this is something i’m really really angry about.
The three largest local phone companies control 83 percent of home telephone lines. The top two long distance carriers control 67 percent of that market. The four biggest cellular phone companies have 64 percent of the wireless market. The five largest cable companies pipe programming to 74 percent of the cable subscribers nationwide.
This is why Verizon can get away with operating on “suck” mode for the phone service in Westwood. This is why your cable bill is ridiculously high, and you can’t get all the channels you want anyway. This is why you can see the same newscasters on Channel 2 and 9 in Los Angeles. This is why your DSL provider can get away with giving you crappy service because there really are no other providers anyway. This is why radio is so terrible. Competition in telecommunications has been nearly eliminated in the rush to deregulation in 1996, and it will be completely eradicated if the FCC gets its way June 2.
The FCC is going to decide next week to raise the cap on media ownership to 35% and allow media companies to own both television stations and newspapers in most markets, effectively enabling one corporation to control all the major information sources in a region. Is this a bad thing? Well, ask yourself why you haven’t heard much about it from the standard tv and print outlets. The story is being buried at the expense of the public, and if that isn’t enough sign that media conglomerate control is a bad idea, then i don’t know what is. FCC chair Michael Powell is quite adamant about pushing this through, and unless there is major public outcry, he will succeed.
so here are some links to a few articles to get you started on the outrage. here, here, and here.
and that’s just the beginning. do a search with google news. write your congressman, write your newspapers… corporate domination of media needs to be stopped!! If this continues, can you imagine what can happen next? I’m too scared to. :(
Your opinion on the FCC case is rather one sided. Powell does have a good point that free broadcasted television, i.e., not cable or satellite, is virtually gone. All of the independent stations have gone for the more lucrative pay for service mode of broadcasting. That hurts anyone who can’t afford those kind of goodies.
Try using an antenna to get TV stations, even in LA, and all you get are the major TV stations who can afford to operate such a low profit operation as broadcasting and Spanish stations who have a large low wage earning market.
In the end, the independent satellite and cable channels won’t be hurt by this. Through their original programming and well earned reputations, they’re well positioned to stay competitive regardless of how many more channels ABC owns. The only thing that will be radically different is people like me who refuse to pay for cable and have an antenna will finally have something other than Spanish TV to watch.
wait, i’m not getting where you’re coming from. you’re saying that smaller stations that can’t afford to broadcast will be better off under this proposal?
that seems patently false to me because these smaller stations will be bought out by the larger corporate moguls. This is not done to ensure the survival of smaller market broadcasters, rather these small broadcasters will be streamlined and redone to fit the preexisting formats of the corporation’s other stations. This is what happened in radio, if you haven’t noticed. This is what Clear Channel, the nation’s largest radio station owner. If you have a KISS, a STAR, or an ALICE station on your radio dial, that’s Clear Channel, applying a pre-fab cookie cutter format in every market it’s in. Corporations are busy entities.. why should they have any interest in producing any sort of unique, quality content if they already own the competition that would force them to? I mean… Star 98.7 right now essentially re-airs the daily morning show in the evenings, as opposed to playing music, heaven forbid consider playing music outside the top 40 format!
So in actuality, you won’t get more things to watch outside of your Spanish language shows and whatever’s being aired on TV. you’re going to get less, because whatever unique content was already there, you might not get it anymore if the new corporate owner decides it doesn’t fit into the proper format.
No, I’m saying this will be horrible for small broadcasters, but who cares? On the local
market level, it will more than likely kill them off, what few remain anyways. Most of those stations, however, rarely do anything interesting, unique or of a high enough quality to justify such blatant over regulation by the government of the market as we have now on a local level. When’s the last time you watched UPN news, the only independent station in LA and felt like throwing your remote at the junk news they put on?
In the end, the most significant part of this decision is to guarantee the future of free
television in some form. Under the status quo it will die in a couple years from its high operation costs and low profits. All the major studios have expressed their dismay with the shrinking audience and ratings. If they do completely abandon the antenna world that leaves poor folk to cough up the money for cable or accept bland PBS. God forbid.
That’s why the very man who wrote the law on media ownership, former FCC Chairman Richard Wiley, has come out in favor of the deregulation.
Wiley sees that competition for television has never been better on cable, how many hundreds of channels do you have to choose? But free TV will be dead unless the FCC acted now.
Give the big media groups more ability to create more stations on a local level (yes, that means dominate) and at least there will be an option for those not willing to pay for cable.
By the way, consolidation hasn’t always led to the same disaster radio has yielded.
Consolidation on the newspaper level has allowed weaker newspapers that would otherwise be closed to survive and thrive.
Singleton bought nearly all of the Los Angeles
newspapers, almost all of which were losing money before he came and made them all profitable by
cutting costs and more importantly consolidating their operations to create a LA regional advertising program making it possible for businesses to advertise on a truly regional level through his company. His consolidated ad program brought in huge amounts of revenue to keep those papers that would have otherwised closed for good putting untold number of people out of work.