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?)

Popular posts from this blog

New post-convention poll Results look good to me. Now, we have to keep them coming. Further down in the article, there is discussion of how Kerry is gaining ground as a person who understands the needs of people, and a person of character. Key problem is going to be keeping these issues in front of voters, when the Kerry campaign will have a finite amount of cash to campaign on. Bush won't have a finite amount until the Republican convention at the end of August. Other people are going to have to step up and start hammering the Bush administration. Kerry Leads Bush in Post-Convention Poll (washingtonpost.com) : The new poll shows Kerry now claims the support of 50 percent of all registered voters, compared with 44 percent for Bush, with independent candidate Ralph Nader at 2 percent. On the eve of the convention, Bush led Kerry 48 percent to 46 percent. Among those most likely to vote, the race is tighter: Kerry holds a 2-point advantage over Bush in the current po...
Read more
Sometimes headlines just write themselves Like this one from the Washington Post today: Ex-FEMA Head Starts Disaster Planning Firm Michael Brown certainly has shown he can plan a disaster. Look at how awful Hurricane Katrina was. For preventing or fixing things afterwards, he's not so good.
Read more
Reading List It is a good thing to be married to a librarian. Our local system has a web-accessable catalog where I can put a book on hold. Depending on how many people are waiting for the book, in a few days to a few months, my wife comes home with the book I've requested. I was reading "A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market" by John Allen Paulos. It is the kind of book that makes mathematics of investing accessable to non-mathematical types (and some of us mathematical folks as well), even as he tells the story of his failed love affair with Worldcom stock. Of course, I set this aside as soon as I got in "Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth" by Joe Conason. This book takes all of the distortions of the right-wing media, the Bush-Cheney administration, and the Republican "conventional wisdom", and proceeds to refute them, citing facts chapter and verse. I think this book is great. But I've g...
Read more