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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: michael97123 who wrote (3726)	7/25/2003 3:40:00 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793559

How often do I agree with a Times Editorial? About as often as John disagrees with one! But the "Local" stations have the Congressmen in their pocket. And yes, I know the "Times" has an axe to grind on this one. Wrong Battle on TV Diversity -NEW YORK TIMES Readers may have done a double-take yesterday when they saw headlines announcing that the House of Representatives had defeated, by an astonishing margin of 400 to 21, a television-ownership proposal favored by President Bush, his allies at the Federal Communications Commission and the Republican leadership. It looked as if the plan was terribly wrong and the House terribly bold in rising up almost as one to set things right. As is often the case in Washington, however, appearances can be deceiving. The president wasn't as off base, or the House as courageous, as it seemed. At issue was one of several important changes in the regulatory structure governing television ownership, specifically, a new rule handed down by the F.C.C. in June to allow the big television networks to own more local television stations. The networks would naturally rather be owners than renters, as they have been for years under a system that requires them to pay local stations to broadcast their programming. The networks argued, and the commission rightly agreed, that they needed some kind of financial break to compete with companies like AOL Time Warner, which controls the cables into millions of homes and owns multiple cable channels that operate nationwide. The new rule was bitterly opposed, however, by the local stations, as well as by various public interest groups that said it would lead to more homogenized programming. The opponents were completely right when they argued that the main point of ownership rules should be to preserve competitive media markets that enrich the exchange of information and points of view. But the idea that independent affiliates are brave Davids battling to maintain local programming in a world of network Goliaths is mythic. The independents are wealthy and politically muscular power centers that are often actually the property of big out-of-town media conglomerates. There is little basis for the claims that they do a better job in providing local news than network-owned stations. The whole fight to keep the networks from owning too many stations is actually last year's, or last decade's, battle. The networks themselves are now struggling players in a new communications environment in which a vast majority of Americans no longer get their TV signals from the airwaves. If Congress has a genuine interest in keeping a tiny number of corporations from controlling most of TV's content, it should establish limits on the amount of programming controlled by the cable giants and tighten rules that bar the distributors from discriminating against their competitors' products. nytimes.com