NY Media Merger Meeting in NYC
Last week over 300 citizens showed up at an informal meeting at Hunter College and attended by only two of the FCC Commissioners, Copps and Adelstein, although all were invited. The subject was Big Media Mergers and how undesirable further mergers would be in the NYC marketplace, which already has a lot of media concentration. Juan Gonzalez, he former president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, had this to say, “if present trends of media concentration continue, and if our government loosens even further its regulation of broadcast ownership rules, media ownership by racial minorities in my opinion will virtually disappear in the United States. We are in real danger of waking up one day with a de facto apartheid system, one where a small group of giant firms, run almost exclusively by white investors and managers, control the production and distribution of news and information to a largely non-white population . . . The last report the Department of Commerce did tracking media ownership was in 2000. It stopped doing the reports. And at that time, it found that 3.8% of all full-power broadcast stations in the country were owned by people of color. Now, when an independent nonprofit group does the job that the federal government should be doing, we find that the actual ownership by minorities has decreased since 2000. So, while the minority population of the country is increasing, the minority ownership of radio and television is decreasing. So this is a troubling trend that we have been trying to get data on. The FCC has not been mining its own data. The Commerce Department has stopped doing the studies.”
Hey Chairman Martin, you better listen up. Bush and the top dogs aren’t going to be in power forever, and may not have much power after the election if we succeed in lameducking them, an event that will take away a lot of the protection that has been afforded to you in your efforts to do dirt on US Citizens to benefit your big business buddies. Do you really want the wrath of the American People to descend upon you if you try to rip out our voice?
Technorati Tags: Big Media Mergers, Copps, Adelstein, FCC, Chairman Martin
