned by Sinclair.…
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FCC Opens The Ownership Floodgates — We’ve Got 120 Days To Learn to Swim
On Tuesday the FCC finally released the official Notice of Proposed Rulemaking for its Media Ownership Proceeding [PDF], more than a month after first announcing that it would happen. This proceeding marks the Commission’s attempt to deal with the 2004 appeals court ruling against the 2003 media ownership rules rewrite which attempted to greatly loosen…
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FCC Pulls the Scab off the Media Ownership Sore
With a full Republican-majority commission, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin finally took the wraps off his proceeding to revisit media ownership rules [link to press release PDF]. Not unexpectedly, this new proceeding threatens to be just as bad as the last one in 2003. I’ll let Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein explain why [PDF]: First, the process does…
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Path for LPFM through the Telecom Bill Forest?
Thursday at 2 PM EDT the Senate Commerce Comittee will begin marking up and possibly voting on the ironically titled Communications, Consumer’s Choice, and Broadband Deployment Act of 2006. It’s the Senate version of the COPE Act, whose primary purpose is to speed the entry of the big telcos, like AT&T and Verizon, into the…