Yesterday's LA Times editorialized against limits on media ownership, which the FCC is trying to eliminate or relax again after its earlier 2003 attempt was "smacked down" (in the Times' own desperate-to-be-hip phrase) by a Federal appeals court. Of course, the Times has the right to editorialize as it sees fit. As A.J. Liebling said, "Freedom of the press is guaranteed (only to those who own one)." And the paper did mention, as part of its un-full "full disclosure," down in the penultimate paragraph, that it does happen to be owned by the Tribune Co., which would profit greatly if media ownership limits were lifted.
What's noteworthy is how wrong and biased the "facts" are that the Times presented to make its case. For example, the paper marginalizes those who tried to block then-FCC Chairman Michael Powell's wholesale lifting of ownership limits as "a motley alliance of anti-corporate zealots and conservative activists."
Hmmm.... Well, in my own full disclosure, the group I head, the Center for Creative Voices in Media, opposed the FCC in 2003, but I'm not sure which side of that alliance we're on. At any rate, here's how it really went down (my own desperate-to-be-hip phrase), and what the Times doesn't care to mention as the editorial page dutifully carries Tribune's corporate water.
It was the Republican-controlled US Congress, in a bill then signed into law by a Republican president, that overturned key portions of the FCC's Tribune-friendly 2003 decision. Then, in 2004, a Federal appeals court overturned as "arbitrary and capricious" the rest of the FCC's decision. The Republican US Department of Justice then refused to join Tribune in appealing that court decision up to the US Supreme Court. In 2005, the US Supreme Court then rejected Tribune's appeal. So now, the FCC is starting the process of doing Tribune's bidding all over again.
So let's see who's in this conspiratorial "motley alliance" against Tribune's efforts to buy up more local and national media:
President George W. Bush
Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez
United States Senate
United States House of Representatives
United States Supreme Court
Third Circuit US Court of Appeals
Now THERE'S a "motley alliance"....
The editorial also fails to mention that the FCC received over three million public comments in its media ownership proceeding, of which well over 99 percent opposed the Tribune/FCC push to allow large media companies to buy up more national and local media outlets.
At what point does "motley alliance of zealots and activists" turn into overwhelming bipartisan public consensus? Whatever point that is on the issue of whether Big Media should get Bigger, surely we've passed it.
The Tribune/FCC effort to eliminate reasonable media ownership limits failed not because of some marginal "motley alliance," but because the public and its elected representatives from both parties overwhelmingly realized it was a really, really bad idea.
Reasonable media ownership limits on national and local media conglomerates are absolutely necessary to preserve competition in news, as well as diverse voices and viewpoints in our democratic discourse.
With the Times' editorial shamelessly slanting and omitting the facts to promote Tribune's business interests over the public interest, it unwittingly proves that very point.