Category Archives: Television

FCC: Trick or Treat! Media Consolidation

kevin_martin.jpg Today is November First, which is the deadline for comments on the FCC’s media consolidation move. There’s still no notice on the FCC web pages of a hearing on November 2.

Oh, wait! Kevin Martin held a hearing two days earlier, on Halloween instead! Without ever announcing it on the FCC web pages.

Dissident commissioners Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein appeared at a rally outside the FCC’s office in Washington to object to Martin’s chicanery. “Neither we nor the public received any confirmation that the hearing would occur until … just 5 business days before the event,” the commissioners said before entering the building for the hearing. “This is unacceptable and unfair to the public.”

Joining Copps and Adelstein were political, labor and community leaders who condemned Martin’s assault not merely on media diversity but on the basic standards for making regulatory shifts.

— No Treats for FCC Chair and Media Monopolists, John Nichols, The Nation, Wed Oct 31, 6:03 PM ET

Jesse Jackson, National Organization of Women, United Church of Christ, Future of the Media Caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives; they all protested.

Martin even has the Parents Television Council against him.

Notice of a meeting only five days before to the other commissioners, and apparently none to the public? You’d think Martin didn’t know how to talk to the press. Yet just a few days ago he was chatting with the New York Times about ending cable monopolies to apartments.

I wonder if he told the telcos about that Halloween meeting more than five days before? Nah, that would be corruption.

-jsq

FCC: Media Consolidation in November

coppshi_1.jpg Last year the FCC rushed through approval of the AT&T-Bellsouth merger at the last minute in December before the new Congress was convened in January. This year the rush is on reducing ownership of the majority of media in the U.S. from 50 owners to 5 in the past two decades wasn’t enough already.
The Federal Communications Commission is responding to critics’ complaints that the agency isn’t giving them enough time to examine the scientific studies prepared for the agency’s media ownership review.

The FCC’s Media Bureau today extended the deadline for comment by three weeks, citing the request of Free Press, Consumers Union and the Consumer Federation of America.

Nearing the end of its examination of media ownership rules, the FCC on July 31 released 10 studies of various issues of media consolidation and indicated they could help form the basis of any rule changes. The studies included examinations of the impact of consolidation on news content, opinion, advertising and programming and also looked at minority ownership trends.

FCC Extends Deadline for Comments on Media Ownership Studies, By Ira Teinowitz, TV Week, September 28, 2007

Various groups complained, so the FCC made an extension:
The FCC said comments that were to have been filed by Oct. 1 now may be filed through Oct. 22, with responses now due by Nov. 1.
That’s right: three more weeks to study an issue that will affect news, politics, government, and, well, basically everything for the indefinite future. Or, to be more specific, to study studies picked by the FCC.

Some observers are relatively confident of concessions, apparently not taking into account that some previous concessions have already fallen by the wayside: Continue reading →

Dispersed Media Ownership

edwin_baker.jpg Here’s a point that somebody needed to spell out:
The Federal Communications Commission is considering whether to reduce restrictions on broadcast-station ownership, an action that would permit greater media and press concentration.

This is a bad idea. Bad for audiences, for citizens, and for democracy. Dispersed media ownership, ideally local ownership, serves democratic values, while conglomerate ownership and media mergers, which would be the result of reduced ownership restrictions, do the opposite.

Equality — one person one vote — provides the proper standard for the distribution of power and voice in a democracy. Maximum dispersal of media ownership can enable more people to identify a media entity as in some sense speaking for and to them.

Dispersed ownership also reduces the danger of inordinate, potentially demagogic power in the public sphere. As the FCC once recognized, many owners creates more independent decision makers who can devote journalistic resources to investigative reports. Finally, dispersal reduces — without eliminating — potential conflicts of interests between journalism and an owner’s economic interests.

In contrast, media mergers put papers and broadcasters into the hands of executives whose career advancement depends on maximizing profits. Mergers require owners to squeeze out more profits to pay off debt created by the high bid made to secure the purchase. As too many recent examples show, the most consistent method to reduce expenses is to fire journalists.

— Dispersed media ownership serves democratic values By C. Edwin Baker, Los Angeles Times, 10 September 2007

There’s more. It’s all good. And it’s by a law professor who has written a book on the subject, so he appears to have researched it. Continue reading →

Back to the ITU Future

itu.jpg I should have expected the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) to be involved in this:
Another document came out last week that ties this all together. It’s from the ITU, and it’s called “Trends in Telecommunication Reform 2007: The Road to Next-Generation Networks (NGN).”

The ITU defines “NGN” as a network that provides quality-of-service-enabled transport technologies. The idea is that packet transport will be “enriched with Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) to ensure Quality of Service (QoS).”

Translation, as far as I can tell: packet transport becomes the same as circuit-switched transport. Prioritization is controlled; it’s a network optimized on billing.

— Tying things together, by Susan Crawford, Susan Crawford blog, Mon 10 Sep 2007 08:05 PM ED

This takes us back to the bad old days when national telephone companies sold you data service by the byte, through their preferred protocol, X.25. The advantage of circuit switching was supposed to be fully provisioned copper wires or other resources all the way through between two parties. The disadvantages were that you sometimes couldn’t get a connection and the high price, which got even higher between countries. It seems the telcos have settled on MPLS as their modern equivalent of X.25.

-jsq

Merger Mania

cleland.jpg Interesting post here on Scott Cleland’s Percursor Blog:
A major reason why the stakes are so high in the FTC’s review of the Google-DoubleClick merger is how remarkably fast online advertising is overtaking other advertising industry segments that have been around for decades.

— Online ad trends show the huge stakes in the Google-Doubleclick merger, by Scott Cleland, Precursor Blog, Wed, 2007-09-05 17:38.

Interesting especially in that I don’t recall him having any similar trepidations about the AT&T-Bellsouth merger.

He quotes eMarketer as saying that:

a recent report from equity firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson predicts that the Internet will displace television as the No. 1 ad medium by 2011.” [bold added]
Cleland did not provide a link to eMarketer or to VSS.

A little googling finds the VSS press release about its report, which actually says:

Internet advertising is expected to become the largest ad segment in 2011, surpassing newspapers.

— New Veronis Suhler Stevenson Forecast: Shift to Alternative Media Strategies Will Drive U.S. Communications Spending Growth in 2007-2011 Period; Consumer Media Usage Expected to Level Off Going Forward, Press Release, Veronis Suhler Stevenson, 7 Aug 2007

VSS says newspapers: not television. Looks like somebody had television on the brain. Continue reading →

if we just had phones and Internet service

32099661.jpg If you’re stuck in a desert in the summer in a dead-end war, what do you want? Water, women, wine? Food and a ticket out? For some, the first thing they want is:
“There are two different wars,” said Staff Sgt. Donald Richard Harris, comparing his soldiers’ views with those of commanders in distant bases. “It’s a dead-end process, it seems like.”

Asked to rank morale in his unit, Harris gave it a 4 on a 10-point scale. “Look at these guys. This is their downtime,” he said, as young soldiers around him silently cleaned dust from their rifles at a battle position south of the capital. A fiery wind blasted through the small base, an abandoned home surrounded by sandbags and razor wire.

“It sounds selfish, but if we just had phones and Internet service,” said Staff Sgt. Clark Merlin, his voice trailing off.

— GIs’ morale dips as Iraq war drags on, By Tina Susman, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer, August 25, 2007

This is perhaps an indication of how important Internet service is these days. With it, these troops can communicate with their peers, family, and others, not to mention get news on whatever they want. Without it, they’re isolated in a howling desert.

Back home, without the Internet, we’re isolated in the wastelands of TV.

-jsq

Heck of a Job, Stickler

Story.jpg
Richard Sticker ((ABC 4 News))
What practical difference does it make when a president appoints political commissars as heads of departments and agencies, enforcing ideologicallines instead of doing their job?
Also coming to light, is the fact that Stickler’s nomination to head the mine administration was twice rejected by congress and rejected when republicans were still in charge. Rejected reportedly by senators who were concerned about Stickler’s safety record when he operated mines. After his nomination was twice rejected by the Senate, President Bush gave Richard Stickler the mine safety job with a recess appointment. That’s a presidential appointment made when congress is not in session.

Finally, congressional investigations and hearings are now expected to look at a key provision of federal mining law, one which requires the U.S. Government to be the main communicator when an accident occurs. ABC News now notes it took the mine safety administration two days to take public control of the Crandall Canyon Mine. ABC also adds, “Others were irate that [mine owner Bob] Murray was allowed to publicly predict success and contradict MSHA itself while agency officials quietly looked on.”

— Federal mine safety official’s credentials questioned, Chris Vanocur, ABC 4 News, Last Update: 8/20 2007 8:00 pm

Dead people in mines. Dead people in Hurricane Katrina. Postal rate hikes for small publications. Wireless spectrum handed over to a few big companies. And of course massive consolidation of first mile Internet ISPs in the hands of companies that aren’t delivering on their promises and that indulge in repeated political censorship while cooperating with the government in wiretapping.

The stakes going forward are even higher, including economic competitiveness, control of information, and political discourse and with it the survival of a political system.

At least the traditional media finally noticed the problem with the appointment of the Mine and Health Safety Administrator. Imagine if we had more proactive investigative media that might have actually noticed his appointment when it happened. And imagine if we had none, which is a very real possibility with continuing media consolidation and increasing control over the Internet by a very small number of companies.

-jsq

700Mhz: Duopoly As Usual

710_1_1a_CARRIE_ANN_BAADE_The_Devil_is_In_the_Details,10_x_17..jpg Susan Crawford reads the 700Mhz auction rules and confirms the worst:
1. Those Carterfone protections don’t mean too much. The no-locking, no-blocking requirements are hedged in by substantial limitations: the winning licensee will be able to lock and block devices and applications as long as they can show that their actions are related to “reasonable network management and protection,” or “compliance with applicable regulatory requirements.” In other words, as long as the discrimination can be shown to be connected (however indirectly) to some vision of “network management,” it will be permitted. (Discrimination “solely” for discrimination’s sake is prohibited, but that’s not too difficult to avoid.)

— Many, many devils in the details: 700 MHz rules, by Susan, from Susan Crawford blog, 13 Aug 2007

So it’s ILECs vs. CLECs, round two. Guess who’ll win?

And even supposedly Cmr. Copps “grudgingly accepted” these rules. Seems to me we need a whole new FCC, so we can get some real rules of the road.

And what we really need is some real competition.

-jsq

Russian Roulette

michael_copps.jpg FCC Commissioner Michael Copps has a way with words. Last year he said we should be talking about Internet freedom rather than net neutrality. And now he says we’re
playing Russian roulette with broadband and Internet and more traditional media

— FCC Commissioner: US playing “Russian roulette with broadband and Internet” By Nate Anderson, ars technica, August 03, 2007 – 09:20AM CT

And the Russians are winning. Continue reading →

Common Sense Conversation

scherer_265x228.jpg In case it wasn’t clear why the Internet is different from traditional broadcast news media:
…news is no longer a one-way process. It is now much more of a conversation between journalist and reader. Reporters at major news organizations no longer have the omnipotent authority they once had. The news process, in a word, has been democratized. Readers feel entitled to get just the information they want, in the form they want it. They feel entitled to talk back. Slowly but surely, we reporters are beginning to accept that readers do actually have this right, and that the feedback can make us better, not worse. As the old New Yorker writer A.J. Liebling once put it, “I think democracy a most precious thing, not because any democratic state is perfect, but because it is perfectible.”

— The MSM vs. the blogosphere, by Michael Scherer, War Room, Salon, 3 August 2007

A conversation? Not controled by the few big media companies that control most other media? Now that sounds dangerous doesn’t it? Dangerous like Common Sense.

-jsq