Ted Turner on Media Consolidation
Just finished a supurb article written by Ted Turner on the subject of media consolidation. In a response to the previous entry, one of my readers asks why I am boycotting ClearChannel. Mr. Turner's article express my sentiments better than I could myself. The boycott is about more than ClearChannel, it's really a statement against media consolidation.
It is so very rare that I come across a written viewpoint that actually expresses my own in a way that is clearer, more well-researched, more eloquent, and more accessible than I could write myself. This is one of those articles, and I want to encourage my readership to read the article in its entirety, even though it's long. The article is the most complete dissertation on the perils of media consolidation that I have ever seen. This issue goes to the core of democracy itself, and affects every person in the world. It's something that I've been trying to figure out how to express for a while, and it's just so refreshing to see that someone else already did it.
Some key excerpts:
Big media today wants to own the faucet, pipeline, water, and the reservoir. The rain clouds come next.
The loss of independent operators hurts both the media business and its citizen-customers. When the ownership of these firms passes to people under pressure to show quick financial results in order to justify the purchase, the corporate emphasis instantly shifts from taking risks to taking profits. When that happens, quality suffers, localism suffers, and democracy itself suffers.
When media companies dominate their markets, it undercuts our democracy. Justice Hugo Black, in a landmark media-ownership case in 1945, wrote: "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."
Naturally, corporations say they would never suppress speech. But it's not their intentions that matter; it's their capabilities. Consolidation gives them more power to tilt the news and cut important ideas out of the public debate. And it's precisely that power that the rules should prevent...This is a fight about freedom--the freedom of independent entrepreneurs to start and run a media business, and the freedom of citizens to get news, information, and entertainment from a wide variety of sources, at least some of which are truly independent and not run by people facing the pressure of quarterly earnings reports. No one should underestimate the danger. Big media companies want to eliminate all ownership limits. With the removal of these limits, immense media power will pass into the hands of a very few corporations and individuals.
(This entry was originally posted without a PGP signature because I did not have my key on me. It has been subsequently modified to add the signature, but the content above this paragraph is unchanged from the original post.)