Sue Wilson

[Commentary] The Republican-controlled Federal Communications Commission will vote Nov 16 to allow just one corporation to own the local newspaper plus every commercial TV station in your town. Nifty way to reduce down to just one newsroom then dictate whatever information that corporation does – and does not – want you to know in this democracy.  We know why Sinclair Broadcasting, renowned for its alt right editorializing over our public airwaves, wants to reach 72 percent of U.S. homes with its propaganda. We know this White House’s agenda.

[Commentary] The entire right-wing mediasphere flexed its powerful muscles against its only regulator, the Federal Communications Commission. It started when the new Republican FCC Commissioner, Ajit Pai, ignored traditional inter-agency channels and went straight to the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal to accuse his colleagues of "meddling with the news."

However, despite the right wing hyperventilation over the nefariousness of the CIN study, it's simply part of the FCC's statutory mandate. What's most interesting, however, is that Commissioner Pai enlisted the very same right wing Pied Pipers who have long taken control of and, indeed, dominate the very airwaves we ALL own, and which most of us agree need more diversity and public oversight -- in hopes of intimidating the new Democratic FCC Chair Tom Wheeler into providing less diversity and public oversight.

Following the siren call of Commissioner Pai's piping, both Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck dutifully took to those airwaves coast-to-coast to work their 30 million or so radio listeners into a frenzy to prevent the FCC from following the agency's decades-long mandate for determining whether local broadcast news organizations are serving the "public interest" or whether they are merely producing news stories mandated by their corporate owners.

[Wilson is Director, 'Broadcast Blues', Media Action Center]

[Commentary] There is a new sheriff at the Federal Communications Commission, and it looks like Tom Wheeler is here to protect the townspeople, not the outlaws.

As new chair, Wheeler explained in a statement, "Protecting Television Consumers by Protecting Competition," the FCC is required by law to assess its media ownership rules every four years to determine if they need to be modified to serve the public interest. If broadcast station owners held the same standards of fairness and duty to the public interest they did at the onset of broadcasting, we wouldn't need all these rules. But these times, they are a changing, and both profit and politics too often trumps the public interest.

[Wilson is Director of 'Broadcast Blues', Media Action Center]

[March 11]