Have you ever thrown your shoe at the TV set? Sometimes media companies air such junk that tossing a shoe, magazine, remote or whatever is close at hand is all you can do. Now you can do more.
My organization, Free Press, just launched “Whack-a-Murdoch” a Web game that let’s you hit back at the big companies that air such bad programming.
While “Whack-a-Murdoch” is only a game, media consolidation is a problem that requires our urgent attention. Right now, the Federal Communications Commission is considering sweeping changes to media ownership rules that would allow big media companies like Murdoch’s News Corp. to get even bigger.
The last time the federal agency attempted to do this, in 2003 under former Chairman Michael Powell, more than two million Americans spoke out against it.
They flooded the FCC with letters and created such a clamor that Congress and the courts reversed the agency’s attempt to handover more local radio, television and newspaper outlets to a handful of the nation’s most powerful conglomerates.
The FCC’s Big Media Agenda
Industry friendly bureaucrats at the FCC apparently didn’t learn their lesson. Now they’re seeking again to do away with two key protections: The rule on “cross-ownership,” which prevents companies from owning a television or radio station and the major daily newspaper in the same city. And the local ownership caps that limit a company from owning more than one television station in smaller markets.
If the FCC is successful and eliminates these safeguards, moguls like Murdoch could own the major daily newspaper, and as many as eight radio stations and three TV stations in a single city. Often these local monopolies are the same companies that control national newspapers, popular Internet sites, cable networks magazines, movie studios and publishing houses.
When we let a few conglomerates control so many outlets, quality journalism gives way to junk media, news and information to celebrity fluff, and our democracy suffers.
Lapdogs for Big Business
Murdoch’s expanding media empire is a case in point. His news programs are a spectacle of beauty queens, right-wing shock pundits and movie stars.
On Monday, he launched the Fox Business Network with an unusual mix of cleavage and stock quotes. Within hours of watching the new channel, it became clear that what Fox News Channel is for the White House, Fox Business Network will become for big business.
Here’s what I mean. A recent Columbia Journalism Review article cited research that could not find one out of News Corp’s 175 newspapers that questioned U.S. President George W. Bush’s arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. Fox News Channel was even more extreme, actually propping up false war claims by Bush administration officials, long after they had been debunked elsewhere.
Murdoch himself has already said that his business channel will be “more business friendly than CNBC.” Fox News chairman Roger Ailes went one further saying: “Many times I’ve seen things on CNBC where they are not as friendly to corporations and profits as they should be.”
Imagine what this means for any Fox Business Network journalist who decides to investigate a Murdoch crony. Columbia Journalism Review’s Dean Starkman gives us a chilling catalog of the types of investigative business journalism you’d never see under Murdoch’s watch. When business news becomes a PR factory, flogging favors for Fortune 500 allies, we all suffer the consequences.
Put Down Your Shoe
The bottom line is our democracy will not survive for long on a steady diet of this sort of junk journalism.
That the FCC is about to remove barriers to Murdoch’s owning more outlets should sound alarm bells for anyone who believes, like James Madison, that a citizenry deprived of accurate information, will result in a government that “is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both.”
So the next time you’re tempted to hurl your shoe at the TV, reach for your computer instead and join the growing campaign to stop media consolidation and transform our democracy.
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