About a week ago the Senate Commerce Committee voted against the FCC’s new cross ownership rules. The vote was against the FCC’s push to allow one company to own a newspaper and television station in the same market. Senator Byron Dorgan from North Dakota sponsored the bill. If the rules are enacted they will further degrade the quality of the media.
Stop Big Media is organizing resistance to these new rules. It points out that according to the FCC itself, more consolidation leads to less journalism jobs and therefore less news coverage. The group is also encouraging opponents to send a message to Congress and people like Rupert Murdoch that the public does not support these changes.
Murdoch has been in the news recently because he’s trying to buy Newsday. Murdoch already owns The New York Daily News and The Wall Street Journal and is already worth $9 billion according to Forbes Magazine. This ranks him 73rd in the world amongst billionaires.
Murdoch’s purchase of The Wall Street Journal was controversial because people thought he was just buying it to turn it into a right wing mouthpiece like Fox News. Fox New’s notorious “Fair and Balanced” label spurred a lawsuit by AlterNet and Moveon.org.
AlterNet had this to say about the “Fair and Balanced” label, “Is the Fox News Channel about to lose its "Fair and Balanced" trademark? Nothing is more likely to make a serious journalist, or a concerned news consumer, gag than hearing the Fox News Channel smugly refer to itself, day after day, as being "fair and balanced." But what really rubs salt in the wound is this: Fox has actually registered those three words – "fair and balanced" – as its signature trademark. Does this mean that all journalists and news organizations in the world are legally forbidden to use those words – not only to describe themselves – but for virtually any purpose whatsoever?”
What Fox News has shown is the danger of media that is too concentrated in the hands of too few people—in this case in the hands of one man—Rupert Murdoch.
As the concentration becomes more pervasive, more people will see why it should be resisted. It’s time for the people of this country to take back the past and with it take back the future. It’s not too late—as long as we’re not too lazy.