The April 12 editorial “FCC takes on cross-ownership” was specious and self-serving.
Tribune ownership of a newspaper, radio station and TV station does not give us three views. It gives us one. Then we get the viewpoints of General Electric. We get the viewpoints of Westinghouse. We get the viewpoints of Disney, Microsoft, Time-Warner, TCI and News Corp. In other words, we get the viewpoints of big business.
About the only other viewpoint available is public television and public radio. Those are under constant attack by the politicians who abhor even that slight latitude of differing opinion.
We constantly hear (through the news media) that the media are too liberal. The media are owned mainly by the large conservative corporations listed above and are paid for by large conservative advertisers like Procter & Gamble and Kodak. It’s impressive math that can have conservative plus conservative equal liberal.
The result is that we are inundated with news about two people having consensual sex. We don’t hear or read about massive strikes in France or American weapons used by an Oriental dictator to kill hundreds of thousands of his neighbors. We don’t hear about corporate attempts to pass a treaty that is essentially the multinational corporations’ profit guarantee agreement (Multilateral Agreement on Investment).
Most of all, we hear and read practically nothing about the giveaway by the U.S. government of billions of dollars worth of the radio spectrum (the Telecommuni-cations Act of 1996). Who were the recipients of that government largess? The media conglomerates that have the large amounts of discretionary cash it takes to influence the government and the Federal Communications Commission.
It’s in the interests of the public to have media cross-ownership restrictions lifted as much as it was to deregulate the savings and loan industry in the 1980s.
