FCC Ruling Would Mean Greater Media Concentration

As if there weren't enough that we've seen greater and greater control of the media by a handful of corporations, including Rupert Murdoch, now the FCC wants to make it worse. The demise of our country's morals, thus our nation, can be directly traced to the lack of choice in the media. Ideas and thoughtful programming have been replaced by mindless programming that is intended to appeal to the lowest common denominator, since that makes the most profit. The damage to our republic can best be exemplified by the trivialization of the news. The press prefers to cover Britney Spears and Paris Hilton than whether we should be getting into a war with Iran. And certainly there will be more debate on Britney gaining custody of her kids than on the issue of media concentration, where there is no debate:

The head of the Federal Communications Commission has circulated an ambitious plan to relax the decades-old media ownership rules, including repealing a rule that forbids a company to own both a newspaper and a television or radio station in the same city.

[...]Officials said the commission would consider loosening the restrictions on the number of radio and television stations a company could own in the same city.

Currently, a company can own two television stations in the larger markets only if at least one is not among the four largest stations and if there are at least eight local stations. The rules also limit the number of radio stations that a company can own to no more than eight in each of the largest markets.

The deregulatory proposal is likely to put the agency once again at the center of a debate between the media companies, which view the restrictions as anachronistic, and civil rights, labor, religious and other groups that maintain the government has let media conglomerates grow too large.