Media Consolidation Won’t Save Journalism

The Federal Communications Commission is pushing a plan to gut its 30-year-old newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership ban. This proposal would allow one company to own a local paper, two TV stations and up to eight radio stations in a single market. Advocates of more media consolidation argue that allowing TV stations and newspapers to merge is critical to cutting costs and saving local journalism.

This is the same argument the Bush FCC used to try to push through the same bad rules in 2007. Back then, the Senate voted the rules down and the courts later threw them out. It’s time to put this argument to bed for good: More media consolidation won’t save journalism.

McDowell’s Scare Tactics Reach New Low

Federal Communications Commissioner Robert McDowell increasingly sounds like a man stranded on a desert island, willing to say anything to get a ride back to shore.

Yesterday, Commissioner McDowell stooped to a new low in a talk with bloggers at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. He was invited to discuss the FCC’s recent decision to punish Comcast for blocking users from sharing legal content on the Internet.

Comcast was caught red-handed secretly discriminating against innovative technologies used for high-definition online TV, using the same censorship technology the Chinese government uses to block free speech. This discriminatory behavior represents a blatant and outrageous violation of free speech.

Debunking The White House’s Media Ownership Myths

On May 15th, on the verge of a full Senate vote on the “resolution of disapproval” that would overturn the FCC decision to gut media ownership rules, the White House released a formal “Statement of Administration Policy” defending the FCC and threatening to veto any bill designed to nullify the FCC’s rule change.

However, the administration got some of their facts wrong. Below is a copy of their statement, with a few notes and clarifications.

Cross-Ownership: Less Local News, More Layoffs

FCC chairman Kevin Martin and his Big Media buddies like to suggest that media consolidation creates a stronger media and allows one company to serve the local community better through “synergy” and “efficiencies of scale.”

They suggest that by leveraging the combined resources of media conglomerates and local papers they can bring a new level of service to local communities.

But using the FCC’s own data, we’ve shown that allowing one company to own a major daily newspaper and broadcast station actually decreases the amount of local news in a given community. And this week, one media giant has proven that cross-ownership also leads to fewer jobs.