The Washington Post today has more on media monopolies and the ownership rules that Gannett/Argus are lobbying to change:
Senate Democrats pressed the Republican-controlled Federal Communications Commission this week to slap tighter controls on media ownership, public-interest broadcasting and television violence. But after a sometimes contentious two-hour hearing Thursday, some lawmakers expressed little hope of meaningful change.
Several Democrats on the Senate Commerce Committee warned the agency not to try to relax limits on the number of media outlets one company can own, as the FCC did in 2003 only to have a federal court stay the action. Recent FCC policies on media ownership, said Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.), have been "a spectacular failure."
He railed against rules that allow one entity to own eight radio stations in a large city and against proposals to allow one owner to have three TV stations in a city. "More concentration means less competition," Dorgan said. "The public-interest standards have been nearly completely emasculated."
But FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin, who has close ties to the Bush White House, defended the agency's policies.
"The commission has tried to make decisions based on a fundamental belief that a robust, competitive marketplace, not regulation, is ultimately the greatest protector of the public interest," Martin said. He told Dorgan, "I'm not convinced yet we need to have the kind of requirements" for local TV and radio programming that some advocates have championed.
Flexing their muscles at Congress's first oversight hearing of the FCC since taking control of the House and Senate last month, Democrats lectured and sometimes scolded FCC members, saying the agency needs more teeth in its regulation of broadcast outlets, telephones, the Internet and other services.
Read the whole story. As I wrote elsewhere, democracy is best practiced when citizens have access to multiple and varying sources of information. Media concentration puts reliable political information in peril. Too much power in the hands of a few people in charge of editorial decisions limits the information available to civic-minded citizens, and the Senate Democrats are right to pressure the FCC to ensure that doesn't happen.
UPDATE: Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America includes a chapter on the press in America, whose "influence in America is immense," he says. He also says that "it is an axiom of political science in [America], that the only way to neutralize the effect of the public journals is to multiply their number." In other words, when there are few newspapers, or only one, in an area they have immense power. This is the problem in South Dakota given the dominance and omnipresence of the Argus Leader, which would only get worse if given the opportunity to pursue the purchase of television stations.
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