Ownership

A group of independent programmers has called on House and Senate GOP leadership to hold hearings on the proposed Sinclair/Tribune merger.

According to a copy of a letter to the chairs of the House and Senate Commerce and Judiciary Committees, which among them oversee communications issues, including mergers, they warn of the "growing power" of media conglomerate and the leverage they say that gives them over the public's access to content. They call that leverage unprecedented and a threat to "the very freedom of expression cherished by people regardless of political persuasion." Signing on to the letter were Cinemoi, INSP, theblaze, RideTV, One America News Network, and MAVTV Motorsports.

Republican Reps, who have been trying to excise the media cross-ownership ban from the Federal Communications Commission's regulatory playbook, are making that part of the draft legislation reauthorizing the FCC, according to a GOP staff memo for July 25's FCC oversight hearing. Last December, committee chairman Greg Walden (R-OR) and Rep John Yarmuth (D-KY) introduced a bill to repeal the ban, which applies to daily newspapers and broadcast outlets, which the pair called "disco-era" regulations.

The FCC under chairman Tom Wheeler declined to scrap the ban in the most recent quadrennial ownership rule review, despite suggestions on both sides of the political spectrum that it had outlived its usefulness. The rule dates from 1975 and prevents TV and radio stations from owning a daily newspaper in the same market. The FCC in 2003 under then-chairman Michael Powell found the rule no longer in the public interest, but that decision was challenged in court and has remained on the books.

The reauthorization draft, in addition to eliminating the ban, includes process reforms like making public items circulated for a commission vote, something FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has been doing, but which could change under a new chairman unless it were codified. It would also mandate cost-benefit analysis for proposed rules with potentially significant economic impact. It would allow the FCC more flexibility in assessing regulatory fees—the FCC is self-supporting, paying for its ongoing operations through fees on regulated entities. It also raises the status and profile of the chief information officer and FCC inspector general.

Apparently, US antitrust officials have started talking to representatives from AT&T and Time Warner about possible conditions that could secure approval of their $85.4 billion tie-up. The early-stage discussions suggest that government lawyers have nearly finished their months-long look at how AT&T, the biggest pay-TV distributor, would reshape the media landscape with its bid for the owner of CNN and HBO -- and shows that the sides have moved on to talking about how they can make the merger work without harming rivals.

US antitrust officials, who have blocked many tie-ups between direct competitors, rarely step in to stop vertical deals like this one. But the Justice Department is under pressure not to wave this merger through. Apparently, media and pay-TV competitors have told department lawyers they fear AT&T would favor the in-house programming that it would acquire.

The New York Times has asked that the television show “Fox & Friends” apologize for what a Times spokeswoman described as a “malicious and inaccurate segment” that aired the week of July 17 accusing the paper of publishing a story in 2015 that had hindered the United States military’s attempt to kill Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS.

In response, Fox News late on July 223 published an update to a story on its website and acknowledged the change in a brief “Fox & Friends” segment the morning of July 24. Both the updated article and the TV segment added part of a comment from The Times stating that the paper had described the piece to the Pentagon before publication and “they had no objections.” Neither the article nor the segment acknowledged the paper’s request for an apology nor did they respond directly to the accusations of inaccuracy.

Democrats singled out the AT&T-Time Warner merger in their new messaging campaign on July 24, signaling a tougher stance on policing corporate consolidation.

In a set of documents posted by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), the Democrats laid out their “Better Deal” vision of cracking down on “extensive concentration of power” in a number of industries, including the cable and telecom fields. “Consolidation in the telecommunications is not just between cable or phone providers; increasingly, large firms are trying to buy up content providers,” the document reads. “Currently, AT&T is trying to buy Time Warner. If AT&T succeeds in this deal, it will have more power to restrict the content access of its 135 million wireless and 25.5 million pay-TV subscribers. “This will only enable the resulting behemoths to promote their own programming, unfairly discriminate against other distributers [sic] and their ability to offer highly desired content, and further restrict small businesses from successfully competing in the market.”

Cattlemen, wheat growers, "agri-women" and state agriculture departments are all pushing back on Microsoft's push for reserved TV spectrum channels for unlicensed use, saying broadcasting is vital to rural connections (even as Microsoft is arguing it needs the spectrum to provide rural broadband connectivity). That is according to a letter to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai from nine agriculture groups to the FCC.

Chairman Pai has made rural broadband a prime directive for the agency. "While our organizations certainly understand the need for improved broadband access in rural America and support the deployment of high-speed broadband in our communities, this proposal will only serve to deprive our members of critical access to local broadcast television coverage." The National Association of Broadcasters, which circulated the letter to reporters, has told the FCC that Microsoft's proposal should be a nonstarter. The agriculture groups, which include the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture, agree and sung the praises of local ag news in their letter.

[Commentary] Economists see market concentration as the culprit behind some of the US economy’s most persistent ailments—the decline of workers’ share of national income, the rise of inequality, the decrease in business startups, the dearth of job creation, and the fall in research and development spending. Can Big Tech really be behind all that? Economists are starting to provide the evidence.

David Autor, the MIT economics professor who famously showed the pernicious effects of free-trade deals on Midwestern communities, is one. A recent paper he co-wrote argues that prestigious technology brands, using the internet’s global reach, are able to push out rivals and become winner-take-all “superstar” companies. They’re highly profitable, and their lucky employees generally earn higher salaries to boot. They don’t engage in the predatory behavior of yore, such as selling goods below the cost of production to steal market share and cripple competitors. After all, the services that Facebook and Google offer are free (if you don’t consider giving up your personal data and privacy rights to be a cost). However, academics have documented how these companies employ far fewer people than the largest companies of decades past while taking a disproportionate share of national profits. As they grow and occupy a bigger part of the economy, median wages stagnate and labor’s share of gross domestic product declines. Labor’s shrinking share of output is widely implicated in the broader economic growth slowdown.

In 1956 the US forced Bell Labs to license its patents to all comers. The result was a deluge of innovation (semiconductors, solar cells, lasers, cell phones, computer languages, and satellites) commercialized by new companies (Fairchild Semiconductor International, Motorola, Intel, and Texas Instruments) and the formation of Silicon Valley. Why not require the tech superstars to do the same? Who knows what forces that might unleash.

We live in an age of innovation and disruption, of opportunity and cost, of benefit and risk. As communications technologies continue to evolve, I believe digital equity is within reach, but to achieve it we must continue to bridge gaps – in both access and understanding – and to work together for the communities we all serve. For our part, AT&T looks forward to continuing to support and develop a diverse workforce, to support minority-owned vendors and suppliers, to creating jobs for diverse communities, and to investing in technology and networks that will transition us to a 5G future, which will further bridge the digital divide, creating economic opportunities for communities that need them most.

In the menagerie of television talking heads who have come to prominence advocating for Donald Trump, Boris Epshteyn is hardly the most memorable. Yet he’s perhaps the best surrogate to study if you want to understand where the Trump/TV industrial complex goes next. Epshteyn briefly worked in the White House—the job ended not long after Politico reported that he’d gotten into a “yelling match” with a booker at Fox News—but since April he’s been employed as the chief political analyst for the Sinclair Broadcast Group. Sinclair is likely to get larger yet.

In May the company announced it was buying Tribune Media Co. for $3.9 billion. Among other assets, Sinclair would add 42 TV stations—including major ones in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago—if the deal is approved by regulators. The expansion wouldn’t have been possible if President Trump’s pick to lead the Federal Communications Commission, Ajit Pai, hadn’t voted a few weeks earlier to ease a major restriction on local media ownership...President Trump remains a protected figure on Sinclair airwaves. Even as the company has occasionally furnished its stations with ads made to look like journalism, it’s adopted President Trump’s tactic of hammering its competitors for producing “fake news.”

On the anniversary of the ouster of the most influential man in conservative politics, who died in May, a legacy is revealed in Trump's anti-media venom, Rupert Murdoch's unrest and a vision that has jumped cable news to become the dominant historical current. It was Roger Ailes' tacit support of Trump that, in part, made his removal from Fox all the more urgent for the Murdochs. And it was not just the liberal sons who were agitated by Ailes' regard for Donald Trump, but also the father, whose tabloid, the New York Post, helped create Trump, but who found him now, with great snobbery, not of "our" conservative class. ("When is Donald Trump going to stop embarrassing his friends, let alone the whole country?" Murdoch senior tweeted the day after Trump officially declared himself a candidate.)

Murdoch instructed Ailes to tilt to anyone but Trump, Ailes confided to me before he was fired, even Hillary. (Ailes, for his part, characterized Murdoch's periodic efforts at interference as similar to Nixon's instructions to bomb this or that country — best ignored.) After the election, a confounded Murdoch had to call on his ex-wife Wendi's friends, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, to broker a rapprochement with the disreputable Donald. Now, to Trump's great satisfaction, a humbled Murdoch is a constant caller.