Flawed Media Plan

FLAWED MEDIA PLAN
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Editorial staff]
[Commentary] It is hard to understand the logic behind the way Kevin Martin, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, wants to relax the 32-year-old ban on newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership. You don't get one healthy media company by combining two sick ones. The strategic challenge for newspapers is not cutting costs, but how to attract a larger share of online advertising and make money off the millions of people who read them free online. Martin’s plan, moreover, could dangerously reduce media diversity. Not only would the mergers allowed under the rule change eliminate independent voices, but they also might crowd rivals out of the news business. A study of FCC data by consumer groups indicated that less news is broadcast in cities where companies have been granted waivers to the rules to allow them to own both newspapers and broadcasters. While these concerns might not loom so large if the proposals were truly limited to the biggest cities, Mr. Martin’s proposal includes loopholes that could open the door to consolidation on a much broader scale: depending on the concentration of the media market, it could allow both mergers in smaller cities and mergers involving top-four TV stations if the companies were in financial distress, promised to increase investment and the amount of local news, and vowed to keep their editorial lines independent. For all the technological advances that have shaken American media over the last 30 years, remarkably little has changed about who produces the local news. Internet outlets repurpose and comment on the news. A few cable channels provide national news. But in many small and even medium-sized cities there are only two entities that put money into local news-gathering: the local newspapers and the TV stations.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/17/opinion/17mon2.html
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