Atomized junior

The Federal Communications Commission issued the "Further Notice of Proposed Rule-making" with a 120 day public comment period quietly last month. The subject was Media Ownership. I saw two articles on this at the time, noting then they seemed to reflect two different views of the subject: "The Single Most Important [Media] Policy Debate" and As FCC Digs Into Ownership, Big Media No Longer Cares.The Washington Post article takes the position that media consolidation no longer matters that since the previous iteration of this perennial battle, media companies have made business plans in other directions, Fox corp. unable to assemble 'triopolies' in your city is just as happy to have bought MySpace. The article while containing a grain of truth is mostly the talking points of those who now wish to proceed with media consolidation.

News incorporated : corporate media ownership and its threat to democracy / edited by Elliot D. Cohen ; preface by Arthur Kent. Amherst, N.Y. : Prometheus Books, 2005.
Convergent journalism : an introduction / Stephen Quinn and Vincent F. Filak, editors. Burlington, MA : Elsevier/Focal Press, c2005.
Converging media, diverging politics : a political economy of news media in the united states and canada / edited by David Skinner, James R. Compton, and Michael Gasher. Lanham, Md. : Lexington Books, c2005.
Bagdikian, Ben H. The new media monopoly / Ben H. Bagdikian. Boston : Beacon Press, c2004.
Who owns the media? : global trends and local resistances / edited by Pradip N. Thomas and Zaharom Nain ; with a foreword by Peter Golding. London ; New York : Zed Books ; Penang, Malaysia : Southbound ; New York : Distributed exclusively in the U.S. by Palgrave, 2004.
Cooper, Mark N. Media ownership and democracy in the digital information age : promoting diversity with First Amendment principles and market structure analysis / Mark Cooper. Stanford, Calif. : Center for Internet & Society, Stanford Law School, [2003]
Media organisation and production / edited by Simon Cottle. London ; Thousand Oaks, Calif. : Sage, 2003.
Demers, David P. Global media : menace or Messiah? / David Demers ; with a foreword by Melvin DeFleur. Creskill, N.J. : Hampton Press, c2002.
Herman, Edward S. Manufacturing consent : the political economy of the mass media / Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky ; with a new introduction by the authors. New York : Pantheon Books, 2002.
Compaine, Benjamin M. Who owns the media? : competition and concentration in the mass media industry / Benjamin M. Compaine, Douglas Gomery. Mahwah, N.J. : L. Erlbaum Associates, 2000.
Johnston, Carla B. Screened out : how the media control us and what we can do about it / Carla Brooks Johnston. Armonk, N.Y. : M.E. Sharpe, c2000.
Alger, Dean. Megamedia : how giant corporations dominate mass media, distort competition, and endanger democracy / Dean Alger. Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield, c1998.
Schultz, Julianne, 1956- Reviving the fourth estate : democracy, accountability, and the media / Julianne Schultz. Cambridge, UK ; New York, NY, USA : Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Invisible crises : what conglomerate control of media means for America and the world / edited by George Gerbner, Hamid Mowlana, Herbert I. Schiller. Boulder, Colo. : Westview Press, c1996.

So the FCC goes into action. The period between 2003 ( FCC: Public Be Damned) and now consisted of the Powell descendency, and interregnum, when the commission had no chair. Now there is, and also a conservative majority on the commission. This brings us to the 2006 Quadrennial Regulatory Review & 2002 Biennial Regulatory Review[~] Review of the Commission's Broadcast Ownership Rules and Other Rules Adopted Pursuant to Section 202 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, Cross- Ownership of Broadcast Stations and Newspapers, Rules and PoliciesConcerning Multiple Ownership of Radio Broadcast Stations in Local MarketsDefinition of Radio Markets . What Commissioner Copps refers to as the 'slim document'. Here is the: News Release FCC Opens Media Ownership Proceeding for Public Comment and Fact Sheet: on this from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Home Page (06/21/06 entry). Note the section of the release where they refer to "Comprehensive studies that will address a variety of issues including: (1) How people get news and information (2) Competition within types of media and across media platforms (3) Independent and diverse programming in today[base ']s media environment (4) And that they budgeted $200,000 for these studies. There are also statements by each commissioner on this same page, the one by Copps is worth glancing at.

Alexander Micklejohn speaking of the inherant difficulties of democracy, it's unclear even contradictory nature quotes Edward Carr:

What he is saying is that our government as we created and conceived it - covenanted it - cannot be put on auto-pilot. It can not be delegated, not to our delegates, nor by them (congress) to the executive. It is the debate. It is whatever consensus arises from that debate, it is the information, the communication, the knowledge. Without these it doesn't exist. The opposing force we contend with is alien (or alienated) government which seeks to rule without consensus, or to limit the range of public opinion within certain boundaries. Done perhaps to simplify or streamline decision processes, or make them privately, compatible with its own class interests. In practice there are incentives to get 'big', to merge for media corporations to reduce risk and uncertainty; remain profitable. Which they claim a free market should allow. Against this are public interest considerations of a free press and democracy, to which some would argue this is why the freest market is one institutionally restrained, if not regulated, from oligopic and monopolistic tendencies Wikipeadia gives a decent quick overview of the issues and current degree of consolidation Concentration of media ownership - Wikipedia.

That the FCC budgeted for studies speaks of a need for data. Lack of obvious consensus usually indicates need for more information. FCC may not have liked what commentary and information exists. Which is why they are going to generate more. Online; the Pew internet project has kept up a steady stream of reports on integration of the internet into American information assimilation - of news and opinions. The ultimate sources of information, contrasted with information providers; the roles and ownership of services and content providers are treated more tangentially. The last time a Pew project tackled this directly seems to be this 1999 report Striking the Balance, Audience Interests, Business Pressures and Journalists' Values. In Sec. iv of that report they claim that surveys indicated that news editors and management of media held widely divergent opinions on how they perceived mergers were affecting news collection and reporting. There are some other internet watch dogs: Media Access Project which bills itself as a non-Profit Public Interest Telecommunications Law Firm. The quote which forms the led paragraph on their site: "the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public, that a free press is a condition of a free society" is from Associated Press v. U.S., 326 U.S. 1 (1945) Mr. Justice Black delivering the opinion of the Court. Another interesting site calls itself Fire the FCC . Certainly there is no paucity within the published literature, see sidebar.

If the FCC truly wishes to learn something, the key issues are the relations between service provider, content provider, particular as this address the emerging diversity of non professional or alternate news dissemination. Always with merging ownership who cuts the paychecks who collects the fees is the critical question. I would like some data that would demonstrate that conglomerations and mass vertical integration do not indicate that a handful of (private) corporations do not own all I see hear and know. Again see the list that wikipedia was able to assemble. The danger is not that speech will be eliminated, rather that you will have marginalized voices within the infrastructure of available media (without net neutrality the web is firmly inside that structure). Under regime control as surely as state control, narrowing the channel of discourse, boxing the debates. Privileged mainstreamed tiers, secondary tiers, tertiary tiers. The owners pricing out voices, projecting their voice and interests while limiting others.