“Updating” Media Ownership Rules -- Is That Like Boiling a Frog?

"UPDATING" MEDIA OWNERSHIP RULES -- IS THAT LIKE BOILING A FROG?
[SOURCE: Tales from the Sausage Factory, AUTHOR: Harold Feld]
[Commentary] It's an old cliche that it's easy to boil a frog. Don't drop the frog in the boiling water -- he'll just climb out. Drop him in the pot and raise the temperature a little at a time. Before he knows it, he'll be dead. We have that with media consolidation and the non-stop relaxation of the rules. But instead of calling it “boiling,” proponents of consolidation call it “updating.” This attempt to describe relaxing the ownership rules to allow more consolidation as “updating,” when the evidence shows that the last round of consolidation kicked off by the 1996 deregulation has been a disaster for the industry and a disaster for democracy, came up again at yesterday's media ownership hearings. An “update” means setting limits that make sense today. And the evidence is pretty clear that the current rules don't need to be relaxed to be “updated.”
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