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Big Media

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin has announced a December 18th vote on whether or not newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership should be further deregulated. About 750 people showed up to oppose Martin's plan at a hearing in Seattle last week, despite being given just seven days notice. Bill Moyers has a great video about the hearing, and much more:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEoKXKUnLsY

Rule changes such as the one Martin is proposing are designed to further consolidate media ownership into the hands of the powerful few. Free Press conducted a study which found that while minorities make up 33% of the U.S. population, they make up just 3.26% of all TV station owners.

At the hearing, FCC Commissioner Michael Copps said: "The commission always seems to be on the fast break to help big media, but it's slow as molasses when the topic is the public interest. I will fight against any efforts to short-circuit the process." Kudos to Commissioner Copps, but if we are going to stop this dangerous deregulation, we are all going to have to fight alongside him.




1. Contact the FCC here.

2. Contact your Senators here.


(copied from Myspace, a bulletin from Disinformation)
 
Thanks for posting this. Many of the radio stations here have been swallowed by a couple big companies and now we're fed music like formula from a bottle. Chicago's Tribune Co. bought our newspaper and then bought our "alternative" newspaper. It's done for them what it's done for the Cubs, which it also owns. It's no wonder they haven't won a World Series since the Paleozoic.

No matter where we turn, everything comes from the same homogenized, pasteurized point of view, often from the same production facilities. It's good for corporate profits, but bad for democracy and music and community everything else that really matters.
 
Forget regular radio. Satellite radio is so much better.
 
Satellite serves a lot of flavors of formula, but I prefer media to be locally grown. Even if it's something like this - http://www.wolfpointherald.com/ - a newspaper where someone named Shumway writes everything and someone else named Shumway does everything else. They're known in these parts to be wild-eyed gun nuts, but we need more media in human hands like theirs and less in the corporate clutches of the Tribune Co., Clear Channel and so on.
 
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