Michael Powell, FCC chairman, said: "Keeping the rules exactly as they are, as some so stridently suggest, was not a viable option. Without today's surgery, the rules would assuredly meet a swift death."
Under the new ruling, large newspaper companies such as Gannett, Tribune and the New York Times could purchase television stations in markets where they own newspaper titles. Meanwhile, broadcasters such as Viacom and News Corp would be free to buy more local television stations around the US in addition to acquiring newspapers.
Newspapers are dying everywhere. Having a television tie-in could help them with their resources. Being able to gather news for two different kinds of media at the same time would certainly make an operation run more efficiently. Rupert Murdoch tried to do this in Boston in the 1980s, but Kennedy didn't want to be criticized in two different places.
Fritz Hollings, ranking Democrat on the Senate commerce committee, said: "[This decision] in a rear-view mirror will be seen as a decision that is both dumb and dangerous.
What’s the government's argument about school choice? They say that it will take needed funding away from public schools. What they are saying in effect is competition is bad, because it is inefficient and the resources are better spent all going to one failure. When our media choices are hundreds of channels and thousands upon thousands of web sites, they see no good. Right now any person in the United States could have their own TV show web cast for a few thousand dollars. Never have so many people been able to voice their views to so many.
Now, why is it all right for the government to own 90% of the schools in America if they can’t trust someone else to own 45% of the media in just one market? They’re saying that competition and local control are good ideas for private business, but inefficient for government programs. It’s not necessary for government ideas and solutions to compete, but wholly necessary for private enterprise.
But are government bureaucrats really looking out for us more than some company? Enron was a private sector example of what the government has been doing for years. We can always turn the media off when we don’t like the programming. But no matter how big the government gets, we can never turn it off. That's the real danger.
Until the government is willing to look past its own intentions and see the results of their own monopolies, they have no grounds upon which to object to private sector oligopolies.
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