On Tuesday, December 18, the Federal Communications Commission voted to loosen even further the rules that govern media consolidation in this country. The FCC’s decision weakens a 32-year-old ban on newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership, which had prevented a company from owning both a newspaper and broadcast station (radio or television) in the same market. The vote, 3-to-2 along party lines, permits this sort of cross-ownership in the country’s 20 largest markets.
Read all about it at the Free Press blog, and don’t miss the powerful dissenting statements from FCC commissioners Jonathan Adelstein and Michael Copps (Word docs) on what this means for local media.
This is bad news, but it’s not the final word–the legislature has the authority to overturn the decision. If enough people sign the open letter to Congress that Free Press has drafted, perhaps they’ll listen.
—Danielle Maestretti
Check out Keith Goetzman’s profile of Adelstein and Copps, “Big Media Meets Its Match,” from the July-August issue of Utne Reader.
