Media mergers

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  • Clipper
    Member
    • Sep 2003
    • 91

    Media mergers

    Senate Votes Down Media Mergers
    Victory for Democracy

    The Senate this morning voted 55-40 to block the FCC from allowing big media corporations to grow even bigger.

    George Bush has threatened to veto the bill, but even powerful republican lawmakers have said they'd maneuver around the president because so many Americans are opposed to media concentration.

    If Georgie boy has his way he'll give you the news he wants you to hear..... all good of course, he knows what's best for you.
  • meerkat
    Senior Member #4667
    • Feb 2002
    • 21774

    #2
    House Repupblican leaders say it's DOA in the House.
    If you don't think for yourself, someone else will do it for you!

    Comment

    • John of Phoenix
      Senior Member
      • Jun 2001
      • 31214

      #3
      MoveOn is a community of millions of Americans from all walks of life who use innovative technology to lead, participate in, and win campaigns for progressive change.


      Glad to help. [img]smile.gif[/img]

      Comment

      • Wayne Jeffers
        Former member # 1964
        • Mar 2002
        • 3132

        #4
        From the Opinion page of today's NYTimes
        ----------------

        The Senate Says No
        By WILLIAM SAFIRE

        How are a majority of Americans, standing with a bipartisan majority of both houses of Congress, going to stop the Federal Communications Commission from making the biggest mistake in its existence?

        A handful of media giants want to further concentrate their power by gobbling up more local TV and radio stations, beyond the 35-percent-of-penetration limit. The F.C.C. chairman has called arguments for local diversity "garbage" and this week branded the proposed Senate resolution disapproving of his anything-goes ruling as "bordering on the absurd."

        The Senate answered this arrogance yesterday by voting, 55 to 40, for Senator Byron Dorgan's resolution to disapprove the F.C.C.'s green light for power-grabbing. Though a House majority would agree, the G.O.P. leadership there declared the Senate bill "dead on arrival" and will block a vote. Therefore, the Senate's expression becomes a dramatic gesture, but not law.

        Meanwhile, a federal appeals court in Philadelphia has put a hold on the F.C.C.'s ruling. When administration lawyers tried to yank the case over to a D.C. appeals court — more likely to rubber-stamp the order — the Philadelphia judges said nothing doing. That gives Congress time to pass legislation directing the F.C.C. to hold the line against the Disney-G.E.-Fox-Viacom takeovers.

        The F.C.C. chairman, Michael Powell, sensing that not even his friendship with Senator John McCain nor his backing by Big Media is stopping the popular groundswell, has resorted to a fear appeal: that stopping more gobbling up of local stations by the broadcast networks will be the ruination of "free TV."

        That's the ludicrous party line being peddled by G.E., which owns NBC. But four-fifths of broadcast network TV is now delivered to homes by cable or satellite — not free — and NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox are making money hand over fist. "Powell's Last Stand" on this false argument has become an embarrassment to the Bush White House, which has been foolishly threatening to veto any disapproval of the F.C.C.'s abdication of the public interest. (The G.O.P. leader Tom DeLay still can't get 148 signatures on a letter promising to sustain what would be Bush's first veto.)

        How do we break out of this impasse, with the mediopoly and its political trained seals on the merger side, and with the most diverse coalition of lefties and righties ever assembled on the other?

        Senator Trent Lott, a Republican, knows how these things work; I crosshatched his analysis with that of a savvy Democratic mole in the House.

        Yesterday's Senate expression of disapproval was a good sign, but will die in the House. The bill already passed by McCain's Senate Commerce Committee detailing what the F.C.C. must do to protect diversity in TV as well as radio, and to restrict new cross-ownership of TV and newspapers, will not soon get a floor vote as the majority leader, Bill Frist, goes along with White House wishes.

        But thanks to the canny Alaskan Ted Stevens, the rollback of the Powell abomination will appear in the Senate appropriations bill for the Commerce, Justice and State Departments. It is already in the House bill funding those departments, and Democrats will not let it be stripped out behind closed doors in conference. Thus even restraint of cross-ownership of newspapers and TV — which those of us in diversity's ranks thought a lost cause — may be carried along in the wave of resentment against the 45-percent-of-TV-audience penetrators.

        "Today's victory — and don't kid yourself, it stunned 'em — is just one step in the process," says Lott. "The final step will be even harder for the president or the leadership to stop. An appropriations bill for Commerce-Justice-State — that would be hard to veto over the issue of a regulatory review."

        Why would the president want to bring the financing of the war on terror to a grinding halt to rescue an appointee aching to resign? Or to curry favor with a tight bunch of media biggies who might use their ever-greater power to turn on him when he least expects it? The first Bush veto should advance a principle, not be wasted on a bow to a muscular Mickey Mouse.

        Libertarians of the left and right are resisting the concentration of power and insisting on the preservation of competition. This strange bedfellowship will not equivocate, and we will be heard.

        ---------

        Wayne

        Comment

        • Scott Rosen
          Senior Member
          • Feb 2000
          • 5390

          #5
          Wesley Clark is in. The Bush campaign should be worried. Independent voters like me would welcome an alternative to the strident and devisive Conservative ideologues. Check out this from yesterday's Times.

          Republicans for Dean
          By DAVID BROOKS

          The results of the highly prestigious Poll of the Pollsters are in! I called eight of the best G.O.P. pollsters and strategists and asked them, on a not-for-attribution basis, if they thought Howard Dean would be easier to beat than the other major Democratic presidential candidates. Here, and I'm paraphrasing, are the results:

          "Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!"

          You would have thought I had asked them if Danny DeVito would be easier to beat in a one-on-one basketball game than Shaquille O'Neal. They all thought Dean would be easier to beat, notwithstanding his impressive rise. Some feared John Kerry, others John Edwards, because his personality wears well over time, and others even Bob Graham, because he can carry Florida, more than Dean. As their colleague Bill McInturff put it atop a memo on the Dean surge: "Happy Days Are Here Again (for Republicans)."

          I think the pollsters are probably right, but I'd feel a lot more confident if I could find somebody who really understood the forces that are reshaping the American electorate.

          Over the past few decades, the electorate has become much better educated. In 1960, only 22 percent of voters had been to college; now more than 52 percent have. As voters become more educated, they are more likely to be ideological and support the party that embraces their ideological label. As a result, the parties have polarized. There used to be many conservatives in the Democratic Party and many liberals in the Republican Party, groups that kept their parties from drifting too far off-center.

          Now, there is a Democratic liberal mountain and a Republican conservative mountain. Democrats and Republicans don't just disagree on policies — they don't see the same reality, and they rarely cross over and support individual candidates from the other side. As Gary Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California at San Diego, has shown, split-ticket voting has declined steadily.

          The question is whether this evolution changes the way we should think about elections. The strategists in the Intensity School say yes. They argue that it no longer makes sense to worry overmuch about the swing voters who supposedly exist in the political center because the electorate's polarization has hollowed out the center. The number of actual swing voters — people who actually switch back and forth between parties — is down to about 7 percent of the electorate. Moreover, the people in this 7 percent group have nothing in common with one another. It doesn't make sense to try to win their support because there is no coherent set of messages that will do it.

          Instead, it's better to play to the people on your own mountain and get them so excited they show up at the polls. According to this line of reasoning, Dean, Mr. Intensity, is an ideal Democratic candidate.

          The members of the Inclusiveness School disagree. They argue that there still are many truly independent voters, with estimates ranging from 10 to 33 percent of the electorate. Moreover, the Inclusiveness folks continue, true independents do have a coherent approach to politics. Anti-ideological, the true independents do not even listen to candidates who are partisan, strident and negative. They are what the pollster David Winston calls "solutionists"; they respond to upbeat candidates who can deliver concrete benefits: the Family and Medical Leave Act, more cops in their neighborhoods, tax rebate checks.

          By this line of thinking, Dean is a terrible candidate. His partisan style drives off the persuadable folks who rarely bother to vote in primaries but who do show up once every four years for general elections.

          The weight of the data, it seems to me, supports the Inclusiveness side. And the chief result of polarization is that the Democrats have become detached from antipolitical independent voters. George Bush makes many liberal Democrats froth at the mouth, but he does not have this effect on most independents. Democrats are behaving suicidally by not embracing what you might, even after yesterday's court decision, call the Schwarzenegger Option: supporting a candidate so ideologically amorphous that he can appeal to these swingers.

          Which is why so many Republicans are quietly gleeful over Dean's continued momentum. It is only the dark cloud of Wesley Clark, looming on the horizon, that keeps their happiness from being complete.

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