Mediageek Radioshow Notes for April 9, 2009

I’m going to try and get back in the saddle with posting show notes for each week’s radioshow so that listeners can check out some of the news items and other relevant stuff that comes up during the show. Since the show is produced live, often featuring live guests, I’ll be treating these posts as dynamic documents. This means I’ll add links to stuff that comes up spontaneously during the show after the live broadcast is over, and maybe even after the podcast version is posted.

So, here’s the notes for the April 9, 2009 edition of the radioshow (now online):

Bloomberg – Todd Shields: FCC Head Says Agency Should Reconsider Newspaper Ownership Rule

Huffington Post – Jeff Jarvis To Newspaper Moguls: You Blew It

ArsTechnica – Julian Sanchez: AP launches campaign against Internet “misappropriation”

FCC’s Press Release on National Broadband Plan (PDF).

FCC’s Notice of Inquiry on National Broadband Plan (PDF).

FCC Chair Choice Sparks Hope for Net Neutrality, Other Issues Less Clear

Last month Matthew Lasar dug up info on this mysterious Julius Genachowski whose name starting circulating as a candidate for Obama’s FCC Chairman. Late Monday night the news broke that Genachowski is slated to be Obama’s nominee for the job. As Matthew noted in his Ars Technica article yesterday, the public interest community is responding positively to this news, primarily based upon Genachowski’s work on Obama’s “Technology and Innovation” plan. Given that candidate Obama was specific in his support for Network Neutrality, the hope inspired by Genchowski’s likely nomination appears to be more well founded than any other news on the Net Neutrality front in the last year.

However, much is still unknown about Genachowski’s views on media issues, like ownership concentration and indecency enforcement. He was an assistant to Clinton-appointed FCC Chairman Reed Hundt in the 1990s, and we might learn a little bit about Genachowski by looking at his former boss’ tenure at the Commission. With regard to media ownership, Hundt opposed lifting the nationwide radio ownership cap. The lifting of the cap–which brought on the Clear Channel era–happened with the passing of the Telecomm Act of 1996 by Congress, signed by President Clinton, and was not decided by the Hundt FCC. Hundt was also a proponent of children’s programming requirements, while also pushing for indecency fines against the likes of Howard Stern.

We’re sure to learn more about Genachowski’s views on a whole panoply of communication issues when he goes up for confirmation by the Senate. Here’s hoping that his apparently progressive outlook on Net Neutrality is combined with the willingness to put the brakes on the Bush FCC’s full-speed gallop on loosening media ownership limits. I must admit that ensuring a free and open internet, along with enacting policies to stimulate high-speed broadband build-out really should be the top priority for media and telecomm, above all.

With the lessons learned from the 1996 Telecomm Act and the ill-considered experiment of taking away common carrier status from internet (therefore creating the need for Net Neutrality) there exists a blueprint for creating a much more vibrant, diverse and free media ecology.

On Tonight’s Radioshow: Breaking Down the Tribune Bankruptcy

Over at Chicago Media Action Mitchell Szczepanczyk has written a concise “Chicago Citizen Activist’s Guide to the Tribune Bankruptcy” that makes simple work of untangling the how and why the Tribune company is in the financial dumps:

The Tribune debt didn’t just happen. It happened because Zell used the debt to buy the company.

Why did Zell buy the company? Because a Tribune shareholder revolt in the summer of 2006 demanded a change of ownership, and the following spring they got it.

Why did Tribune shareholders revolt? Because the Tribune thought that by 2006 they would be rolling in cash for having a bunch of TV-newspaper duopolies. They banked their future on it. And for good reason: The Tribune already owned four such duopolies across America, and what, you were expecting media concentration to stop or something? Are you some kind of anti-market communist freak?

Mitchell will be my guest on the radioshow tonight (9 PM WNUR 89.3 FM, Evanston-Chicago, IL) to talk more in depth about the greed, incompetence, arrogance and myopia that led to so many job losses, eroded journalism and who-knows-what-more.

I’m working on my own piece triggered by the Tribune bankruptcy, but more broadly aimed at the rotten outcome of the post-1996 consolidation era. Some observers, free-marketeers and big media apologists are now claiming that such disasters as Clear Channel going private equity and all these bankruptcies are evidence that we don’t need ownership regs, because clearly the market is acting to correct the excesses of consolidation: See, now these big consolidated behemoths will be broken back down into littler pieces.

But what they fail to account for is the real human toll — the lost jobs, the lost public service, the diminished local content, news and information.