Big Media

Mainstream Media Advances On The Internet

Posted by on September 12, 2006 at 8:29 pm. 1 Comments :

A new report finds that the usual suspects in big media are also the big winners on the Internet. The report also states that those same players will be growing faster than other sectors of the media industry.

Anybody thinking that the Internet was going to rescue us from the stodgy, entrenched, and compromised press that has been torturing journalism for the past 50 years had better wake up. The giant corporations that own the media today are not about to let go of their monopolies.

“…traditional media companies are aggressively pursuing online and mobile platforms, protecting their brands and developing new revenue streams,” said James Rutherfurd, VSS’ executive vice president and managing director.

Rutherford said amid the unprecedented fragmentation of the media market, “traditional media companies have responded by investing in multiple media platforms to reach this increasingly fragmented audience.”

Market fragmentation is really just the migration of consumers to new technologies. The media companies recognize this migration and are developing or acquiring properties in the new media space. Already, 9 of the top 11 news sites on the net are owned by big media. The most popular new Internet destinations have targets on their backs. Rupert Murdoch’s Internet division recently purchased MySpace and the rumors of YouTube’s acquisition are heating up.

If we want to preserve the net’s independence, we had better make sure that we don’t allow it to be devoured by the dinosaurs that have fouled the conventional media. That means putting your home page where your mouth is. We need to support independent sites and refrain from supporting those that have fallen into the big media abyss.

An interesting side note from the report: The number of hours that consumers will spend with media will increase to 3620 per person annually. That’s almost 10 hours a day. This projection paints a bleak picture of mankind’s future.

The Los Angeles Times Hears Its Master’s Voice

Posted by on August 27, 2006 at 12:31 pm. 1 Comments :

In an editorial published Friday, August 25, the L. A. Times took a courageous stand in favor of propping up its parent corporation, The Tribune Company. By supporting the latest power-grab being proposed by the FCC, the Times/Tribune are really just supporting their own economic interests at the expense of the public.

In 2003, the FCC attempted to ram through a new set of ownership rules that would allow the already too big media empires to consolidate even more. They did this with little concern for the public’s interest or input. What transpired was an unprecedented uproar from citizens who persuaded their representatives to pass a bill repealing the FCC’s measure. Subsequently, a federal Court of Appeals struck down the rest of the regulation calling it “arbitrary and capricious.” So how does the Times characterize these events?

It starts by portraying the FCC as the embattled servant of goodness, seeking only to liberate the well-meaning media companies from, “unreasonable government restrictions on their activities.” But they are foiled by the sinister court system and the Senate, which was, “prodded by a motley alliance of anti-corporate zealots and conservative activists.” Unmentioned in this mythologizing is that the prodding actually came from a record 3 million complaints from the people to the FCC. The Senate responded, not to some motley alliance, but to their constituents. It’s called Democracy and someone should tell Tribune about it. The editorial goes on to make some shockingly untrue assessments of the modern media landscape:

“…what the FCC tried to do three years ago was too modest. In an age of cable and satellite TV – not to mention an age of YouTube.com – it’s no longer justifiable for the government to impose any limits on how many affiliates broadcast networks can own, given that CBS, NBC and ABC no longer control the distribution of their programming the way they did when American families gathered around their sets to watch “I Love Lucy.”

The Internet itself is at risk of becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of the Media/Telecom Complex…

Too modest? That requires a massive dose of hubris to lay down. Something the Times neglected to mention was that in this age, the cable, satellite, and broadcast networks, to which they refer, are owned largely by the same handful of corporate megaliths. And since they brought up YouTube, it should be noted that the Internet phenom is currently the subject of persistent rumors that it is about to acquired by, you guessed it, a major media corporation. The Internet itself is at risk of becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of the Media/Telecom Complex who oppose Net Neutrality and favor monopolistic convergence. Already, 9 of the top 11 Internet news sites are owned by Big Media.

It is true, though, that the broadcast networks no longer control the distribution of their programming the way they once did. They now have more control. With the repeal of the financial/syndication rules a few years ago, they can now fully own the programming that they broadcast. Now independent producers are getting shut out by the networks who would rather schedule programs that they own because they make more money that way – particularly in syndication.

And then there’s this Orwellian pearl…

“More cities might still have a competitive newspaper market if more broadcasters had been allowed to buy newspapers in the past.”

It’s impossible to fathom how they define competition. If more broadcasters (who are buying each other) were allowed to buy more newspapers (who are buying each other), you eventually end up with little or no competition at all. And that’s exactly the way they like it.

This editorial reveals a self-serving media empire that reflects the industry overall. In the past 25 years, the number of companies that controlled the majority of media output plunged from 50 to 5. If they have their way, they will continue to purge every voice of independence and diversity from the public arena.

Your voice is needed now to persuade Washington’s regulators and legislators that competition is not enhanced by consolidation. Use this form provided by Stop Big Media (a project of FreePress.net) to send your thoughts to the FCC. There is much more information available at that site. And let your representatives know how feel as well.

Republicans Sucking Up Telecom Dollars

Posted by on August 18, 2006 at 3:22 pm. NO Comments :

In a year with a major Telecom bill before congress, numerous regulatory issues on the table, and Net Neutrality still hovering ominously over the webiverse, the big Telecom companies, and their lobbyists, have gotten out their checkbooks. From the National Journal:

“Officials of dominant telephone and cable TV companies vying for an upper hand in pending telecommunications legislation are contributing heavily this election season to Republican incumbents who share those firms’ deregulatory outlook.”

Let’s take a look at the money flow from these interested parties:

  • AT&T – $1,700,000.
  • National Cable and Telecommunications Association – $1,048,444.
  • Verizon Communications – $905,700.
  • BellSouth – $686,850.
  • Comcast – $581,000.
  • National Association of Broadcasters – $403,820.
  • Qwest Communications International – $384,702.
  • Clear Channel Communications – $342,000.
  • Time Warner – $309,750.

These corporations are aggressively pursuing their interests, which include killing Net Neutrality and removing barriers to more consolidation. Now, let’s look at where that money went:

  • George Allen – $260,132.
  • Conrad Burns – $210,941.
  • John Ensign – $203,439.
  • Rick Santorum – $168,000.
  • Dennis Hastert – $158,350.
  • Joe Barton – $155,129.
  • Fred Upton – 152,400.

These are Washington honchos that shape legislation and hold the federal government’s purse strings. The money they are receiving is sorely needed now. Burns is the most endangered incumbent in the senate due in part to his having received more money from convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff than any other senator. Santorum is presently behind in his senate reelection bid. And Republicans in general are suffering from the low ratings of congress and the president.

So the Telecom industry has come to the rescue in hopes that they will be rewarded with legislative perks and deregulation. Let’s hope they don’t get their money’s worth.

The MySpace World Domination Conspiracy

Posted by on June 28, 2006 at 2:27 am. 4 Comments :

OK, here it is. This blows the lid off of the totalitarian overlords once and for all. The mother of all conspiracies and MySpace is at the center of it.

Go back with me to February 2002, when the existence of the Total Information Awareness (TIA) Office at DARPA was disclosed by the New York times. John Poindexter, the former Reagan National Security Advisor who was convicted of lying to Congress about his management of the Iran-contra affair, was the head of TIA, whose mission was to:

…gather as much information as possible about everyone in a centralized location for easy perusal by the United States government, including Internet activity, credit card purchase histories, airline ticket purchases, car rentals, medical records, educational transcripts, driver’s licenses, utility bills, tax returns, and any other available data.

After having been revealed, the hue and cry from the public resonated through the halls of Congress. Russ Feingold introduced the Data-Mining Moratorium Act of 2003, to suspend operations at TIA until a review of its practices could be completed. Not surprisingly, the review was never initiated by the Republican majority and the program just seemed to fade away.

In fact, some of the critical technologies were surreptitiously transferred to other intelligence agencies including the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA), a branch of the NSA. The NSA, of course, was already engaging in illegal covert programs to wiretap phone conversations and collect records from the phone companies. The NSA chief through much of that time was General Michael Hayden, who was also a deputy to John Negroponte, Director of DHS. Negroponte was also Ambassador to El Salvador while Poindexter was at the White House funding contras in Nicaragua. More recently we learned that the government is also tracking private banking transactions without obtaining warrants or submitting to any judicial oversight. And Hayden went on to become the Director of the CIA.

Stay with me now – here’s where it gets interesting. ARDA, which has changed its name to the Disruptive Technology Office (I’m not kidding), has been funding research into the mass harvesting of the information available on social networks like MySpace. The New Scientist reports that:

By adding online social networking data to its phone analyses, the NSA could connect people at deeper levels, through shared activities…..data the NSA could combine with social networking details includes information on purchases, where we go (available from cellphone records, which cite the base station a call came from) and what major financial transactions we make.

Combining that data with the personal information that MySpace collects, the recorded network of friends, and the communications that are made and stored online, will produce some pretty thorough profiles.

Now, with the government creating these clandestine agencies, shuffling them around and changing their names, supporting them with ever more technology to pry deeper into our personal lives, and attacking the media any time they report on some aspect of these activities so as to insure their secrecy, what is the next piece of this puzzle to fall into place?

Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of News Corp and Fox News, buys MySpace for $580 million dollars. Never mind that MySpace, while growing its membership exponentially, has lost money since its inception. What better steward for this program of privacy obliteration than the committed right-wing baron of one of the world’s largest media empires?

Am I just paranoid, or does it seem like there really is a governmental and corporate cabal that is positioning itself to become the Big Brother that Orwell warned us about?

Stop Big Media – The Battle Begins

Posted by on June 22, 2006 at 4:02 pm. 2 Comments :

Via Free Press:

The FCC is preparing to hold new hearings on media ownership. The last time they did this, they succeeded in passing a rule that drew widespread opposition from the public and Congress. It was ultimately thrown out by a Federal Court for not having justified its conclusions.

They’re at it again, but this time a coalition of public advocates is determined to preempt any mischief they try to engage in. The coalition, dubbed StopBigMedia, will seek to encourage greater public involvement in the debate over the future of the media.

“For far too long, media policy in this country has been made behind closed doors in the public’s name but without our informed consent,” said Robert W. McChesney, president of Free Press. “Despite overwhelming public opposition to greater media consolidation from across the entire political spectrum, the FCC and industry lobbyists are trying to sneak through the same misguided rules rejected in 2003.

Concentration of ownership and Net Neutrality are without a doubt the most critical media reform issues of the day. Your participation is needed and will surely have an impact. This is the time to make a stand. Go to StopBigMedia and register to join the effort to beat back the monopolists that seek to dominate the media and pervert its mission. We won this battle last time and we can do it again. But it will not happen without everybody taking responsibility and getting involved. You can be a part of this victory. So, please…..do it.

The Nation’s Corporate Media & Consolidation

Posted by on June 16, 2006 at 2:49 pm. NO Comments :

The Nation magazine has updated its chart of who owns what in the media. Along with the chart, they invited some influential writers to comment on the state of entertainment and media. Here are some highlights:

Mark Crispin Miller – The Death of News
In short, our very lives and liberty are at unprecedented risk because our press has long since disappeared into “the media”–a mammoth antidemocratic oligopoly that is far more responsive to its owners, big shareholders and good buddies in the government than it is to the rest of us, the people of this country.

I couldn’t agree more.

Jeffrey Chester – A Ten-Point Plan for Media Democracy
The next several years are critical to insure that the promise of what we now experience online–and its vast potential to help build a just civil society–is fulfilled.

This is an invaluable resource for participation in the fight for media reform. Most of the top media sites on the Internet are divisions of old media conglomerates. What we do today will determine if new media remains independent.

Eric Klinenberg – Mega-merger Mania
No one, except the owners of conglomerates, benefits from concentrated control of local media, and in the past decade public outrage over the costs of consolidation has helped turn the embryonic media reform movement into the nation’s fastest-growing bipartisan political project.

Public outrage got Congress to reverse an FCC rule permitting media ownership to increase from 35% to 45%. But shortly after the Congress acted, the FCC produced a new rule with a 39% cap. Eternal vigilance is the price of a free press.

Markos Moulitsas Z̼niga РUse the Tools
We are at the beginning of the age of citizen media, where corporations can own vast, billion-dollar media outlets yet fail to control the flow and content of information.

From a proven expert in citizen media, a call to arms. We can become the media we hope for. Though he is more optimistic than I am about the whether the old media will fade away.

Robert W. McChesney – Fight for a Free Press
Despite the Internet’s truly revolutionary implications, in itself it cannot address the core crises of our media: the collapse of journalism and the rise of hypercommercialism.

What more can I say?

Robert Greenwald – Brave New Media
We have at our disposal a rapidly proliferating array of tools available at low cost to get our messages out–from the Internet to iPods to cellphones and whatever comes next.

Greenwald has been experimenting with alternative methods of film distribution, including providing free copies of films to people who host house parties for their family, freinds and neighbors.

FCC Chief: Too Many Voices In The News

Posted by on April 4, 2006 at 8:50 pm. NO Comments :

The Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Kevin Martin, told an audience of newspaper publishers that he supports repealing the ban on cross-ownership that prohibits owning a newspaper and television station in the same market. These rules promote greater diversity for news consumers, but Martin would prefer to pander to the media conglomerates he is supposed to be regulating.

In support of his contention that cross-ownership regs hurt publishers, he raises the point that there are some 300 fewer newspapers today than when the regs went into effect 30 years ago. However, it is far more likely that the decline in papers was caused by too much consolidation, not too little.

Martin made clear whose side he is on and, as evidence of his allegiences, he tells the Newspaper Association of America that it is their responsibility to change public opinion that presently favors current law.

“The public is not convinced of the need to change these rules, and if you can’t convince the public, our chances to do that are dim.”

It might be nice if the FCC were advocating on behalf of the public instead of implying that the only thing holding back the publisher’s rule change is the public’s failure to be convinced of the rule’s harm. It might be nice if the FCC recognized that the public just may know what is in it’s own best interest.

Monopolies Kill Newspapers – Dead

Posted by on March 25, 2006 at 12:57 am. 1 Comments :

The Columbia Journalism Review has offered an explanation for why the newspaper business is gasping for air. After a generation of acquisition, consolidation and cut-throat competition that left many markets with a single reportorial voice, the lone victor became bloated or cocky or lazy, or some combination of the three.

Competition is good, remember. It nourishes aggressive reporting and distinctive, creative approaches. With a lack of competition in the local news and information business, too many papers, even some of the more ambitious ones, allowed their voices and personalities to wither. Too many editorial pages toned it down and slid into the inoffensive and boring. Too few embarked on crusades. Corporate owners, too, encouraged a play-it-safe culture. Too many newspapers rounded off their ragged edges, but lost the spark. When the advertising and readership began to recede, so did resources, and those weak habits and attitudes began to reveal themselves like the fish on the beach before the tsunami.

Despite the wisdom in this analysis, I wouldn’t expect the industry or the regulatory agencies to correct their self-destructive behavior. In fact, the pattern is even now repeating as the FCC prepares to fast-track more media consolidation. The CJR holds out hope that competition will emerge from new venues, i.e. the Internet. But that is where I depart from their view. First, the Internet does not constitute competition if the the web sites are owned or controlled by the same media megaliths that run the conventional media. Second, whatever passes for competition on the net can’t fulfill the local function that a newspaper will.

In the end, the arrogance and greed of the corporations that run print journalism will almost certainly destroy it. The decline in quality will accomapany a decline in professionalism and ethics. We’ve already seen examples unfold in the form of plagiarists (Jayson Blair), fabricaters (Janet Cooke), propagandists (Armstrong Williams) and whatever Jeff Gannon was. The solution, as with all monopolies, is to break them up and re-introduce real competition and diversity. It’s a tall order but it’s the only straw available for grasping.

DeadLines

Posted by on November 29, 2005 at 5:33 pm. NO Comments :

Kucinich & Co. Take L.A. Times To Task For Scheer Dismissal
We, as Members of Congress, object to the dismissal of Robert Scheer, a 32-year veteran of the LA Times with a long history of excellence in reporting and op ed pieces.

Koppel Floating Idea For New Show Called The F-ing Media
TV never looks at itself hard. We want to answer such questions as, ‘Why is 24-hour cable news “blondes reporting on missing blondes”?

Newspapers Dispelling the Myth of Readership Decline – By Counting Online Readers
For years, publishers have relied — often to their detriment — upon the metric of paid circulation. But circulation for the core product has been on a long, steady decline, causing some to suggest that print is on its way out.

Time Warner Hosts Off The Record Conference with Justice Scalia
He was the latest guest in a Time Warner series of interviews conducted by Norman Pearlstine, the departing editor in chief of Time Inc. Just before the program began on Monday, Richard D. Parsons, chairman of Time Warner, told the audience of more than 100 journalists and businesspeople that what was said was off the record.

Reporters Given 180 Minutes of Access to 470 pages of Alito Documents
How nice of the Justice Department, thanks to a FOIA request, to make legal documents related to Judge Alito available, on a very limited basis today.

FCC Is Expected To Back ‘A La Carte’ Pricing For Cable Networks
FCC Chairman Kevin Martin is expected to announce Tuesday that the commission will soon revise the conclusion it reached in the report it issued last year

Feds won’t block merger of Village Voice Media and New Times
The federal government has declined to intervene in the merger of New York-based Village Voice Media, which owns Seattle Weekly and five other publications, with Phoenix-based New Times, which owns 11 weeklies – clearing the way for the two companies to become one as soon as paperwork is complete.

L. A. Times Trades Scheer For Goldberg

Posted by on November 18, 2005 at 7:44 pm. NO Comments :

The Los Angeles Times has announced that they have jettisoned their long-time liberal columnist, Robert Scheer. At the same time, they announced that they will begin carrying conservative hack, Jonah Goldberg. This may be the worst trade since the Red Sox sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees. And we don’t have to look any further than Goldberg’s inaugural column. In it, he takes on the question of Bush’s lying to the country and comes down on the side of lying.

It’s not bad enough that he is outright insulting (calling his opponents deranged moonbats), he is also nearly vaporous substantively. And, ironically, the absurdity of his premise, that lying to the American people is acceptable, is nicely rebutted just a few pages earlier in an article headlined, “Declassified Memo Captures Nixon’s Intention to Obscure the U.S. Campaign in Cambodia”.

In a memo from the meeting, Nixon told his military staff to continue doing what was necessary in Cambodia, but to say for public consumption that the United States was merely providing support to South Vietnamese forces when necessary to protect U.S. troops.

“That is what we will say publicly,” he said. “But now, let’s talk about what we will actually do.”

Funny, Goldberg didn’t bother to cite Nixon’s demonstration of forgivable deceipt. Maybe because his lies are not really forgivable. And neither are Goldberg’s or Bush’s.