Consolidation threatens America's newsrooms

CONSOLIDATION THREATENS AMERICA'S NEWSROOMS
[SOURCE: Seattle Times, AUTHOR: Ryan Blethen]
[Commentary] Rupert Murdoch's unsolicited offer to buy Dow Jones & Co. for $5 billion is not encouraging for American journalism. The dot-com-like offer puts Dow Jones' jewel, The Wall Street Journal, into Murdoch's overflowing media trough called News Corporation. The prospect of a News Corporation/Dow Jones marriage would be such a media dreadnought it should be enough to raise the government's limp regulatory hackles. The Federal Communications Commission probably has no role in the deal, but should try to make noise, considering News Corporation already owns a New York paper, the New York Post, and a television station in the same market. The Federal Trade Commission should be extremely worried that News Corporation could own Fox News Channel, with its dominance of cable TV, a new financial cable channel, and The Wall Street Journal, with its national circulation of 2.06 million and nearly another million people who pay for its online edition. The agencies and elected officials that are supposed to protect our democracy have instead given away one of the democracy's crucial supports: the press. The once-robust and diverse press has been transformed into mere properties lumped in with other disparate industries in a bookkeeper's ledger. This has all happened with the help of the FCC, which the media biggies are again pushing to relax rules that ban one company from owning a newspaper and radio and television stations in the same market. The Wall Street Journal will not be the last newspaper to fall if Congress, and the nation's regulatory agencies, do not get serious about this very real threat to democracy, and create laws that foster an independent press.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2003701896_ryan11.html