Media Maneuvers: Why the Rush to Waive Cross-Ownership Ban?

MEDIA MANEUVERS: WHY THE RUSH TO WAIVE CROSS-OWNERSHIP BAN?
[SOURCE: Center for American Progress, AUTHOR: Mark Lloyd]
[Commentary] Lloyd offers a history lesson for those concerned about media ownership concentration. He finds links between President Franklin D. Roosevelt's challenge of anticompetitive practises of the Associated Press and the Chicago Tribune to recent action by the Federal Communications Commission to lift the ban on newspaper broadcast crossownership. In Associated Press v. United States (1945), Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black found that the First Amendment “rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public, that a free press is a condition of a free society.” It would take the FCC another 30 years to align itself with the Supreme Court regarding media diversity and to finally take action on FDR’s concern over newspaper ownership of broadcast operations by instituting a ban on the cross-ownership. But the newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership ban contained a giant loophole. Those combinations which were in existence at the time of the ban in 1975 would be allowed to continue until there was a change in ownership. But the newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership ban contained a giant loophole. Those combinations which were in existence at the time of the ban in 1975 would be allowed to continue until there was a change in ownership. The Republican majority on the FCC, consisting of Chairman Kevin Martin, and Commissioners Robert McDowell and Deborah Tate, recently turned this loophole inside out. Billionaire real estate mogul Sam Zell is buying the Tribune Corporation. And he wants to keep WGN(AM) and WGN-TV. Instead of ruling that a new owner triggers the removal of the “grandfather” waiver because the Tribune’s ownership of a major radio, television, and newspaper operation in the same market has gone on long enough, the three conservatives at the FCC ruled that the “uniquely long-term symbiotic relationship between the broadcast stations and the newspaper warrants a permanent waiver.”
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2007/12/media_maneuvers.html