FCC vote on media ownership June 2

And I hope all of my readers have signed the petition linked below to ask the FCC and your elected representatives to not roll back the rules regarding ownership any more.

One of the big responses to the wailing about media ownership concentration is that new technology has made this fear obsolete, because of the options available on the web and on cable. First, the cable operations are owned by big corporations, who own several channels, or own cable channels and other big media outlets. MSNBC? CNN (AOL Time Warner)? Even FOX? They take their promenence in another media and extend to cable. There really isn't a diverse marketplace of ideas.

And on the internet? Nope. Wendy Grossman has a good column in The Inquirer, a tech news site written in the style of the British tabloid papers.
Advertisers like massed ranks of eyeballs, not little niche markets, at least online. This may of course change as advertisers become more sophisticated in their use of new media, but the trend so far has been in the opposite direction.

I live in the Washington, DC metro area. Since I have moved here, I've quit listening to commercial radio. There isn't a station that speaks to me One of the public radio stations does a good job with jazz and world music in the evenings, and so I listen to that when I'm at home in the den. If I want to hear alt-rock, there isn't a station here for me. I don't want to see television become as vapid a wasteland as commercial radio has become. And I'd like to have a local DJ, the kind who looks out the window to do the weather, not one a thousand miles away.

(In a related note, I don't buy near as many albums as I used to. Wonder when the record companies will start screaming at the corporate radio oligopolists about them cutting into their sales?)