MEDIA consolidationbak

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MERRI OK

--> FASCISM SINCLAIR KIMMEL NEXSTAR

NoTE TRUMP CENSOR PRESS SUPPRESS DISNEY PARamount fcc brendan carr susie wiles skydance ellison tiktok?!

primary 5/18 on AT&T and sinclar

see also monopoly, merger M&A

see 1996 telecomm act clinton

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database: http://www.cjr.org/resources/index.php

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AN 11 25

Do you ever wonder why Republican propaganda appears to be everywhere while solid, informative news keeps going belly-up? It’s all about money, author Katherine Stewart tells Bulwark. Republican propaganda has it and news does not.

Fox News channels and amplifies rage at a carefully curated target, which never appears to be the Republican Party and that channeling “has worked overwhelmingly to the advantage of the authoritarian right wing,” Stewart said.

You can try to blame it on new technology, or the kind of reporters working in the industry, or the theory that the media has simply come to reflect the biases and polarization of the public. But it all really comes back to money and the moneyed interests who value driving the argument.

“Today … 40 percent of all local TV news stations are under the control of the three largest broadcast conglomerates: Sinclair Broadcast Group, Gray Television, and Nexstar Media Group,” said Stewart. “Their stations — each company now owns about 100 affiliated with ABC, CBS, FOX, or NBC — operate in more than 80 percent of U.S. media markets. A conglomerate with a distinct and well-documented right-wing bias, such as Sinclair, has an outsize footprint on our information ecosystem.”

And under the Trump administration, the concentration of the media business has accelerated.

“Consider that Trump cleared the way for [“Trumpy billionaire Larry Ellison, and his son, David”] to merge their Skydance Media company with Paramount in order to gain control of CBS News. Thanks to this preferential treatment, the Ellisons’ new media giant is now in the running to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery, which includes the crown jewel of the media marketplace: CNN,” said Stewart. “Other companies adapt swiftly to the new cronyistic landscape. Comcast, which previously drew scrutiny from the Trump administration for its own efforts to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery, recently donated up to $10 million to fund Trump’s White House “renovation.”

These major media executives feel little need to satisfy any mission to genuinely inform the public, said Stewart. What they want is profits, and hate-based rage-bait is generally more profitable than information.

“Fox News blazed the trail when it reconceived the product that cable news produces: Instead of the straight story, information became fodder for entertainment, persuasion, and grievance. Under the direction of Roger Ailes, the outlet applied all the tricks of demagoguery to expand and consolidate its reach, including a hand-in-glove coordination with the GOP,” Stewart said.

These same companies “protect their turf” by protecting governments that decline to regulate their anti-competitive moves.

A similar drive toward oligopoly profits is at play in the tech industry, Stewart warned. When a government grants and enforces an effective monopoly to some technologist, they are “likely to use just as much misinformation and manipulation as they can get away with to protect their privileged position.”

The corporations that own the tech industry are also in the hands of plutocrats, who generally favor right-wing governments “because they want to keep as much of their money as possible—and prevent the little people from telling them what to do with it, said Stewart.

“Consider Peter Thiel, who identifies those who wish to end tax exemptions for the super-rich as possible representatives of ‘the antichrist,’” said Stewart. “Or consider Jeff Bezos, who is undermining The Washington Post’s long tradition of exemplary journalism by turning the Opinion section into an regime-friendly advocate for ‘personal liberties.’”

There’s no pretending this can all be overcome “simply by reducing partisan divides and promoting civility,” said Stweart. “… We need to confront and challenge media and tech oligopolies and establish a system that produces journalism committed to the goal of any free press, which is to inform the public and promote the truth.”

Read the New Republic report at this link.

REF

On a recent trip through Florida, my Uber driver was intent on letting me know just how truly evil Nancy Pelosi is. I attempted to deflect, as I often do in such circumstances, but he persisted. Didn’t I think it was outrageous that Democrats want to raise rich people’s taxes? What about “abolishing the police”?

“A lot of people want something for nothing,” he said. “They want to get things for free. I don’t believe in that. I say if you don’t work, don’t come looking for handouts.”

He continued in this vein, sprinkling his anger and frustration with right-wing talking points on the scourge of immigrant criminals and the Biden crime family.

“Where did you hear that?” I finally asked when he got around to his spiel on open borders.

“They were talking about it on Fox News,” he said.

With unobtrusive questioning, I learned that he had worked in health care and was recently laid off. He was extremely concerned with keeping his car free of smudges and scuff marks because, as he told me, he found it very expensive to clean and maintain. When he wasn’t venting at the Democrats, he was bashing Uber. “They’re taking more and more from us drivers,” he said. “It’s impossible to make a living.”

It’s a tale as old as time. A skewed economic system delivers stress and frustration to a large group of people who previously imagined that they had a path to a decent life, and somehow all that rage gets channeled into a reactionary brand of politics.

It’s the “channeling” part of the story that interests me here. Rage is natural, but it isn’t a constant. It can be amplified—and it can be directed. That is pretty much what has been happening for the past two decades. And the channeling, while hardly monolithic, has worked overwhelmingly to the advantage of the authoritarian right wing. It is impossible to overstate the damage to American political culture of a rising right-wing media ecosystem, centered on Fox News. The question is not whether this is happening but why.

There was once a simple theory about media bias. It said that the problem with media is all about the kind of people who enter the profession of journalism. This has mostly been a cherished theory of the right, because the usual story is that journalists are, by nature, liberal types in an Amtrak corridor who view “real Americans” with contempt. But there is a left-wing version, which says that professional journalists are all “establishment” types militantly committed to perpetuating the status quo.

A second theory holds that the media has simply come to reflect the biases and polarization of the public. This story is usually accompanied with hoary truisms, like “for every Fox, there’s an MSNBC.” It’s the notion that media caters to partisans on left and right with equal fervor, dishing up whatever red or blue meat they would like.

A third idea blames it all on new technology, with the premise that social media and handheld devices, by their very nature, mess with people’s minds and produce a distorted media landscape.

These theories are incomplete at best. First, they fail to acknowledge that right-wing and left-wing media spheres are not equal and opposite poles of a symmetrical system. This fact has been proven in careful studies of reporting patterns across many years.

“The right is more insular, it is more extreme, and it is more partisan,” said the director of research at the Berkman Klein Center, which conducted one such study. Indeed, while both left- and right-wing media spread false stories, a summary of the research from the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy notes, “Misinformation is currently predominantly a pathology of the right.” A study out of the University of Amsterdam, published earlier this year, asserts that far-right populist parties undermine democracy with misinformation as a matter of political strategy.

Importantly, the political impact of these two media spheres is not remotely comparable. One study, examining voting patterns among viewers in regions where Fox was off the air for technical reasons for certain periods indicates that Fox alone may have shifted between 3 percent and 6 percent of the votes in recent elections.

But perhaps the most important feature of the media landscape today comes down to money. Specifically, the endless, flowing river of oligarchic monopoly money.

Well-functioning media systems have generally included some kind of public constraint or oversight that keeps journalism from veering too far from its fundamental mission of informing the public. This public involvement can take the form of regulation (through broadcast licenses, for example), through support for large public broadcasting corporations (the BBC in the U.K., CBC in Canada), or through a variety of other mechanisms (like the old Fairness Doctrine in the United States).

In the U.S., public constraint on media has largely evaporated. But that doesn’t mean that the system has been handed over to “the market.” Today, for example, 40 percent of all local TV news stations are under the control of the three largest broadcast conglomerates: Sinclair Broadcast Group, Gray Television, and Nexstar Media Group. Their stations—each company now owns about 100 affiliated with ABC, CBS, FOX, or NBC—operate in more than 80 percent of U.S. media markets. A conglomerate with a distinct and well-documented right-wing bias, such as Sinclair, has an outsize footprint on our information ecosystem.

Under the Trump administration, the concentration of the media business has accelerated. And the administration has made it abundantly clear that the pathway to further consolidation involves pleasing (and funneling money to) the regime and its ruler. The news cycle related to Jimmy Kimmel’s exclusion and subsequent reinstatement has come and gone, but the real story endures. It was always fundamentally about securing regulatory approval for the CBS merger as a stepping stone to the CBS-Warner merger, which will leave us with a media behemoth under the thumb of Trumpy billionaire Larry Ellison, and his son, David.

Consider that Trump cleared the way for the Ellisons to merge their Skydance Media company with Paramount in order to gain control of CBS News. Thanks to this preferential treatment, the Ellisons’ new media giant is now in the running to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery, which includes the crown jewel of the media marketplace: CNN. Other companies adapt swiftly to the new cronyistic landscape. Comcast, which previously drew scrutiny from the Trump administration for its own efforts to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery, recently donated up to $10 million to fund Trump’s White House “renovation.”

It appears that these major media executives feel little need to satisfy any mission to genuinely inform the public. They want profits. And at least since the dawn of yellow journalism in the late nineteenth century, hate-based rage-bait has been seen as generally more profitable than information. The idea that such outlets are news organizations is increasingly quaint. Fox News blazed the trail when it reconceived the product that cable news produces: Instead of the straight story, information became fodder for entertainment, persuasion, and grievance. Under the direction of Roger Ailes, the outlet applied all the tricks of demagoguery to expand and consolidate its reach, including a hand-in-glove coordination with the GOP. This explains part—but only part—of the right-wing tilt in the media system.

The other part has to do with the kind of profits involved. The major media corporations in the U.S. aim for the kind of oligopoly profits that economists call “rents.” They make money by protecting their turf. The best way to protect their turf is to have governments that decline to regulate their anti-competitive moves—or, as in the present, that actively encourage anti-competitive outcomes that favor the regime. In short, they accumulate these rents by locking themselves into the economic and political structure.

One could argue that the mainstream media is not the only kid in town, and that the rise of social media, bloggers, and a thousand points of light on the internet have created a new landscape. But the role of the majors in anchoring the center and edges of national conversations should not be underestimated. My Florida Uber driver illustrates the point well. He was clearly picking up misinformation from a wide range of sources. But when it came to justifying his positions to me, he cited Fox News as holy writ.

A similar drive toward oligopoly profits is at play in the tech industry. The tech determinist narrative says that evil is built into the social media machine and its various hardware devices. But this just isn’t true. There is no natural law that says that social media, or any other technology, must be used for misinformation and manipulation. However, when you grant and enforce an effective monopoly to some technologist, they are likely to use just as much misinformation and manipulation as they can get away with to protect their privileged position.

One could still ask why a system that is so corrupted with money and regulatory policy would necessarily tilt to the right. The obvious answer is that the money that controls these corporations is in the hands of plutocrats, who generally favor right-wing governments because they want to keep as much of their money as possible—and prevent the little people from telling them what to do with it. Consider Peter Thiel, who identifies those who wish to end tax exemptions for the super-rich as possible representatives of “the antichrist.” Or consider Jeff Bezos, who is undermining The Washington Post’s long tradition of exemplary journalism by turning the Opinion section into an regime-friendly advocate for “personal liberties.”

But there’s a more subtle reason why these systems tilt away from progress and democracy. It’s because they are inherently corrupt and unreasonable. The last thing our tech, media, and corporate oligopolies want is an informed public, carrying on a rational debate about how we should govern ourselves. Their aim is to create dependence, and they succeed in doing so by filling up Uber drivers and others with narratives that appeal to resentment and frustration. The best way to control people, after all, is to get them to control themselves.

The main solutions, I hope, are clear. Let’s not pretend this can all be overcome simply by reducing partisan divides and promoting civility. And let’s set aside the idea that a few new apps to limit screen time or tame the worst bits of social media will have much of an effect. The fundamental problem is money and control. We need to confront and challenge media and tech oligopolies and establish a system that produces journalism committed to the goal of any free press, which is to inform the public and promote the truth.

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--> FASCISM

an 9 25

In an article for Salonpublished Sunday, the outlet’s executive editor, Andrew O’Hehir, argues that Americans have been given a harsh reminder: Democracy isn’t guaranteed, and beyond merely consenting to be governed, citizens must take an active role to defend it.

He warned that many of the formal institutions, especially the U.S. Constitution, are showing signs of decay, undermined “from within” by what he sees as encroaching authoritarianism.

O'Hehir writes that the confrontation over late-night host Jimmy Kimmel’s show is presented not as just a media squabble, but a test case.

"Jimmy Kimmel’s cancellation is a test case, designed to measure the breadth and power of the accelerating authoritarian coup now underway in America," he said.

Late-night comedy and other cultural institutions become battlegrounds, in part because they sit at the intersection of public opinion, dissent, and broad reach, he noted.

IFrame Content

IFrame Content

IFrame Content

IFrame Content

O’Hehir added that large media companies, many now under oligarchic ownership or dominated by finance capital and big tech, are becoming more reliant on those in power.

"The MAGA assault on late-night comedy — which is doubly vulnerable, as both a fading cultural institution and the veritable definition of First Amendment-protected speech — represents a kind of pincer movement, bringing together multiple overlapping fascist tendencies," he wrote.

"On one hand, we see the consolidation of mainstream media companies, now increasingly under the oligarchic control of Big Tech and finance capital, and increasingly dependent on the corrupt Trump regime to approve their corrupt cartel-building mergers and acquisitions. On the other, we see the regime’s undisguised campaign to restrict and punish dissent, and to redefine 'free speech' as a conditional benefit conferred only on its most loyal grovelers and forelock-tuggers, and subject to revocation at any time.

He cited Sinclair and Nexstar as examples of companies that pushed against Kimmel, seemingly aligning with Trump-friendly narratives.

The editor argued that many of the pillars of democracy — courts, civil service, justice departments, regulatory agencies — are weakened, co-opted, or acting as enforcers of the regime rather than checks upon it.

"The Supreme Court has given Trump free rein, the FBI and Justice Department have become his enforcers, the civil service has been co-opted and subverted, the public health agencies have been conquered by moonbats and Republican state legislatures are doing their best to rig the midterm elections. As [Bill] Curry puts it, leaders at white-shoe law firms, elite universities and major foundations have repeatedly surrendered without a shot, revealing themselves as 'traitors, cowards, rank opportunists or simply inept.'"

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NEWSWEEK 9 25

ABC has pulled Jimmy Kimmel's late-night show off the air after comments the comedian made about the recent assassination of Charlie Kirk, and following pressure from the network's affiliates as well as the nation's TV regulator.

"Jimmy Kimmel Live will be preempted indefinitely," a spokesperson for the Disney-owned broadcaster said in a statement shared with various news outlets on Wednesday.

The move has drawn praise from allies and supporters of President Donald Trump, but sparked condemnation from Democratic lawmakers and free expression advocates.

The context of Kimmel's cancellation has led to allegations that business interests—particularly those concerning a delicate merger approval process involving the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and ABC affiliate Nexstar—may have played a role.

Taken together, some have interpreted this as a form of indirect censorship of the political Left by the Trump administration. Similar concerns were raised following the recent cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

"First Colbert, now Kimmel. Last-minute settlements, secret side deals, multi-billion dollar mergers pending Donald Trump's approval," said Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren. "Trump silencing free speech stifles our democracy."

Newsweek has contacted ABC, Nexstar and the FCC via email for comment.

Why It Matters

In the wake of Kirk's killing, the Trump administration has taken a series of actions critics believe undermine longstanding commitments to free speech in the U.S.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has warned foreign nationals celebrating his death online to "prepare to be deported," Vice President JD Vance has encouraged people to report those who do so to their employers, and Attorney General Pam Bondi has come under fire for urging a crackdown on "hate speech"—a move many believe clashes with First Amendment protections.

Read moreJimmy Kimmel

Russian State TV Floats Theory Trump Planned Charlie Kirk's Killing

• ### Brendan Carr's 'Censorship' Remarks Resurface After Jimmy Kimmel Suspension

• ### Donald Trump Praises George Orwell Amid Free Speech Crackdown Concerns

• ### Donald Trump Reacts to Jimmy Kimmel Live! ABC Suspension

The administration of President Joe Biden faced similar criticism and accusations of censorship over the pressure it placed on social media companies to remove accounts and posts relating to the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 presidential election that were considered misinformation. In June 2024, the Supreme Court rejected cases claiming that these amounted to an unconstitutional violation of free speech.

Why Was Jimmy Kimmel Taken Off the Air?

During his Monday night monologue, Kimmel made remarks about Kirk's death and its aftermath, suggesting that Trump supporters were attempting to capitalize on the murder and distance themselves from the alleged shooter, Tyler Robinson.

"We hit some new lows over the weekend, with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it," Kimmel said.

Kimmel also mocked President Trump's seemingly uninvolved response to a reporter's question on Kirk's death.

In an interview with conservative podcaster Benny Johnson on Wednesday, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, a Trump ally and appointee, called Kimmel's comments "some of the sickest conduct possible," and said that there could be "a path forward for suspension over this."

"This is a very, very serious issue right now for Disney," he added. "We can do this the easy way or the hard way."

Carr also urged other media companies and local broadcasters to "push back" and stop airing the show.

:{:{FCC Chairman Brendan Carr testifies before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government at the Rayburn House Office Building on May 21, 2025 in Washington, DC.}:

Following Carr's interview, Nexstar Media Group, the owner of several ABC affiliate stations, announced that it would stop airing the show "for the foreseeable future" over Kimmel's remarks.

"Nexstar strongly objects to recent comments made by Mr. Kimmel concerning the killing of Charlie Kirk and will replace the show with other programming in its ABC-affiliated markets," the statement read.

This sequence of events has raised questions about the extent to which this decision was guided by financial motivations rather than genuine outrage over Kimmel's comments.

Nexstar, one of the biggest station owners in the U.S, is currently attempting to complete a merger with fellow TV giant Tegna. The nature of the merger—valued at $6.2 billion—requires the approval of the FCC, and for it to loosen longstanding ownership regulations. These include federal laws barring a single entity from owning TV stations that together reach over 39 percent of American households, and guidelines on the total number of stations that can be owned in a single market.

Sinclair, ABC's largest affiliate group, similarly objected to Kimmel's remarks, and said it would be pulling the late-night show from its stations "indefinitely." Sinclair praised FCC Chairman Carr's comments, and asked Kimmel to issue an apology to Kirk's family, and to make a "meaningful personal donation" to both them and Turning Point USA, the conservative outreach group founded by Kirk.

"Regardless of ABC's plans for the future of the program, Sinclair intends not to return Jimmy Kimmel Live! to our air until we are confident that appropriate steps have been taken to uphold the standards expected of a national broadcast platform," Sinclair said.

According to CNN, Sinclair—like Nexstar—has matters awaiting approval from the Trump administration.

Newsweekhas contacted Sinclair via email for comment.

After ABC followed suit, Johnson boasted that it was his podcast with Carr that led to Kimmel's show being taken off the air.

"It's called soft power. The Left uses it all the time," he wrote on X. "Thanks to President Trump, the Right has learned how to wield power as well."

FCC Chairman Carr, meanwhile, responded to CNN's request for a reaction with a GIF taken from The Office,in which the characters Michael Scott and Dwight Schrute are pumping their hands in the air in celebration.

What People Are Saying

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, in an interview with Sean Hannity on Wednesday evening, said that broadcast licenses carry "a unique obligation to operate in the public interest."

Commenting on the decisions by Nexstar and Sinclair to pull the show, Carr added: "I'm very glad to see that American broadcasters are standing up to serve the interests of our community."

President Donald Trump reacted to the news on Truth Social, writing:"Great News for America: The ratings challenged Jimmy Kimmel Show is CANCELLED. Congratulations to ABC for finally having the courage to do what had to be done. Kimmel has ZERO talent, and worse ratings than even Colbert, if that's possible. That leaves Jimmy and Seth, two total losers, on Fake News NBC. Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC!!! President DJT."

Andrew Alford, President of Nexstar's broadcasting division, said: "Continuing to give Mr. Kimmel a broadcast platform in the communities we serve is simply not in the public interest at the current time, and we have made the difficult decision to preempt his show in an effort to let cooler heads prevail as we move toward the resumption of respectful, constructive dialogue."

Anna Gomez, the only Democratic commissioner at the FCC, posted to X: "An inexcusable act of political violence by one disturbed individual must never be exploited as justification for broader censorship and control. This Administration is increasingly using the weight of government power to suppress lawful expression."

The Writers Guild of America (WGA), a Hollywood labor union, said in a statement:"Shame on those in government who forget this founding truth. As for our employers, our words have made you rich. Silencing us impoverishes the whole world. The WGA stands with Jimmy Kimmel and his writers."

California Governor Gavin Newsom posted to X: "Corrupt, despicable, & spineless behavior. A coordinated effort to control the media is happening before our eyes & it needs to be called out."

Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren posted to X:"First Colbert, now Kimmel. Last-minute settlements, secret side deals, multi-billion dollar mergers pending Donald Trump's approval. Trump silencing free speech stifles our democracy. It sure looks like giant media companies are enabling his authoritarianism."

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) reacted: "The government pressured ABC—and ABC caved. The timing of ABC's decision, on the heels of the FCC chairman's pledge to the network to "do this the easy way or the hard way," tells the whole story. Another media outlet withered under government pressure, ensuring that the administration will continue to extort and exact retribution on broadcasters and publishers who criticize it."

What Happens Next?

Sinclair said that its ABC stations will air a tribute to this Friday, during Jimmy Kimmel Live's usual time slot.

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pete smothered

see 1996 telecomm act

The act was justified as fostering competition. However, by permitting increased cross-ownership, it had precisely the opposite effect, opening the floodgates on mergers and acquisitions, which created the monopolies we have today. Major companies absorbed smaller stations so rapidly that their numbers shrank from nearly 50 in 1983 to 10 in 1996, and then six by 2005. The consolidation and shrinking competition produced a homogenization of content, tone, and policies—especially as smaller and locally attuned newsrooms were no longer needed. This new landscape was a bonanza for media owners because it consolidated larger audiences for corporate advertising, justifying higher fees for ads. The 1996 act also fostered a wild-West environment of niche channels on cable TV. Within a decade, online media followed the same template. While corporate apologists celebrated “competition” and “free speech.” In actuality, the cable channels were primarily single-issue destinations for entertainment, sports, shopping, and, occasionally, low-budget news. Their emergence further balkanized audiences, diminishing debate, and smothering fair and balanced public discussion in the same way algae suffocates a pond by colonizing the surface.      

          Media and Democracy’s Downward Spiral The search for larger profits required larger audiences. That goal concentrated the attention of the C-suites. News producers orchestrated a tectonic morphing of the previous evenhanded, fact-based reporting: creating a new hybrid they called infotainment—the  awkward interbreeding of news and entertainment that one observes passing for pertinent news on nearly every channel and outlet today. Nation and local politics, train-wrecks in Bosnia, tipped ferries in Bangladesh are all, by someone’s definition, news.

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an 11 22

...For example, his administration appears to be reversing a decades-long status quo and embracing vigorous antitrust enforcement.

This is a vital step in reducing inequity and breaking the hammerlock the wealthy currently have on policy and public life.

With the threat of authoritarianism looming, the reinvigoration of antitrust policy could be one of the few positive signs of democratic renewal.

The biggest recent victory for the administration’s tougher trust-busting approach was in the book industry. The Biden Justice Department brought a lawsuit to block the merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster.....

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/this-merger-is-a-monopolistic-disaster-consumer-groups-decry-approval-of-**t-mobile-sprint-deal/

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/to-fight-corporate-assault-on-journalism-sanders-unveils-plan-to-stop-big-media-mergers-and-bolster-independent-news

no lnx

To fight corporate ‘assault on journalism,’ Sanders unveils plan to stop big media mergers and bolster independent news

Bernie Sanders image by JStone, Shutterstock

Written by Jake Johnson / Common Dreams August 27, 2019

Warning the “decimation of journalism” by big business and billionaire executives poses a major threat to democracy, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Monday unveiled a plan to stop the long-running corporate consolidation of American media, take anti-trust action against tech giants like Facebook and Google, and bolster independent news.

“Today, after decades of consolidation and deregulation, just a small handful of companies control almost everything you watch, read, and download,” Sanders, a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, wrote in an op-ed for the Columbia Journalism Review.

This consolidation, as well as the domination of the digital market by Facebook and Google, has led to the destruction of local independent news and hard-hitting reporting, Sanders said, leaving a void that has been filled by the vapid punditry, “infotainment,” and business-friendly propaganda that is so often featured on America’s corporate-owned television networks.

“At precisely the moment when we need more reporters covering the healthcare crisis, the climate emergency, and economic inequality,” wrote the Vermont senator, “we have television pundits paid tens of millions of dollars to pontificate about frivolous political gossip, as local news outlets are eviscerated.”

Sanders went on to provide an overview of the long-running destruction of local news and independent journalism, which he said has been “gutted by the same forces of greed that are pillaging our economy”:

Over the past 15 years, more than 1,400 communities across the county have lost newspapers, which are the outlets local television, radio, and digital news sites rely on for reporting. Since 2008, we have seen newsrooms lose 28,000 employees—and in the past year alone, 3,200 people in the media industry have been laid off. Today, for every working journalist, there are six people now working in public relations, often pushing a corporate line.

To fight the corporate assault on journalism—which Sanders noted has been made “far worse” by President Donald Trump’s “authoritarian bullying”—the senator’s plan would:

Impose an immediate moratorium on federal approval of mergers of major media companies;

Require media corporations to disclose whether their corporate transactions and mergers would cause significant layoffs of reporters;

Require that employees “be given the opportunity to purchase media outlets through employee stock-ownership plans”;

Block federal merger and deregulation moves that harm people of color and women;

“Reinstate and strengthen media ownership rules” with the goal of limiting “the number of stations that large broadcasting corporations can own in each market and nationwide”;

Enforce anti-trust laws against tech behemoths like Facebook and Google “to prevent them from using their enormous market power to cannibalize, bilk, and defund news organizations”;

Increase funding for federal programs that support public local media “in much the same way many other countries already fund independent public media.”

“Today’s assault on journalism by Wall Street, billionaire businessmen, Silicon Valley, and Donald Trump presents a crisis,” Sanders wrote. “We cannot sit by and allow corporations, billionaires, and demagogues to destroy the Fourth Estate, nor can we allow them to replace serious reporting with infotainment and propaganda.”

“When I am president,” Sanders said, “my administration will put in place policies that will reform the media industry and better protect independent journalism at both the local and national levels.”

Sanders’ plan to stop corporate consolidation of U.S. media and reverse its devastating effects won praise from journalists and press freedom advocates.

Journalists should understand that ?@BernieSanders? isn’t against journalism. He’s against a profit-driven corporate system that has long stymied real journalism and is now destroying the entire industry. https://t.co/y3wwnDXbvu

— Daniel Denvir (@DanielDenvir) August 26, 2019

Solid media-reform proposal from @SenSanders that could help journalism without threatening its independence. https://t.co/8xNbY4VYOq

— Dan Kennedy (@dankennedy_nu) August 26, 2019

“Wow!” tweeted Craig Aaron, president of advocacy group Free Press. “Bernie Sanders outlines an ambitious plan to save local journalism and confront the harm greedy corporate media and runaway consolidation have done to communities.”

==

aha fang extracts from press, double whammy death spiral? driven by ggl fbk?

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/a-leading-democrat-has-a-plan-to-save-journalism-from-the-tech-giants/

no lnx

A leading Democrat has a plan to save journalism from the tech giants

Written by Grace Gedye / Washington Monthly August 9, 2019

This was a bad week for journalism, in a depressingly familiar way.

On Monday, the investment firm that controls the newspaper publisher GateHouse Media bought Gannett, another publishing giant, which runs the USA Today network. Both companies own hundreds of newspapers around the country, and had already instituted layoffs this year. Meanwhile, public filings indicate that cost cutting will continue to be a priority, according to the Washington Post.

Then, on Wednesday, Pacific Standard, an online magazine focusing on social and environmental justice, announced abruptly that it would be shutting down. The same day,Governing, which covers state and local policy, said in a statement that it would be closing because it had proven “unsustainable as a business in today’s media environment.”

It’s part of a much larger trend: with Facebook and Google sucking up ever-increasing shares of ad revenue, publications are finding it harder and harder to stay financially viable.

One member of Congress thinks he has a solution. This spring, Rhode Island Congressman David Cicilline proposed the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, a bill that would allow news publishers to collectively bargain with giant tech companies and negotiate the terms under which their content is republished.

It’s part of Cicilline’s broader effort to counter the negative effects of market consolidation. As chair of the House’s antitrust subcommittee, he has emerged as one of the most prominent critics in Washington of tech giants and monopoly power. This year, he’s leading a congressional investigation into Big Tech, summoning executives to Capitol Hill and grilling them on whether they squash competitors. I spoke with him this week about local journalism, the increasing popularity of reviving antitrust, and whether he thinks President Trump will be an ally—or an obstacle—in the effort.

This conversation has been shortened and edited for clarity

GG: I’d like to start by talking about the topic of yourfirst hearing in the antitrust investigations, which was the impact on local journalism. Why did you choose to start with that subject?

DC: I think this is one of the areas where the market dominance of these large technology platforms is having a really serious and negative impact on our democracy. This is not just about their market dominance resulting in some impact on the sale of widgets, but this is really about the ability of citizens of this country to access trustworthy, reliable, local news, and a free and diverse press—particularly a local press—is really essential to the proper functioning of our democracy.[ANOTHER KIND OF DE FACTO PRESS SUPPRESSION?!]

GG: You proposed a bill in the spring that would allow news publications to collectively bargain with online platforms like Facebook and Google that republish their content. What motivated you to write that bill?

DC: When you look at what’s happening in the marketplace, you see that the vast majority of American people access their news through two large platforms, Facebook and Google. And Facebook and Google have amassed enormous revenue from online advertising—$60 billion last year, the majority of all online revenue. At the very same time, despite [publications’] record levels of online readership, there’s been a steep decline in revenues as a result of the rise of these two large technology giants. And you’re seeing all across the country the impact on newsrooms where people are being laid off, newspapers are closing, and in a lot of ways, local journalism is on life support. So, the legislation I’ve proposed, the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, provides an interim step to stabilize the marketplace by allowing producers of content online and small newspapers to collectively negotiate with the two large technology platforms.

GG: So, were this bill to pass, what are some specific measures that you could see news organizations pushing for in their negotiations?

DC: Well, I’ll leave it up to them to negotiate, but I think there’s no doubt they will attempt to negotiate terms that ensure that the branding and attribution—that is, when a newspaper has invested significantly in their brand because of high-quality and accurate journalism, then I think they want to be sure that that brand is protected. So, my guess is they would negotiate about attribution and branding, that they would negotiate about making certain that these platforms are not engaged in discriminatory conduct which favors their own publications.

GG: Antitrust seems to be having a resurgence of popularity in the past year or couple of years. It’s now a much more frequent topic of debate in national politics, but we obviously had huge companies before these past couple of years. Why do you think this subject is gaining traction now?

DC: I think we’re beginning to see the consequences of this enormous market concentration: in significant data breaches, in the widespread use of false information on the internet, the consequences of the interference in the American presidential election, the work by Cambridge Analytica. At least in the Democratic Party, we’ve very much focused on developing an economic agenda that really speaks to the anxieties of the American people, the economic anxieties, and focuses on getting the economy to work for everyone, raising family incomes, and being sure that we’re reducing the cost of people’s lives. The kind of mega-mergers and market concentration that we’re seeing is part of the reason that the economy isn’t working for everyone. I think people have just really begun to understand that our failure to be aggressive in antitrust enforcement has contributed to very substantial market concentration and some of the worst income inequality in our country’s history.

GG: For about the past 40 years, much of the discussion about why monopolies are bad—including antitrust legal decisions—has focused on consumer prices, the logic being that monopoly power is bad because it results in higher prices for consumers. But during the antitrust committee hearing that you had a couple of weeks ago, with lawyers from Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple, I noticed that very few of your questions had to do with impact on consumer prices. Is that a deliberate pivot?

DC: In the age in which attention is a commodity, and where your attention is monetized for ad revenue, the idea that focusing on, “Well, Facebook and Google are free”—but they’re not actually free. You’re giving them your attention, which is really the coin of the realm. Even in the context where it feels like the service is free, antitrust principles are important. In some ways even more important, because it may feel like “Oh, what’s the big deal, this is all free,” but if in fact they are crushing competitors by excluding them or acquiring them so that there’s no real competition, that has a very adverse impact on innovation. We want to make sure that the next Facebook, or the next Amazon, or the next Google has the ability to be successful.

So, this idea of really seriously impacting innovation is significant. If they are favoring their own products and services while giving you the impression that the search is done in some kind of neutral way, that’s also harmful to the consumer. I think the reason that you probably didn’t hear a lot about consumer prices is that there’s a recognition that that factor alone is insufficient to appreciate the dangers of monopolies and a lack of competition in the 21st century.

GG: Do you think your Republican colleagues agree that we have a monopoly problem?

DC: Yes. I don’t know if they’ll agree with every solution, but I think this is a bipartisan investigation, and I think my Republican colleagues have at least expressed a willingness to be part of the investigation, and help identify some solutions.

GG: So, two weeks or so ago, President Trump said that the government “should be suing Google and Facebook” and then said, “perhaps we will.” The Justice Department also recently opened an antitrust review of tech companies. Do you think President Trump will be an ally in the committee’s work?

DC: Unclear. You know, I don’t take the President at his word, to be very honest. I think this administration has not been effective at all in taking on the question of the technology giants and the deep concentration of market power in the technology platforms, or in monopolies generally. It’s an administration that seems to favor the very wealthy and big corporate interests, so I haven’t seen a lot of evidence that the president is going to be on the side of consumers and workers in the antitrust work and the work for our committee, but we’ll see.

GG: Have you at all been in touch with the president about the committee’s work?

DC: No.

==

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gannett bought by

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/another-nail-in-the-coffin-of-democracy-and-journalism-as-us-newspaper-giants-announce-1-4-billion-merger/

Members of the press and democracy advocates issued grave warnings about the future of journalism in the United States on Monday after the nation’s two largest newspaper publishers unveiled plans for a $1.4 billion merger that, if approved, will spawn an “unprecedented” media conglomerate.

GateHouse Media announced Monday that it will purchase Gannett, which owns USA Today and other major American newspapers. While the media giants touted their commitment to “journalistic excellence” in a press release, the merger announcement came with plans for $300 million in annual budget cuts.

“Not good news for journalism,” tweeted New York Times reporter Eric Lipton in response to the planned cuts.

Michael Copps, former FCC commissioner and Common Cause special adviser, said in a statementthat the cuts mean “we can expect to see more reporter layoffs and consolidated newsrooms.”

According to Common Cause, a “combined GateHouse-Gannett entity would own one in every six newspapers in the nation and control over 100 local news operations.”...

==

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verizon merger? saudis buy whole floors?

Needing Trump's backing, telecom giant books rooms at his hotel ...

www.msnbc.com/.../needing-trumps-backing-telecom-giant-books-rooms-his-hotel

1.

4 days ago - 21, 2106, the Trump International Hotel in Washington. ... a $26 billion merger with rival Sprint, which would more than double T-Mobile's value ...

Missing: verizon ‎| ‎Must include: ‎verizon

---

==

not just 80-90's still goes on:

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2018/12/company-that-owns-your-local-news-might-also-influence-federal-politics/

Dec. 3, it was announced that Tribune Media would be acquired by Nexstar Media Group for over $4 billion. The resulting company will own over 200 television stations, giving it incredible access to American homes across the country through their local news programming.

Although less overtly political than their cousins on cable, local news stations have come under increased scrutiny after the viral controversy aroused in early 2018 by a “must-run” segment on stations owned by Sinclair Media. In the segment, news anchors read from a script decrying “biased and false news” on social media and other news outlets. The script was passed down from Sinclair’s corporate office in Maryland.

“Unfortunately, some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control ‘exactly what people think’” said the script. “This is extremely dangerous to a democracy.”

Many Americans rely on stations owned by companies like Sinclair, Tribune Media and Nexstar Media Group to stay informed on local politics. But, aside from their reporting, these organizations dabble directly in politics and elections more than one might expect.

Nexstar Media Group’s PAC, for instance, has steadily ramped up its spending on political causes from 2014, with $27,100 spent that year, $95,700 spent in 2016 and $196,500 in 2018. The PAC favors Republicans, but only slightly. (They gave $5,000 to Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) in the 2018 cycle, but also gave $2,500 to Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.))

The PAC gave $10,000 to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and the same amount to committees associated with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-K.Y.) and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) in 2018. They also gave $5,000 to Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.).

As the PAC distributed its funds, stations owned by Nexstar were covering politics and political races across the country. One segment, run by Nexstar-owned WATE in Knoxville, Tennessee, focused on an anti-Phil Bredesen ad that was “censored” by Facebook. (Bredeson was Blackburn’s opponent in the 2018 Tennessee Senate race.) A Memphis station owned by Nexstar also ran a version of this story. Another WATE story featured anti-Blackburn protestors demonstrating during a moment of silence for the Pittsburgh Synagogue shooting victims at a campaign event.

KTSM, an El Paso, Texas station owned by Nexstar, re-ran an article from the Texas Tribune exploring the effect of “Hispanic identity” on the Senatorial race that pitted Beto O’Rourke against Cruz. El Paso is O’Rourke’s hometown.

A July segmentin Centex Proud, a Fox-affiliated, Nexstar owned, Waco-area station, covered a Cruz event saying “(Cruz) is excited to see the current economy and business boom – with the lowest unemployment rate for Hispanics and African-Americans in a decade. He says Texas is prospering because of this, and now says it’s time to complete the jobs underway.”

Yourcentralvalley.com, a Nexstar site affiliated with NBC covering Fresno, California, ran a storyabout Kevin McCarthy’s claims that California Democrats had fallen out of touch with voters. In addition to its station in Fresno, Nexstar owns a station in Bakersfield. Fresno and Bakersfield are a stone’s throw from the 23rd congressional district where McCarthy has his seat.

They also own a station in San Francisco where Nancy Pelosi is the congressperson for the 12th district and where Dianne Feinstein was mayor in the 80s. The San Francisco station, KRON4, has run stories on both Pelosi and Feinstein. Pelosi even gave the station an exclusive interview.

Perry Sook, Nexstar’s CEO, gave $5,000 to the company’s PAC in the 2014, 2016 and 2018 election cycles. Thomas Carter, the CFO, did the same. So did Timothy Busch, the president of the company’s broadcasting subsidy.

The Chief Technology Officer, Brett Jenkins, gave $5,000 to the PAC, but only in 2018. Gregory Raifman, president of Nexstar Digital, gave $2,500 that year. Executive Vice President Elizabeth Ryder gave $2,500 in 2014 and 2016, then beefed up her contribution to $5,000 in 2018.

The company also spent $390,000 lobbying during this period and employed a former chief counsel to Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and a former deputy staff director for Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) as lobbyists.

After its merger with Tribune, Nexstar will be the largest owner of local broadcast stations in the U.S. Nexstar and the Illinois-based media company already have political activism in common.

Political spending at Tribune peaked around 2000 when they gave $123,280, the majority of that to Republicans. Their political giving has since plummeted to $13,034 by 2018, all but $500 of which went to Democrats.

In 2008, Tribune gave $11,450 to then-Senator Barack Obama. (Compare that to Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign when they gave him just $1,475.)  Using the Wayback Machine to return to October 2008, one can see Tribune’s official endorsement of Obama for president on the WGN-TV website. The same banner rotates between the endorsement of Obama, a banner advertising Decision 2008 coverage and links to other stories.

Tribune has another connection to Obama in Edward Lazarus, Tribune’s Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer. Lazarus is a former chief of staff to the chairman of the FCC. The FCC Chairman Lazarus served under, Julius Genachowski, was nominated to the position by Obama in March 2009.

By the 2016 cycle, Tribune was throwing $4,963 behind Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid. Another $2,000 went to Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and $1000 went to Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.).

Between the 2002 and 2018 cycles, Tribune gave generously to Michigan Republican Rep. Fred Upton, climbing from $1,000 in 2002, to $4,000 in 2008, then spiked again to $5,500 in 2012. Upton represents Michigan’s sixth congressional district in the Southeast of the state. WGN-TV quoted Upton’s criticisms of the Affordable Care Actand its rollout in 2013.

Before Nexstar sealed the deal to acquire Tribune, Sinclair tried to make the same purchase. Their attempt was scuttled by regulators, but Sinclair already owns a huge swath of local television stations, 191 by their count.

After flirting with bankruptcy in 2009, Sinclair was saved in part thanks to Citizens United and the ensuing influx of political ad spending. Their giving has increased dramatically since 2010 when they contributed just $8,100 to political causes. In 2014, they contributed $263,587 and in 2016 they contributed $429,504 before dipping back down to $186,648 in 2018. In each of those cycles since 2010, they gave at least two-thirds of the money to Republicans.

Sinclair is based out of Maryland and owns twelve Baltimore-area television stations. They have given generously to Maryland politicians over the years, including Rep. Andy Harris, Sen. Barbara Mikulskiand Nancy Jacobs, a Republican state Senator who lost a race for Maryland’s second congressional district in 2012.

In 2014, Sinclair gave Mikulski $25,000. They gave another $17,600 to John Boehner and $7,900 to Paul Ryan.

In a 2015 articleon the announcement that then-Senator Mikulski would receive the presidential medal of freedom, the Fox45 site included a transcript of Mikulski’s full reaction from the floor of the Senate. Mikulski also gave the Fox station an interview on receiving the medal.

South Dakota Senator John Thune received the biggest haul from Sinclair in 2016 (over $30,000). Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen (Md.) meanwhile received $9,100.

Van Hollen gave Fox45 (the first ever Sinclair station) an exclusive interview on gun control and government spending during the same election cycle. In the days before the 2016 election, Van Hollen appeared on a Fox 45 news segment called “Your Voice” where he talked about the ease of early voting and pitched his plans to accelerate job growth in Maryland.

“Good luck on Tuesday!” the host said as he concluded the interview.

“Thanks,” Van Hollen said. “Everyone get out to vote!”

Van Hollen appeared on another Your Voice segment in April 2018. Later that summer, Fox45 covered Van Hollen’s visit to a Texas border patrol processing center.

Sinclair’s top three recipients for 2018 were Republican Senators Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), Deb Fischer(R-Neb.) and Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), all of whom received $15,000 or more. They also gave $5,700 to Rep. Greg Gianforte, who became well known nationally after physically assaulting a reporter. Blackburn got $5,700 and Arizona Senate candidate Joe Arpaio got $2,000. Both Blackburn and Arpaiohave received lavish praise from President Trump.

Sinclair’s name recognition spiked after a Deadspin compilation synchronizing the “biased news” must-run segment went viral, but Sinclair has been distributing corporate speech through local news stations for years. Segments like “News Central” and the “Terrorism Alert Desk” have been aired as must-runs at Sinclair-owned stations. Boris Epshteyn, a former Trump staffer, has a. Sinclair was even accused of trying to influence the 2004 election by airing a documentary (Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal) that accused John Kerry of fabricating parts of his military service.

In the 2000s, Sinclair had a similar a must-run segment called The Point, hosted by a Sinclair lobbyist and ex-Navy intelligence officer. The host would criticize other media outlets for their coverage of then-President Bush, once going so far as to say that “terrorist leaders would dearly love to see President Bush replaced with Senator (John) Kerry.”

Sinclair-affiliated PACs and individuals supported Donald Trump for president in 2016 with $3,804. According to the Washington Post, Sinclair stations ran fifteen exclusive interviews with Trump and did none with Hillary Clinton.

Perhaps the most explicitly pro-Trump company in local television is Minnesota-based Hubbard Broadcasting. Hubbard’s CEO, Stanley Hubbard, is on the advisory board for a pro-Trump Super PAC.

“We ended up with one guy standing. His name is Trump. And I’m a team player,” said Hubbard, who was initially skeptical of the President, in an interview with NPR. “Our country is very important. We got to get rid of all these regulations, give the little guy a chance to get ahead and stop all this government interference in our lives.”

Hubbard Broadcasting gave $350,000 to Freedom Partners Action Fund, a Koch-network Super PAC, in the 2016 election cycle. Of that sum, $200,000 came from the company itself, $150,000 from individuals within the company. In 2014, the Hubbard Broadcasting gave the Super PAC $450,000, $300,000 from the company and $150,000 from individuals.

Hubbard Broadcasting’s political contributions peaked in 2016 when they gave over $1 million to Republicans. That year they gave $18,500 to Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) and $16,300 to Ted Cruz.

In 2018, their top four recipients were all Minnesota politicians: Republican Senate candidate Karin Housley, Rep. Erik Paulsen, Emmer and Rep. Jason Lewis. Each of the candidates received tens of thousands from Hubbard.

ABC 5, a Hubbard-owned station, reported on 2009 Facebook comments made by Housley in which she likened Michelle Obama to a chimpanzee. The article includes a quote from a political scientist who says, though the statement is distasteful, they “don’t think it shows she’s a virulent racist…”

On the other hand, ABC 5 gave a “D-” to an ad run by Paulsen that attempted to tie his opponent to a sexual assault. The grade was part of a segment called “Truth Test” in which political ads are rated on their factual accuracy.

Hubbard Broadcasting owns the radio station that ran the Jason Lewis Show before Lewis became a congressman. Lewis infamously used the platform to vent his frustrations with modern gender politics.

“It used to be that women were held to a little bit of a higher standard,” Lewis said on the show according to CNN. “We required modesty from women. Now, are we beyond those days where a woman can behave as a slut, but you can’t call her a slut?”

Both Lewis and Paulsen lost their seats in 2018.

Since Americans have a significantly greater level of trust in their local news stations than they do in national news outlets or in web-only publications, this level of political activity from media companies is especially significant.

In most cases, it is difficult to say whether these companies’ political activities cross-pollinate with their journalism and business dealings, but future controversies akin to the Sinclair must-run scandal could continue to increase the visibility of the companies behind these local stations and erode Americans’ faith in yet another source of news.

Note: Due to errors with CRP data obtained from the FEC that triple-counted contributions, it was originally reported that Sen. Chris Van Hollen received $28,000 from Sinclair affiliates and its PAC. That number has been corrected to $9,100. 

RELATED TOPICS

• ABC5
• Andy Harris
• Barack Obama
• Barbara Mikulski
• Beto O’Rourke
• Boris Epshteyn
• Brett Jenkins
• CentexProud
• Chuck Schumer
• Deadspin
• Deb Fischer
• Edward Lazarus
• Elizabeth Ryder
• Erik Paulsen
• Fred Upton
• Freedom Partners Action Fund
• Great America PAC
• Greg Gianforte
• Gregory Raifman
• Hillary Clinton
• Jason Lewis Show
• Joe Arpaio
• John Boehner
• John Cornyn
• Julius Genachowski
• Kamala Harris
• Karin Housley
• Kevin McCarthy
• koch network
• KRON4
• Marsha Blackburn
• Mitch McConnell
• Must-Run
• Nancy Pelosi
• News Central
• Nexstar Media
• Orrin Hatch
• Paul Ryan
• Perry Sook
• phil bredesen
• Roger Wicker
• Stolen Honor
• Tammy Baldwin
• Ted Cruz
• Terror Alert Desk
• The Point
• Thomas Carter
• Timothy Busch
• Tom Emmer
• Tribune Media
• WGNTV
• Will Lennon
• Yourcentralvalley.com

==

jim h 8/18

America's political history has been written in the fierce narrative of war -- not only our country's many military clashes with foreign nations, but also our own unending war for democracy in the U.S.

Generation after generation of moneyed elites have persisted in trying to take wealth and power from the workaday majority and concentrate both of those things in their wealthy hands to establish a de facto American aristocracy. Every time, the people have rebelled in organized mass struggles against the monopolist and financial royalists -- literally battling for a little more economic fairness, social justice, and equal opportunity. And now, the time of rebellion is upon us again, for We the People are suddenly in the grip of a brutish level of monopolistic power.

Corporate concentration of markets, profits, workplace decision-making, political influence and our nation's total wealth is surpassing that of the infamous era of robber barons. Apple, which just became the first U.S. corporation to reach a stock value of a trillion dollars, is now larger than Bank of America, Boeing, Disney, Ford, Volkswagon and 20 other brand-name giants combined. Just five tech superpowers -- Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Netflix -- have raked in half of this year's stock price gains by the 500 top corporations ranked by the S&P index.A recent gold rush of corporate mergers has created mega-firms and shriveled competition in most industries, including airlines, banks, drug companies, food, hospitals, hotels, law firms, media, oil and more.  

The results of fewer and bigger corporations is that those few attain overwhelming power over the rest of us. They are able to control workers' pay, crush unions, jack up prices, squeeze our smaller businesses, dominate elections, weaken environmental projections... and become even fewer, bigger and more powerful. Thus, they are waging all-out corporate class war on American people, and on our democratic ideals, and they're winning.

These monopolies are not merely un-American, they're virulently anti-American, suppressing our fundamental values of fairness and opportunity for all. That's why, throughout our history, the people have instinctively rebelled at the arrogant assertions of monopoly avarice -- the Boston Tea Party, the Populist Movement, the rise of unions, Teddy Roosevelt's trustbusters, the Progressive Party, the muckrakers, the New Deal, Ralph Nader and on and on. Yet, in the stunningly short period of the last couple of decades, corporate political money and the public officials it bought have enshrined monopoly power as a legitimate form of business in our land, aggressively protected from public "meddling" by lawmakers, regulators and judges. For example, after our grassroots economy was crushed in 2007 by the greed of too-big-to-fail Wall Street banksters, officials bailed out the villainous banks at the taxpayer expense and deliberately made them bigger, more powerful and more dangerous than ever. Today, just five banks control nearly half of all financial assets in the U.S.

You'd think such a massive power grab by bank monopolists would produce an equally massive, 24/7 barrage of coverage by the nation's multitude of media outlets, which purport to be our defenders of democracy. And sure, an occasional story pops out here or there about monopoly abuse, but nothing comprehensive and cohesive to rally a public rebellion against what's become the United States of Monopoly Rule.

Why? Look at who owns America's mass media. Three decades ago, 50 large media conglomerates controlled 90 percent of the media. This year, after yet another merger of giants is completed, just 5 mega-media monopolists will control 90 percent of what we see, hear and read. It is not in their interest to inform the public about the threat that monopolies pose to our democracy.

As a paragon of journalistic integrity, A.S. Liebling, warned nearly 40 years ago, "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one."

==

doh! also tech: FB bought / bot instagramm, whatsapp, youtube, going into VR oculus rift (addictive? porn?)

***

authoritarian playbook anti-social media; modi, duterte

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/8/1/a_threat_to_global_democracy_how

“Black Elevation.” “Mindful Being.” “Resisters.” “Aztlan Warriors.” Those are the names of some of the accounts removed from Facebook and Instagram Tuesday after Facebook uncovered a plot to covertly influence the midterm elections. The tech giant said 32 fake accounts and Facebook pages were involved in “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”

:{:{}:

}:

 This announcement comes just days after the company suffered the biggest loss in stock market history: about $119 billion in a single day. This is just the latest in a string of controversies surrounding Facebook’s unprecedented influence on democracy in the United States and around the world, from its pivotal role in an explosion of hate speech inciting violence against Rohingya Muslims in Burma to its use by leaders such as Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte in suppressing dissent. Facebook has 2.2 billion users worldwide, and that number is growing. We speak with Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of “Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy.” He is a professor of media studies and director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia.

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NOT JUST PAST

also time warner?

https://www.commondreams.org/tag/sinclair-broadcasting

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charlieBlack is currently working with AT&T in its lobbying campaign to be given retroactive immunity against lawsuits for having assisted the administration in its warrantless wiretapping program.

==

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/5/11/headlines/at_t_paid_trumps_lawyer_600k_to_advise_on_time_warner_merger

Washington Post reports that President Trump’s personal lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen’s company won a $600,000 contract just days after Trump’s inauguration to advise the telecom giant AT&T over its planned merger with Time Warner. This follows reports that Cohen used the promise of White House access as he brought in a total of $4.4 million in payments to his shell company, Essential Consultants LLC—the same company that Cohen used to pay hush money to the adult film star Stormy Daniels—also known as Stephanie Clifford—who says she had an affair with Donald Trump in 2006.

==

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-att-trump-michael-cohen-20180509-story.html

In 

the early days of President Trump's administration, Trump had a friend in AT&T Inc. Chief Executive Randall Stephenson.

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FCC Commissioner Slams Her Own Agency for Policies 'Custom-Built' to Favor Sinclair-Tribune Merger

"We're burning down the values of media policy in this agency in order to service this company."

byJulia Conley, staff writer

FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel raised concerns about her agency's recent policy decisions, which could work in Sinclair Broadcasting's favor. (Photo: New America/Flickr/cc)

FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel on Tuesday argued against her own agency's recent policy rulings under the Trump administration, in light of President Donald Trump's defense of Sinclair Broadcasting as the conservative broadcasting giant attempts to merge with Tribune Media in a $3.9 billion deal.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/04/03/fcc-commissioner-slams-her-own-agency-policies-custom-built-favor-sinclair-tribune

https://www.democracynow.org/2017/10/26/fcc_eliminates_rules_preventing_media_consolidation

major decision by the Federal Communications Commission Tuesday eliminated a decades-old rule that ensures community residents can have a say in their local broadcast TV station. This comes as the FCCannounced plans Wednesday to abolish long-standing media ownership rules. Opponents say these changes will accelerate media consolidation, allowing massive corporate media companies, such as the right-wing Sinclair Broadcast Group, to buy up and control even more local stations. We speak with Andy Kroll, senior reporter at Mother Jones magazine, whose story in their new issue is titled “Ready for Trump TV? Inside Sinclair Broadcasting’s Plot to Take Over Your Local News.”

---

major decision by the Federal Communications Commission that eliminates a decades-old rule that ensures community residents can have a say in their local broadcast TV station. The regulation is known as the “main studio rule,” and it requires broadcasters to have a physical studio near where they have a license to transmit.

This comes as the FCC also announced plans, at a hearing Wednesday, to abolish long-standing media-ownership rules, including limits on how many stations or newspapers one company can own in a single market. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai testified Wednesday during a congressional hearing.

AJIT PAI: If you believe, as I do, that the federal government has no business intervening in the news, then we must stop the federal government from intervening in the news business. And that is why, this afternoon, I shared with my fellow commissioners an order that will reform our media ownership rules and help pull the government, once and for all, out of the newsroom. We will vote on this order at our November 16th meeting.

The marketplace today is nothing like it was in 1975. Newspapers are shutting down. Many radio and TV stations are struggling, especially in smaller and rural markets. Online competition for the collection and distribution of news is even greater than it ever was. And just two internet companies claim 100 percent of recent online advertising growth. Indeed, their digital ad revenue alone this year will be greater than the market cap of the entire broadcasting industry. And yet the FCC’s rules still presume that the market is defined entirely by pulp and rabbit ears.

AMY GOODMAN: But opponents say these changes will accelerate media consolidation, allowing massive corporate media companies, such as the right-wing Sinclair Broadcast Group, to buy up and control even more local stations. Earlier this year, Trump’s FCC appointees revived a regulatory loophole that could allow Sinclair to buy 42 TV stations from Tribune Media Company, on top of the more than 170 stations it already owns. The deal means Sinclair stations would reach about 72 percent—almost three-quarters—of U.S. households.

This comes as former Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly has reportedly been negotiating for a position with Sinclair Broadcast Group. O’Reilly secretly settled a sexual harassment claim for $32 million in January, the sixth and by far the largest such settlement during his tenure at Fox, from which he was fired.

For more, we’re joined in Washington, D.C., by Andy Kroll, senior reporter at Mother Jones magazine, where he’s written extensively about the FCC. His latest story in the current issue is headlined “Ready for Trump TV? Inside Sinclair Broadcasting’s Plot to Take Over Your Local News.”

Andy, welcome back to Democracy Now! You know, a lot of the meme going around is that Trump just can’t get anything done, but it sure doesn’t look that way at the FCC this week. Can you talk about what’s happened?

ANDY KROLL: Well, at the FCC this week, as you described, the commission voted along party lines—three Republicans voting in favor, two voting in opposition—to eliminate the main studio rule, this rule from about 80 years ago saying that a local TV or radio station needs to have its studio, its primary studio, in or near the community it serves. And that served a number of purposes, not only for the community to be able to interact with that station, but also tethering that station to the community in which it’s reporting the news and delivering some value to the people who watch it. That rule has been eliminated.

And then, as we saw in the clip that you just showed, the chairman of the FCC, Ajit Pai, a Republican, former staffer to Jeff Sessions, now the attorney general, has said that there is a whole bunch more deregulation in the works. This comes in a year, since President Trump’s inauguration in January, in which the FCC has consistently knocked down one barrier after another to enabling a massive deal frenzy, a consolidation in the broadcast business, which is exactly what companies like Sinclair want, going forward, so that they can gobble up as many TV stations around the country as they can, and basically dominate the local news business.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Andy, before we get to Sinclair Broadcasting, I wanted to ask you about the context of this attempt—or, in fact, the overturning of the main studio rule. It’s been in effect, as you said, for several decades. Has any other administration attempted to overturn it?

ANDY KROLL: No. The rule has been tweaked over time, on several occasions, to, what they say, modernize it. But the substance of the rule, having that studio in the community where the viewers, where the people who depend on that TV or radio station is, that has not changed over time. And the supporters of the rule say there’s a very clear reason for that. Yes, it’s true that with email and with social media you can send a message to your TV station, but the rule also gave that sense of locality. It gave that connection in the newsgathering and in the—you know, just the connection to a community that is so vital to local news. And that has been a bedrock of broadcast television for nearly 80 years and has gone unchallenged under Republican administrations and under Democratic administrations. And now, under President Trump and with Commissioner Pai at the FCC, that rule is ancient history.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Andy, before—could you explain, because—as a result of overturning this rule, all of these different stations, TV stations and radio stations, can be increasingly consolidated. Now, one of the companies under which these stations have been consolidated is Sinclair Broadcasting. But this media organization, very few people know about. So could you tell us about this broadcasting channel?

ANDY KROLL: Yeah. I like to say that Sinclair Broadcast Group is the most influential media organization that most Americans have never heard of. It owns nearly—owns or operates nearly 200 local TV stations around the country. It has a tremendous influence over the local news business.

And it marries that influence, that size, reaching into 40 percent of households right now, with a unabashed conservative and pro-Trump agenda. You see that in the kind of programming that Sinclair produces and sends out to its local stations. These are called “must-run segments.”They take, you know, basically, a shamelessly pro-Trump message, repeating talking points of the administration’s through its commentators, and putting that into the local news.

And as you mentioned earlier, Sinclair is eyeing a deal to acquire 42 new stations around the country, giving it a reach to almost three-quarters of American households. So this is a massive broadcast company, set to get even bigger. And it has a distinct conservative viewpoint that it is intent and bent on projecting out to the millions of people who watch its television channels.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain what you mean when you say “intent and bent on.” Your headline of your piece, “Ready for Trump TV? Inside Sinclair Broadcasting’s Plot to Take Over Your Local News.” What are the edicts being handed down?

ANDY KROLL: Well, Sinclair is a pioneer in what’s known as the “must-run segment.” This is a segment that is produced by Sinclair’s corporate headquarters here in the D.C. area and also in Maryland, that it produces, and then it sends out to its stations around the country—again, almost 200 of them—and says, “You are required to run this 90-second commentary or this two-minute editorial.” That content, that is being distributed out around the country, has a very clear, unequivocal conservative, partisan bent to it and, frankly, a pro-Trump bent to it.

You know, the lead political analyst, if you could call it that, atSinclair is a man named Boris Epshteyn, former Trump campaign aide and a former Trump White House aide, who left the administration and immediately went into this role at Sinclair. His segments are called “Bottom Line with Boris.” They are distributed, and they are required to run every day at Sinclair stations. And these are basically Trump talking points. And, I mean, you can go on YouTube, you can watch all of his clips in a row. They are 100 percent toeing the Trump line. And if they’re not that, they’re softball interviews with Trump administration officials.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I mean, of course, people might know who Boris Epshteyn is, because during the campaign he was one of his spokespeople, always interviewed on TV. This is one of Boris Epshteyn’s recent commentaries.

BORIS EPSHTEYN: It is important to note that voter fraud goes beyond stealing or miscounting ballots. Intentionally improper voter registration is absolutely a type of voter fraud. The Commission on Election Integrity has gotten to work. … The extent of voter fraud in our elections has been hotly debated between the left and the right. The president’s commission has been established to come up with a factual, impartial answer to that question. The states should do everything within their power to cooperate with the commission. And that’s the bottom line.

AMY GOODMAN: And that is required by every station to run, Andy Kroll?

ANDY KROLL: That’s correct. You are—

AMY GOODMAN: This is—

ANDY KROLL: Yes, that’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: This is another clip from a Sinclair station, featuring former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka. The show was broadcast earlier this month.

SEBASTIAN GORKA: You do not make legislation out of outliers. Our big issue is black African gun crime against black Africans. It is a tragedy. Go to Chicago. Go to the cities run by Democrats for 40 years. Black young men are murdering each other by the bushel.

AMY GOODMAN: “By the bushel.” That’s former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka referring to “black African [gun] crime” on “black [Africans],” saying black men are killing each other “by the bushel.” Andy Kroll?

ANDY KROLL: Sebastian Gorka, of course, another alumnus of the Trump White House, who, upon leaving, went immediately to Sinclair and is now a talking head at Sinclair. So you see this trend of Trump officials going to Sinclair Broadcast Group and then them being put on the airwaves and either pushing a completely crazy message, that Sebastian Gorka just did, on a segment that was supposed to be about guns in America—

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, I think “outright racist” is a very—

ANDY KROLL: Outright racist, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —more accurate way to describe it.

ANDY KROLL: Yeah, it’s hard to find the words to describe what that was. You have Boris Epshteyn, as well. His segment, that we just listened to, is basically advocacy for the Trump administration in its deeply flawed, inept supposed commission on investigating voter fraud, which, of course, in most cases, doesn’t exist.

So, you have this message, and you have stations around the country that, in a lot of cases, just want to do local news. But as they come under the Sinclair umbrella, they are being told by headquarters, “You will run these segments.” In Boris Epshteyn’s case, Sinclair doubled down and tripled the number of times that Boris Epshteyn was required to be run by its stations. And so, this is the progression we’re seeing this year. So we’re only seeing a more pro-Trump message, at the same time that Sinclair is looking to gobble up more stations and consolidate its control.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, could you talk, Andy, about the founder of Sinclair Broadcasting Group, David Smith?

ANDY KROLL: Yeah. David Smith is a media mogul with an incredible amount of sway over what goes on on the local airwaves. He’s not well known on the level of, say, a Rupert Murdoch, for instance, even though the two men would, I think, consider themselves contemporaries or competitors.

David Smith built a small family company that had three TV stations, starting in the mid-’80s. They were based out of Baltimore. And he—by finding ways around the law and taking advantage of ways that the law was changed—in this case, deregulated—in the past few decades, he has grown Sinclair into this conservative TV behemoth that it is today, and one that stands to get even bigger if the Tribune Media merger goes through.

David Smith, longtime donor to mostly Republicans, though Democrats, as well, who are in a position to help his company. And today, you know, he throws a party for a Supreme Court justice, Clarence Thomas. He travels in a, you know, elite, rarefied group of Republican supporters. He’s even bragged about dining at the White House with the president. So he is right at the top of a Republican-industry-donor pyramid, if you will. But he has managed to avoid the amount of attention that, say, a Rupert Murdoch or some other international media moguls that we do of have attracted.

AMY GOODMAN: And the merging of Sinclair and Tribune? I mean, these are the smaller local stations that dot the United States, you know, crisscross the United States.

ANDY KROLL: That’s right. The deal would give, again, 42 television stations from Sinclair—or from Tribune into Sinclair. It would add more of those dots on the map, as you mentioned. Right now, Sinclair has no presence in Colorado. This would give it a major presence in Colorado. But it would also bring stations in the three largest media markets in the country into the Sinclair company: New York, WPIX; KTLA in Los Angeles; and WGN, one of the most famous broadcast companies in America, in Chicago. So this would really seal Sinclair’s position as the sort of dominant broadcast company—and, of course, given that many more tens of millions of people who would be potentially seeing Boris Epshteyn, Sebastian Gorka, potentially Bill O’Reilly.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, when we were talking about Sebastian Gorka, just to understand, as he’s talking about black African violence here in the United States, who he is, the whole controversy around him wearing that pin at the inauguration, of the Vitézi Rend, the newspaper The Forward reporting members of the Vitézi Rend elite order confirmed Gorka took a lifelong oath of loyalty to the Hungarian far-right-wing group, listed by the U.S. State Department as having been under the direction of the Nazi government of Germany during World War II. I mean, just the significance of what is being required by these local stations to run all over the country?

ANDY KROLL: Yeah. And Gorka is—if you watch that clip, or the roundtable that that clip comes from, which is available on Sinclair’s website, I mean, Sebastian Gorka is more or less given an open mic to say what he thinks about, in this case, quote-unquote, “guns in America.” We see where he took that theme. But he was a foreign policy aide in the Trump White House. He was not a domestic policy expert. He was not someone working on the issue of guns, for all that we know. And yet he is just given this platform, as he has been on several other occasions with Sinclair.

The company seems to have no qualms, given the background that you describe, the fantastic reporting that The Forward has done on his past. They seem to have no problem giving him that platform, just as they reportedly seem to be considering an arrangement with Bill O’Reilly, someone who, as you mentioned, has settled sexual harassment claims for tens of millions of dollars when he was at Fox News, to the point that Fox fired him.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, explain that last part. What do you understand is the state of these negotiations? And have they been stopped by this latest news of his $32 million settlement with a Fox host for sexual harassment?

ANDY KROLL: What I’ve heard and what I’ve seen reported in the past week is that there are negotiations underway between Sinclair and O’Reilly around either—whether it would be bringing him in as a host or a commentator or some kind of arrangement or partnership between O’Reilly having his own—potentially his own program, his own platform, and Sinclair as the megaphone, if you will, projecting that program, projecting O’Reilly out, using its empire of stations. Now, Sinclair has denied that it is talking with O’Reilly, and has repeatedly done that, though the reporting, that doesn’t go for the official comment from Sinclair, would suggest otherwise.

I will say that I, you know, have talked to people in and around Sinclair, and among the rank and file, if you will, there is kind of shock and disgust that—in light of O’Reilly’s sexual harassment settlements and all the allegations at Fox, that Sinclair would be thinking about considering a partnership with him has a lot of people there upset, concerned about their futures, whether they want to work there if Bill O’Reilly joins the company in some capacity.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Andy Kroll, we want to thank you for being with us. We’ll certainly link to your piece. Andy Kroll, senior reporter at Mother Jones magazine, where he has written extensively about the FCC and Sinclair Broadcasting. His piece published this week, we’ll link to, “Ready for Trump TV? Inside Sinclair Broadcasting’s Plot to Take Over Your Local News.”

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https://kpfa.org/episode/talkies-october-4-2017/

the nation mag

buy small town newspapers for real estate; rent to paper then downsize jobs, then discard;

julie reynolds

king city/ cops tow scam

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randall smith global capital

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https://www.propublica.org/article/these-professors-make-more-than-thousand-bucks-hour-peddling-mega-mergers

If  THE GOVERNMENT ENDS UP approving the $85 billion AT&T-Time Warner merger, 

credit won’t necessarily belong to the executives, bankers, lawyers, and lobbyists pushing for the deal. More likely, it will be due to the professors.

A serial acquirer, AT&T must persuade the government to allow every major deal.Again and again, the company has relied on economists from America’s top universities to make its case before the Justice Department or the Federal Trade Commission. Moonlighting for a consulting firm named Compass Lexecon, they represented AT&T when it bought Centennial, DirecTV, and Leap Wireless; and when it tried unsuccessfully to absorb T-Mobile. And now AT&T and Time Warner have hired three top Compass Lexecon economists to counter criticism that the giant deal would harm consumers and concentrate too much media power in one company.

Today, “in front of the government, in many cases the most important advocate is the economist and lawyers come second,” said James Denvir, an antitrust lawyer at Boies, Schiller.

Economists who specialize in antitrust — affiliated with Chicago, Harvard, Princeton, the University of California, Berkeley, and other prestigious universities — reshaped their field through scholarly work showing that mergers create efficiencies of scale that benefit consumers.But they reap their most lucrative paydays by lending their academic authority to mergers their corporate clients propose.Corporate lawyers hire them from Compass Lexecon and half a dozen other firms to sway the government by documenting that a merger won’t be “anti-competitive”: in other words, that it won’t raise retail prices, stifle innovation, or restrict product offerings. Their optimistic forecasts, though, often turn out to be wrong, and the mergers they champion may be hurting the economy.

American industry is more highly concentrated than at any time since the gilded age. Need a pharmacy? Americans have two main choices. A plane ticket? Four major airlines. They have four choices to buy cell phone service. Soon one company will sell more than a quarter of the quaffs of beer around the world.Some of the professors earn more than top partners at major law firms. Dennis Carlton, a self-effacing economist at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and one of Compass Lexecon’s experts on the AT&T-Time Warner merger, charges at least $1,350 an hour. In his career, he has made about $100 million, including equity stakes and non-compete payments, ProPublica estimates. Carlton has written reports or testified in favor of dozens of mergers, including those between AT&T-SBC Communications and Comcast-Time Warner, and three airline deals: United-Continental, Southwest-Airtran, and American-US Airways.

Mergers peaked last year at $2 trillion in the U.S. The top 50 companies in a majority of American industries gained share between 1997 and 2012, and “competition may be decreasing in many economic sectors,” President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers warned in April.

While the impact of this wave of mergers is much debated, prominent economists such as Lawrence Summers and Joseph Stiglitz suggest that it is one important reason why, even as corporate profits hit records, economic growth is slow, wages are stagnant, business formation is halting, and productivity is lagging. “Only the monopoly-power story can convincingly account” for high business profits and low corporate investment, Summers wrote earlier this year.

In addition, politicians such as U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren have criticized big mergers for giving a handful of companies too much clout. President-elect Trump said in October that his administration would not approve the AT&T-Time Warner merger “because it’s too much concentration of power in the hands of too few.”

During the campaign, Trump didn’t signal what his broader approach to mergers would be.But the early signs are that his administration will weaken antitrust enforcement and strengthen the hand of economists. He selected Joshua Wright, an economist and professor atGeorge Mason’s Antonin Scalia Law School, to lead his transition on antitrust matters. Wright, himself a former consultant for Boston-based Charles River Associates, regularly celebrates mergers in speeches and articles and has supported increasing the influence of economists in assessing monopoly power. “Mergers between competitors do not often lead to market power but do often generate significant benefits for consumers,” he wrote in The New York Times this week.

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http://fair.org/home/trump-uses-power-of-fcc-to-pay-back-friends-at-sinclair-broadcasting/

This morning  Sinclair Broadcast Group, the conservative media behemoth thatowns more local news stations than any other company in the country, just got even bigger.  It announced it was buying Tribune Media for $3.9 billion, creating what Bloomberg (5/8/17) calls a “TV goliath.”

The purchase, which gives Sinclair a staggering reach of  nearly 69 percent  of the US population (Free Press, 5/8/17), would’ve been in  violation of ownership restrictions just weeks ago.  But last month, the Trump-appointed FCC chair, Ajit Pai, reinstated the “UHF discount,” an outdated loophole that allowed media conglomerates to exceed the nation’s 39 percent cap on ownership (New York Post,4/20/17). Sinclair made a $420 million deal to buy Bonten Media Group (Baltimore Sun,4/21/17) the very next day.

This sequence of events “sure looks like a quid pro quo,” as Craig Aaron of the media advocacy group Free Press has noted  (5/8/17). Months ago, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner told business executives, according to Politico (12/16/16), that “Trump’s campaign struck a deal with Sinclair Broadcast Group during the campaign to try and secure better coverage.” The deal, Politico reported, was that Sinclair would give Trump more (uncritical) coverage (Washington Post, 12/22/16) in exchange for more “access to Trump and the campaign.”

Now, Trump appears to be using the considerable power of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as his own personal ATM for political currency—and his Big Media allies at Sinclair are now seeing the return on their investment.

Free Press’ Aaron said in a statement this morning (5/8/17):

It’s a scandal. Sinclair—the Trump-favoring broadcast mega-chain—gets some FCC rules changed and expects others to be erased. All so that Sinclair can air its cookie-cutter newscasts to nearly 70 percent of the country’s population in local markets across the country.

Pai had been meeting with Sinclair executives at Baltimore’s Four Season Hotel in the months preceding these FCC-enabled media buys (Bloomberg, 3/27/17). “The gleaming harbor-front hotel, home to fare including a $32 crab cake sandwich and a $15 ‘Ulterior Motive’ cocktail, offered a memorable perch for impressing Pai,” Bloomberg reported.

Sinclair also recently hired a former Trump spokesperson (CNN,4/17/17), adding to the cozy relationship between company and president. In the press release, they touted the new hire’s former role as  “a surrogate and senior advisor to the Trump campaign.”Shareholders for Sinclair, and other broadcasters, had already been profiting from the Trump presidency. “Despite President Donald Trump’s numerous gripes about media coverage of his campaign and presidency, the sector has been on a roll since the New York real estate baron was inaugurated on January 20,” reported The Street (4/26/17):

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http://billmoyers.com/story/twenty-years-of-media-consolidation-has-not-been-good-for-our-democracy/

Wall Street’s sinister influence on the political process has, rightly, been a major topic during this presidential campaign. But history has taught us that the role that the media industry plays in Washington poses a comparable threat to our democracy. Yet this is a topic rarely discussed by the dominant media, or on the campaign trail.

The negative impact of the law cannot be overstated. The law, which was the first major reform of telecommunications policy since 1934, according to media scholar Robert McChesney, “is widely considered to be one of the three or four most important federal laws of this generation.” The act dramatically reduced important Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations on cross ownership, and allowed giant corporations to buy up thousands of media outlets across the country, increasing their monopoly on the flow of information in the United States and around the world.But now is a good time to discuss our growing media crises. Twenty years ago last month, President Bill Clinton theTelecommunications Act of 1996*. The act, signed into law on February 8, 1996, was “essentially bought and paid for by corporate media lobbies,” as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) described it, and radically “opened the floodgates on mergers.”

“Never have so many been held incommunicado by so few,” said Eduardo Galeano, the Latin-American journalist, in response to the act.

Twenty years later the devastating impact of the legislation is undeniable: About 90 percent of the country’s major media companies are owned by six corporations. Bill Clinton’s legacy in empowering the consolidation of corporate media is right up there with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and welfare reform, as being among the most tragic and destructive policies of his administration.

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 is not merely a regrettable part of history. It serves as a stern warning about what is at stake in the future. In a media world that is going through a massive transformation, media companies have dramaticallyincreased efforts to wield influence in Washington, with a massive lobbying presence and a steady dose of campaign donations to politicians in both parties — with the goal of allowing more consolidation, and privatizing and commodifying the internet.

This issue has not been central in the 2016 presidential election. But it is deeply concerning that, of all the presidential candidates running in 2016, the Big Media lobby has chosen to back Hillary Clinton. Media industry giants have donated way more to her than any other candidate in the race, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics. In light of this, we must be mindful of the media reform challenges we face in the present, as we try to prevent the type of damage to our democracy that was caused by the passing of this unfortunate law.

A Threat to Democracy: The Telecommunications Act and Media Consolidation

:{When President Bill Clinton }:{ into law, he did so}:{. The bill, which was lobbied for in great numbers by the }:communications and media industry:{, was sadly a }::{bipartisan misadventure — only 3 percent of Congress voted against the bill: five senators and 16 members of the House, including then-Rep. Bernie Sanders.}:

At the time, President Clinton as “truly revolutionary legislation … that really embodies what we ought to be about as a country.” House Speaker Newt Gingrichprojected consumer savings and private job growth. Rep. John Dingell (D-Michigan for the bill that would “make this country the best served, the best educated and the most successful country … in all areas of communications.”

Despite all of these glowing words, the consequences of the bill were disastrous. The act “fueled a consolidation so profound that even insiders are surprised by its magnitude,” said one trade publication, according to Robert McChesney, in his book,Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times.

“Before the ink was even dry on the 1996 Act,” wrote S. Derek Turner, research director of Free Press, in a 2009 report proposing a national broadband strategy, “the powerful media and telecommunications giants and their army of overpaid lobbyists went straight to work obstructing and undermining the competition the new law was intended to create.”

Media consolidation was already an extremely pressing concern long before 1996. In 1983, Ben Bagdikian published his groundbreaking book, The Media Monopoly, which revealed that just 50 corporations owned 90 percent of the media. That number gradually dwindled over the coming 13 years and was accelerated by the Telecommunications Act. This has led us to the aforementioned crisis where more than 90 percent of the media is owned by just six companies: Viacom, News Corporation, Comcast, CBS, Time Warner and Disney.

Radio has seen an equally appalling consolidation, which has been horrendous for both news media and music. In 1995, before the Telecommunications Act was passed, companies were not allowed to own more than 40 radio stations. “Since passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, Clear Channel [now called iHeartMedia]has grown from 40 stations to 1,240 stations — 30 times more than congressional regulation previously allowed,” according to a report from the Future of Music Coalition.

Local newspapers, too, have been stung by these deregulations. Gannett, for instance, owns more than 1,000 newspapers and 600 print periodicals. Layoffs havebeen the norm for the company, including at USA Today, the paper with the largest circulation in the country, where layoffs were described as a “total bloodbath” in the American Journalism Review.

Save the Internet: The Next Big Media Battle

There was a lot at stake when media companies lobbied for reform in 1996. There is just as much at stake today in the battle for a free and open press. Not only have big media companies continued to push for more consolidation and mergers, but they are also seeking to commodify and privatize the internet. This has become a major concern for advocates of“net neutrality,” who want to “save the internet,” and ensure it is protected as a public utility with equal access for everybody. An FCC ruling in February 2015 has protected the internet for now, but as Free Press warns, the internet is still “in danger.”

“Net neutrality has made the internet an unrivaled space for free speech, civic participation, innovation and opportunity. Net neutrality prohibits online discrimination and gives any individual, organization or company the same chance to share their ideas and find an audience,” explains Free Press’s website, Save the Internet. “Companies like Comcast and Verizon aren’t used to losing in Washington, and they’ll do everything they can to knock down the Title II protections the FCC approved on Feb. 26, 2015.”

The organization is right to be concerned. One reason for the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, as McChesney wrote in 1997, was the sheer power that the media and communications industry has in Washington. “Both the Democratic and Republican parties have strong ties to the large communication firms and industries, and the communication lobbies are among the most feared, respected and well-endowed of all that seek favors on Capitol Hill.”

Today that power and influence has only increased. “From 2002-2008, the industry increased its spending on lobbying efforts every year,” reports the Center for Responsive Politics. “The streak snapped when the Great Recession set in and most clients cut back on their DC efforts, and then reversed again in 2013. In 2014,cable and satellite providers spent nearly $8.1 [million] on lobbying.”

Big Media’s Relationship With Hillary Clinton

What is most revealing when analyzing the donation patterns of these industries in the data from the Center for Responsive Politics — be it cable television, print and periodicals, radio or telecom services — is that Hillary Clinton is, by far, the largest recipient of donations of any candidate in the 2016 election in either party. In fact, of all the top industries that have donated to Clinton, the TV/movies/music category ranks behind only the securities and investments category. (This data is from reports filed on January 31, 2016, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.)

More troubling is that these filings come on the heels of a report from Politico that the Clinton Foundation has received donations, some of them very large, from most of all the major media companies directly: Viacom, News Corporation, Reuters, NBCUniversal, Newsmax, Time Warner, Mort Zuckerman (owner of US News &World Report and the New York Daily News), Comcast, AOL Huffington Post Media and Robert Allbritton (owner ofPolitico). George Stephanopoulos, one of ABC News’ most visible journalist and a former staffer for President Clinton, has also been under scrutiny for not disclosing a $75,000 donation to the foundation.

Of course, the Clinton Foundation is not a political campaign and does some philanthropic work. So while this all might be legal, it is extremely unsettling, especially in tandem with all the campaign donations Hillary Clinton has received from the major players in this industry.

In March 2015, for instance, a Comcast executive held a $50,000 per plate fundraiser for Clinton’s super PAC.“Comcast NBCUniversal operates in 39 states and has 130,000 employees across the country,” said company spokeswoman Sena Fitzmaurice at the time. “It is important for our customers, our employees and our shareholders that we participate in the political process.”

Of course, media companies don’t just donate to Clinton, but also to members ofCongressfrom both parties. Further, as the Center for Responsive Politics reports, the FCC is filled with “revolving-door” employees, who have been switching back and forth between government work and lobbying for Comcast.

Their aggressiveness in Washington makes them a dangerous enemy in the fight for free and democratic media. In this environment, it should come as no surprise that the position ofFCC chairman is typically held by a former lobbyist for the cable industry, such as Tom Wheeler, the current chairman, who was once president of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, a major opponent of net neutrality.

And while it is good news that Clinton has come out in favor of net neutrality, it is a reasonable fear that she could change her views once elected, especially given her relationship with Big Media. It would not be the first time a president has changed a view after being elected, as we learned when Barack Obama embraced a mandate in health care, or when George H.W. Bush raised taxes, despite histhat he never would.

It is important to note that, whatever her relationship with the telecommunications industry, it is not fair to blame Hillary Clinton for the Telecommunications Act of 1996. As first lady, Clinton was not in charge of telecommunications policy and there doesn’t appear to be evidence she played a role in constructing or fighting for the law in the White House. In fact, 20 years later, it is difficult to find any public statements from Hillary Clinton expressing her opinion about the law or its impacts. She di at the 2012 YearlyKos convention about the Telecommunications Act. Her response, however, did little to clarify her views on the subject. She said:

You’ll have to ask [then-Vice President] Al Gore. We’ve had a lot of media consolidation. We’ve had some good competition. We have a lot that we need to do to begin to create a more competitive framework. Al was very involved in designing and pushing that through — he is an expert; I am not … We’ve got to take a hard look at this and I don’t want to say something I may not really support. So I have to look at that proposal.

Clinton is now, however, deep into a presidential run and could well be responsible for appointing the head of the FCC. She owes it to voters to describe her views on the Telecommunications Act, and on media consolidation more broadly, in a way that goes beyond advising Americans to “go ask Al Gore.”

Why Media Reform Matters

When McChesney observed that the communications lobby was “among the most feared, respected and well-endowed of all” groups in Washington, he also pointed out one of the great challenges about trying to fight Big Media.

“[The] only grounds for political independence in this case,” he wrote about the debate over the Telecommunications Act, “would be if there were an informed and mobilized citizenry ready to do battle for alternative policies. But where would citizens get informed?”

This catch-22 is indeed one of the great difficulties about fighting for a vibrant media and a healthy democracy. But it is a challenge advocates of free media must embrace. Supporting independent media is one important way to help bring light to issues the corporate media ignores.In other words, how can we have a real debate about media issues, when we depend on that very media to provide a platform for this debate? It is no surprise, for instance, that the media largely ignored the impact of Citizens Unitedafter the Supreme Court decision helped media companies generate record profits due to a new mass of political ads. “Super PACs may be bad for America, but they’re very good for CBS,” said CBS president Les Moonves, in a rare moment of candor at an entertainment conference in 2012.

Media reform is the issue that affects all other issues. As the impact of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 has shown, democracy suffers when almost all media in the nation is owned by massive conglomerates. In this reality, no issue the left cares about — the environment, criminal legal reform or health care — will get a fair shake in the national debate.

TOPICS: MEDIA

TAGS: BILL CLINTON, FCC, HILLARY CLINTON, MEDIA CRITICISM, NET NEUTRALITY, SUPER PACS,TELECOMMUNICATIONS ACT

==

wiki

CBS Corporation is an American mass media corporation focused on commercial broadcasting, publishing, andtelevision production, with most of its operations in the United States. The president and chief executive of the company is Leslie Moonves. Sumner Redstone, owner of National Amusements, is CBS's majority shareholder and serves as executive chairman. The company began trading on the NYSE on January 3, 2006. Until then, the corporation was known as Viacom, and is the legal successor to said company.^[4] A new company, keeping theViacom name, was spun off from CBS. CBS, not Viacom, retains control of over-the-air television (CBS, CW) andradio broadcasting, TV production and distribution, publishing, pay-cable, basic cable (Pop), and recording formerly owned by the larger company. CBS has its headquarters in CBS Building, Midtown, Manhattan, New York City, United States.^[5]

...

Sumner Murray Redstone (born Sumner Murray Rothstein; May 27, 1923) is an American businessman and media magnate. He is the majority owner and Chairman of the Board of the National Amusements theater chain. Through National Amusements, Redstone and his family are majority owners of CBS Corporation and Viacom (itself the parent company of Viacom Media Networks, BET Networks, and the film studio Paramount Pictures). According to Forbes, as of March 2014, he is worth US $6.2 billion.^[1]

Contents

  [hide] 

• 1Early life and education
• 2Career
  • 2.1Viacom
  • 2.2Paramount Pictures
  • 2.3CBS
  • 2.4Succession
  • 2.5Holdings
• 3Books
• 4Political views
• 5Philanthropy
• 6Personal life
• 7References
• 8Further reading
• 9External links

Early life and education

Sumner was born to a Jewish family^[2] in Boston, Massachusetts, to Belle (née Ostrovsky) and Michael Rothstein. In 1940, his father changed the family surname from "Rothstein" to "Redstone"^[3] ("Red stone" is a literal translation of the German-Jewish name, "Rothstein").^[4] Michael Rothstein owned Northeast Theater Corporation inDedham, Massachusetts—the forerunner of National Amusements^[5]—and the Boston branch of the Latin Quarter Nightclub.^[6]

Redstone attended the Boston Latin School, from which he graduated first in his class. In 1944, he graduated from Harvard College,^[3] where he completed the studies for his baccalaureate in three years. Later, Redstone served as First Lieutenant in the United States Army during World War II^[3] with a team that decoded Japanese messages.^[7] After this military service, he worked in Washington, D.C., and attended Georgetown University Law School. He transferred to Harvard Law School and received his LL.B. in 1947.^[3]

After completing law school, Redstone served as special assistant to U.S. Attorney General Tom C. Clark (who later served as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1949 to 1967)^[3] and then worked for the United States Department of Justice Tax Division in Washington, D.C. and San Francisco, and thereafter entered private practice. In 1954, he joined his father's theater chain, National Amusements and in 1967, he became CEO of the company.^[3] As the company grew, Redstone came to believe that content would become more important than distribution mechanisms: channels of distribution (in varied forms) would always exist, but content would always be essential (Redstone coined the phrase, "Content is king!"^[8]). He invested in Columbia Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox, Orion Pictures, andParamount Pictures (Redstone's Viacom would buy Paramount in the 1990s), all of which turned over huge profits when he chose to sell their stock in the early 1980s.

In 1979, he suffered severe burns in a fire at the Copley Plaza hotel, in Boston, but survived after thirty hours extensive surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital. Though he was warned that he might never be able to live a normal life, eight years later he was fit enough to insist on playing tennis nearly every day and to launch a hostile takeover of Viacom.^[9] Redstone has discussed the story of surviving the fire as a reflection of his strong determination and will to live.^[10]

Career

Viacom

Looking for a new business venture, he set his sights on Viacom International, a company which he had already been buying stock in as an investment and was a spin-off of CBS in 1971 after the FCC ruled that television networks could not syndicate programs following their network run. Viacom syndicated most of CBS's in-house productions (such as Hawaii Five-O and Gunsmoke, as well as the pre-1960 Desilu Productions library which CBS acquired in 1960, I Love Lucy being among the acquired programs), but also made a lot of money from syndicating other programs, including most of Carsey-Werner Productions' shows (The Cosby Show, Roseanne, and A Different World), as well as syndicating shows for other companies (Columbia Pictures Television's All in the Family was one notable example, as was MTM Enterprises' The Mary Tyler Moore Show), and cable channels (Nickelodeon's Double Dare and Finders Keepers (co-syndicated with 20th Television) were two examples).

Viacom also owned MTV Networks (formerly known as Warner-AMEX Satellite Entertainment), which owned MTV and Nickelodeon. In addition, other properties included Showtime Networks (a similar pay-television network to HBO and Cinemax) and The Movie Channel. Viacom acquired MTV Networks in 1985 for $550 million from Steve Ross' Warner Communications. (WCI bought American Express' share and then sold the entire entity to Viacom, as they felt that they could not make a lot of money from the venture and the bias of a studio owning cable channels would be a conflict of interest. The studio's stance changed in 1995, when as Time Warner it bought Turner Broadcasting.)

After a four-month hostile takeover in 1987,^[11][12] Redstone won voting control of Viacom and led a series of acquisitions to make Viacom one of the top players in modern media along with Bertelsmann, News Corporation, Time Warner, Sony, Disney, and NBC Universal (owned by Comcast).

Paramount Pictures

Redstone's next acquisition was the purchase of Paramount Communications (previously Gulf+Western), parent of Paramount Pictures in 1993. He engaged in a bidding war with Barry Diller (former board member of Vivendi Universal and CEO of IAC/InterActiveCorp) and John Malone (president of TCI/Liberty Media), and had to raise his bid three times. Some say that Redstone overpaid, but after he shed certain assets — the Madison Square Garden properties (which included the NBA's NY Knicks and the NHL's NY Rangers) to Charles Dolan's Cablevision and Simon & Schuster's educational publishing units to Pearson PLC — for almost $4 billion, Redstone turned Viacom's expenditure into a substantial profit. Under Redstone's leadership, Paramount went on an almost ten-year streak of record performance, producing such films as Saving Private Ryan, Titanic (one of the highest grossing film of all time and Best Picture Academy Award winner),^[13] Braveheart (Best Picture Academy Award),^[14] and Forrest Gump (also a Best Picture winner)^[15] and the creation of the hugely successful Mission: Impossible^[16] series of pictures.

Redstone replaced the team of Jonathan Dolgen and Sherry Lansing in 2004 after their nine-year winning streak ended.^[17] Along with the strong slate of films they oversaw, Dolgen and Lansing’s accomplishments included: doubling the size of Paramount's music publishing division, Famous Music; expanding UCI Cinemas into 13 foreign countries; creating the Digital Cinema Initiatives standards body for the new digital film technology; and launching the UPN Network (later part of CBS and now called the CW). The current Paramount Pictures consists only of the movie studio, the other groups having been sold or parceled out to other divisions.

Since arriving at Paramount in 2005, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Brad Grey has led a return to fortune at the box office.^[18][19] He has overseen the creation or revitalization of several major franchises, including Transformers, Star Trek and Paranormal Activity.^[20] Paramount has also forged productive relationships with top-tier filmmakers and talent including J.J. Abrams,^[21] Michael Bay^[22] and Martin Scorsese.^[23] The 2010 Paramount slate achieved much success with Shutter Island and a True Grit remake, reaching the biggest box office totals in the storied careers of Martin Scorsese and the Coen Brothers, respectively.^[24][25] In addition, during Grey’s tenure, Paramount launched its own worldwide releasing arm, Paramount Pictures International, and has released acclaimed films such as An Inconvenient Truth, Up in the Air, and There Will Be Blood.^[26]

The Paramount acquisition was only the tip of the iceberg. He purchased Blockbuster Entertainment, which included Aaron Spelling's production company and a huge library of films, much of which has been merged into Paramount Pictures. Blockbuster has now been spun off into its own independent entity. Redstone acquired CBS Corporation in 2000 and then spun it off as a separate company in 2005, taking with it all of Paramount's television shows and catalog. Following the CBS and Blockbuster Spinoffs, Viacom consists of MTV Networks (MTV, Nickelodeon, VH1, Noggin etc.), music publishing (Famous Music) and Paramount Pictures.

In December 2005, Redstone announced that Paramount had agreed to buy DreamWorks SKG for an estimated $1.6 billion. The acquisition was completed on February 1, 2006. A subsequent financing brought Viacom's investment down to $700 million. The animation studio, DreamWorks Animation, was not included in the deal as it has been its own company since late 2004. However, Paramount now has the rights to distribute films by DreamWorks Animation.

On June 1, 2012, Paramount Pictures renamed the Administration Building on the studio lot the Sumner Redstone Building in a dedication ceremony attended by employees of Paramount Pictures and Viacom.

CBS

One of Redstone's largest acquisitions came in the form of Viacom's former parent, CBS. Former Viacom President and COO Mel Karmazin (who was then the President of CBS) proposed a merger to Redstone on favorable terms and after the merger completed in 2000, Viacom had some of the most diversified businesses imaginable. Viacom had assets in the form of broadcast networks (CBS and UPN), cable television networks (MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, MTV2, Comedy Central, BET,Nick at Nite, Noggin/The N, TV Land, CMT, and Spike TV), pay television (Showtime and The Movie Channel), radio (Infinity Broadcasting, which produced the immensely popular Howard Stern' radio shows), outdoor advertising, motion pictures (Paramount Pictures), and television production (Spelling Entertainment,Paramount Television, and Big Ticket Entertainment), and King World Productions (a syndication unit, which notably syndicates the runaway daytime hit, The Oprah Winfrey Show, as well as Dr. Phil, Wheel of Fortune, and *Jeopardy!*), among others.

After CBS and Viacom split in late 2005, Redstone remained chairman of both companies.

Succession

Redstone's trusts make it clear that his daughter, Shari Redstone (Vice-Chairwoman of the Board of Viacom and CBS as well as President of National Amusements), is set to assume his role upon his death. However, a November 22, 2006, New York Times article indicated that Redstone was reconsidering his daughter's role. In 2007, they feuded publicly over issues of corporate governance and the future of the cinema chain.^[27]

==

http://www.desmogblog.com/2015/10/08/why-sale-national-geographic-fox-should-focus-everyone-s-minds-value-photojournalism

When the news broke that*National Geographic*was sold to Rupert Murdoch, fans of the magazine gasped. 

A magazine known for its photo essays paired with reports often based on scientific research being under the control of an outspoken climate change denier worried them.

As a photojournalist, it is to difficult for me to imagine that the sale of National Geographic to Murdoch won’t contribute to the decline of photojournalism, because it is one of the few publications left whose brand is connected to original, visually-oriented content.

Shortly after the sale was announced, Susan Goldberg, National Geographic’s editor-in-chief, claimed it was a good thing. “It’s great news,” she told the Washington Post. “It’s really a doubling down on our journalism and an investment in our journalism.” She pointed out that the partnership will bring more resources and distribution muscle to National Geographic’s digital and print operations.

However, Jane Goodall, the naturalist with a long relationship with National Geographic, told the Winnipeg Free Press that at first she thought it was a joke. The news left her dumbfounded: “It is unimaginable. National Geographic being owned almost entirely by climate deniers.”

Media ownership

Six corporations own 90 per cent of the media companies in the U.S., according to a report by Business Insider. What most Americans read, watch, and listen to is filtered through those corporate interests. And media that isn’t corporate-owned is often corporate-sponsored. National Public Radio, for example, took funding from America’s Natural Gas Alliance, which leads those who oppose fracking to point out how weak NPR’s reporting is on the topic.

“Propaganda by omission is something to watch out for,” Daymon Hartley, former photographer for the Detroit Free Press, told DeSmog. “Now corporations control what you see and what you don’t see. They look through lens of their own ideology and control the message by hiding what it doesn’t want you to see.”

Ownership of the media dictates the tone of editorial content, as well as the allocation of resources to cover stories. Not reporting on a topic can tell us as much about a news source’s stance as the topics it does cover – as do the images we see and don’t see.

At the same time media conglomerates where combining their print, online, and television outlets, individual media sources downsized their staffs of journalists, despite the need to fill 24 hours with streaming news.

Images on the cheap

Photojournalists are often the first to go. The *Chicago Sun-Times* eliminated its entire photo staff in 2013. And in January, this year Sports Illustrated let go all of its staff photographers.

The photographs and video that photojournalists created have been replaced with pictures taken by writers with smartphones, images lifted from other web sources (sometimes authorized, other times not), user-submitted content, work commissioned by freelancer photographers, and photos from photo agencies that offer lower and lower prices available by subscription.

Photo editors rely heavily on photo agencies because not only are they faced with a shrinking staff, but also shrinking budgets for freelancers. It is common practice for photo editors to select an image connected to a topic, even if it was shot at a different time or place than the chosen photo is supposed to represent.

For example, The Guardian licensed a photograph from Corbis Images that I shot in 2012 of a barrier island in Louisiana’s Barrataria Bay to illustrate a story about coastal erosion in 2014. The photo shows birds on healthy mangrove trees in a bird rookery.

The report, published on October 14, 2014, makes no mention that the photo was taken in 2012, and gives a false impression of what the island looked like at that time. I reshot the same location for a DeSmog report in the spring of 2013. My photos show by 2013, the island’s mangrove trees were dead. The island written about was in much worse state than the photo used to illustrate the situation.

imp img]

Barrier Island in Cat Bay known as Cat Island, June 16, 2012.  A photo published by the Guardian in 2014   ©Julie Dermansky

imp img]

Barrier Island in Cat Bay known as Cat Island, September 27, 2013, A photo published by DeSmog in 2013.  ©Julie Dermansky

The Guardian’s choice to use my image taken a couple of years before cost them a tiny fraction of what it would have cost to hire a photojournalist to shoot a new image. Opting not to hire professional photojournalists saves money, but it can cost consumers in terms of quality, authenticity and accuracy.

When Getty Images, the largest source for stock news photos worldwide, was purchased by the Carlyle Group, media critics took notice, but little was written about it. The Carlyle Group is an investment firm that owns a stake in the energy company Kinder Morgan, and in Booz Allen Hamilton, a management consulting firm that counts the U.S. Department of Defense among its clients.

Can Carlyle influence what Getty Images chooses to add to its photo stock? If so, Hartley pointed out, it has the power to control the media by omitting images.

Not only do mainstream media rely on Getty and other stock agencies that offer inexpensive images, alternative media sources, including DeSmog, use stock images, too.

Freelance photojournalists have trouble competing with the low-cost marketplace created by the cheap subscription prices and media’s reliance on free and low-cost images. The rates photojournalists get paid are often the same or lower than they were two decades ago. The World Press Photo Association’s recent survey shows most photojournalists make less than $40k a year.

Experience lost

It is not unusual for veteran photographers to leave photojournalism behind in order to climb up the economic ladder. Leaving with them is their wealth of knowledge of whatever beat they were covering, and a skill set a photographer just hitting the street won’t have.

Few media consumers are aware of what has been lost. But if you pay attention to the credits under photographs, you will notice many are supplied by Getty and other photo agencies, rather than a staff member or freelancer shooting on behalf of the media source.

“Good enough is good enough today,” award winning photojournalist, Kenneth Jarecke, told DeSmog. “That was not the standard publications were after 15 years ago.”

Photojournalists must adhere to a code of ethics that prohibits them from setting up shots and altering a photograph after the fact. While amateur photographers have nothing at stake if they don’t follow basic photojournalistic guidelines, a professional caught breaking the rules loses his or her professional standing.

“There was a code for photo editors too,” Jarecke said, “A photo editor could lose their job for using images out of context.” But the standards in the industry have dropped so much that for some it is acceptable to publish work found on social media that hasn’t been verified, he explained.

Photographs have the power to raise awareness and impact public policy on a global scale. The image of a drowned three-year-old Syrian refugee washed up on a beach in Turkey by photographer Nilüfer Demir reminded us of that. 

There is some truth to the statement, “If it wasn’t photographed, it didn’t happen,” Hartley said.

It is hard for me to believe Murdoch’s outlook won’t influence National Geographic’s content, even though the magazine insists it will retain editorial control.

Will photographs depicting the negative impacts of climate change appear on the pages of a magazine owned by a man who doesn’t believe it is an issue? Time will tell.

But I suggest Murdoch’s purchase of National Geographic serves as a wake-up call to media consumers. People should pay attention to where the images come from.

If no value is given to photojournalists’ work, they might be headed toward the endangered species list, much like the polar bear.

==

http://www.alternet.org/media/10-even-worse-things-you-dont-know-about-comcasts-proposed-merger-time-warner

---

press2:

Media Consolidation:

We get periodic updates on how small the number of media companies has become, let's say generously half a dozen. General Electric, which owned NBC for a long time before selling it off to Comcast, is the US polluter record holder in Superfund sites at 86. Westinghouse owned CBS, build nuclear plants and weapons, before selling off to Disney (also owns TV and radio stations, Hyperion books and several movie studios).

"News Corp. owns 27 television stations, the Fox Network and Fox News Channel, FX, National Geographic Channel, The Wall Street Journal, TV Guide, the New York Post, DirecTV, the publisher HarperCollins, film production company Twentieth Century Fox and the social networking website MySpace.

Elsewhere we have noted systemic analysis, positive feedback loops (aka death spirals):

campaigns get more expensive which increases dialing-for-dollars (to fend off a flank attack in primaries, which also drives ideology to right] which leads to more subsidies and other concessions to corporations (including media ownership rules], which leads to more expensive campaigns.

Media consolidation leads to increase in profits (sell same content across platforms, but also political ad revenue in the billions), increased competition to scoop, so less fact-checking [Boston bombing suicide?] but also less science, investigation and local coverage. More sensational (sex scandals look like hard-hitting but really just more actress without undies] no real critique so safe (plus no sponsors to offend).

Against campaign finance reform b/c they benefit from corporate personhood? Huge windfalls from running negative ad blitz on airwaves owned by public. 3 billion$?

Clearchannel (millionaire congressman) big donors to Bush2, got pass on rules; also cheerleader for Gulf 2 [Dixie Chicks?] and Tea Party [rightwing radio]. Beck

---

old? 

GE owns NBC? world's #1 polluter w/ 86 superfind sites

westinghouse cbs 39 biggest maker of nuke plants and 3rd in weapons 180 (rfk2)

disney ABC

 Comcast owns NBC; Disney owns ABC; and News Corporation owns Fox Broadcasting Company. 

Comcastowns NBC, Telemundo, E Entertainment, Versus, 14 television stations, Universal Pictures, and Hulu. 

Disney holdings include 10 television stations, 277 radio stations, ABC, ESPN, A&E, the History Channel, Lifetime, Discover magazine, Bassmaster magazine, Hyperion publishing, Touchstone Pictures, Pixar Animation, and Miramax Film Corp. 

Viacom owns 10 television stations, The Movie Channel, Comedy Central, BET, Nickelodeon, TV Land, MTV, VH1, and Paramount Pictures. 

CBS owns 30 TV stations, Smithsonian Channel, Showtime, The Movie Channel and Paramount Network Television. 

News Corp. owns 27 television stations, the Fox Network and Fox News Channel, FX, National Geographic Channel, The Wall Street Journal, TV Guide, the New York Post, DirecTV, the publisher HarperCollins, film production company Twentieth Century Fox and the social networking website MySpace. 

Time Warnerowns HBO, CNN, the Cartoon Network, Warner Bros. Time magazine, Turner Broadcasting and DC Comics.

Currently, six major companies control most of the media in our country.  The FCC could decide to relax media ownership rules, which would allow further consolidation and put decisions about what kinds of programming and news Americans receive in even fewer hands.

---

http://shadowsofliberty.org/

---

rajan and boykoff say 1988 media consol 

---

kpfa 2:24 pm spn april 5 2013 hired 100 sacked journalists to create fake news (local and state) take control of 24hr news cycle; hire ppl to trash books and liberal postings

spokes on a wheel defund the left, anti-union, front for corps, esp energy co re fracking, telecomm, state think tanks to ban municipal broadband;

 lee fang the nation the right leans in counterspin

==

Random House, Penguin Publishing Houses To Merge

by Lynn Neary

October 29, 2012

Listen to the Story

All Things Considered

3 min 13 sec

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Executives of the publishing giants Bertelsmann and Pearson announced on Monday that they will pursue a merger of their publishing houses, Random House and Penguin. The united publishing companies are set to become a large and influential force in publishing.

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

We got news today of a wedding of sorts between two titans of the publishing industry. The European conglomerates that own Random House and Penguin have agreed to join forces. The new effort will be called the Penguin Random House.

NPR's Lynn Neary reports that the agreement comes as the publishing business struggles to turn a profit in the age of eBooks and Amazon.

LYNN NEARY, BYLINE: Under the consolidation agreement, the German company Bertelsmann, which owns Random House, will control 53 percent of the new company. The British conglomerate Pearson, which owns Penguin, will control the remaining 47. The agreement brings together two of this country's biggest publishing houses. Random House alone is home to some of the most popular authors in the world.

==

The Nation: Big Media Gets a Whole Lot Bigger

by John Nichols

January 19, 2011 8:26 AM

Partner content from:

The FCC's decision to allow the merger of Comcast and NBC Universal came with conditions designed to protect the consumer. The deal will cost Comcast $13.8 billion.

.reid./flickr.com

John Nichols writes about politics for The Nation magazine as its Washington correspondent. He is also the associate editor of the Capital Times, the daily newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin.

As brutal ironies go, it will be tough to beat this one.

On the same day that President Obama launched a drive to identify what he referred to as "excessive" regulation of business, the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Justice — both of which are defined by his appointments — effectively abandoned more than a century of antitrust principles and approved one of the biggest corporate mergers in American history.

Instead of regulating the telecommunications industry, the FCC's vote to approve Comcast's proposed acquisition of a majority stake in NBC Universal — creating a conglomerate that will be the largest cable provider, the largest Internet provider and one of the largest producers of content in the United States — represents the ultimate surrender to the demands of corporate America.

"Once we allow companies to become this powerful, the FCC does not regulate them," says Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. "They regulate the FCC," says the senator.

No reasonable regulator would debate Sanders's point — or the threat to democracy posed when traditional protections against media monopoly are abandoned.

Unfortunately, there was only one reasonable regulator on the FCC, Commissioner Michael Copps.

Copps, a stalwart defender of media diversity and the public interest, cast a lonely vote against the Comcast/NBCU merger.

"Comcast's acquisition of NBC Universal is a transaction like no other that has come before this Commission — ever," argued Copps, the one Democrat on the commission who was not appointed by Obama. "It reaches into virtually every corner of our media and digital landscapes and will affect every citizen in the land. It is new media as well as old; it is news and information as well as sports and entertainment; it is distribution as well as content. And it confers too much power in one company's hands."

FCC chair Julius Genachowski, an Obama appointee, backed the merger, as did the other Democrat appointed by the president, Mignon Clyburn. They joined the two Republican members of the commission on the pro-merger side of a four-to-one vote.

By any measure, it was the wrong vote — as was the Justice Department's dismissal of antitrust concerns raised by the deal.

Copps says: "The Comcast-NBCU joint venture opens the door to the cable-ization of the open Internet. The potential for walled gardens, tollbooths, content prioritization, access fees to reach end-users and a stake in the heart of independent content production is now very real."

Parallel objections came from the savviest observers of media issues on Capitol Hill.

"Big media just got a lot bigger," declared Congressman Maurice Hinchey, the New York Democrat who chairs the congressional Future of Media Caucus. "The FCC's decision to allow Comcast to acquire NBC Universal will burden the American people with more media consolidation, fewer independent sources of information and higher cable bills. I have no doubt that today's decision will lead to more mega media mergers in the near future. That is certainly not in the public interest."

Senator :{Al Franken,:(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}: D-Minnesota, was equally adamant, "The FCC's action today is a tremendous disappointment. The commission is supposed to protect the public interest, not corporate interests. But what we see today is an effort by the FCC to appease the very companies it's charged with regulating," said Franken. "With approval of this merger, the FCC has given a single media conglomerate unprecedented control over the flow of information in America. This will ultimately mean higher cable and Internet bills, fewer independent voices in the media and less freedom of choice for all American consumers."

Franken vows to fight "any further media consolidation of this kind."

Unfortunately, while Franken and others fight that battle, President Obama will be busy battling a fantasy: the illusion that business is excessively regulated. If Tuesday's decisions by the FCC and the Justice Department confirm anything, it is that business has little to fear from regulators.

Related NPR Stories

Conditions Attached To Comcast-NBC Universal Deal Jan. 19, 2011

Comcast Wins FCC Approval For NBC Merger Jan. 18, 2011

---

FCC grants approval for Comcast NBC merger

Andrea Parrish January 18, 2011

blog:

In a move approved by the FCC, Comcast and NBC will likely be merging. This Comcast/NBC merger is being lauded by industry advocates. Public interest groups, however, are worried that the Comcast/NBC merger will be terrible for consumers.

The details of the Comcast NBC merger

In the last few months, Comcast announced its intention to take over 51 percent of NBC. Comcast intends to spend more than $30 billion to purchase that controlling stake from General Electric company, which currently controls NBC Universal. Comcast currently controls the internet service for 17 million subscribers and television for 23 million cable subscribers. NBC Universal owns NBC, CNBC, Bravo, Oxygen, Universal Studios and 30 percent of Hulu. The purchase requires and has been granted approval by the Federal Communications Commission and Justice Department anti-trust unit.

Comcast NBC merger pros

The FCC approval of the Comcast NBC merger does not come without conditions. Comcast has promised to add 1,000 hours of informational and news programming. The company has also promised to provide broadband internet access for $9.95 a month to low-income households. Specific regulations have also been put in place to help prevent the Comcast-controlled NBC from using its  control to kill competitors in both internet and television programming arenas.

NBC Comcast merger cons

Though Comcast has promised to take action to prevent unfair competition, many consumer advocates are concerned about the merger. The one FCC Commissioner who voted against the deal voiced concern that the “concentration of media under Comcast’s control would put too much power into one company that controls the access consumers have.” The media consolidation means that Comcast NBC could create more of a wall around their content. Vertical integration helps reduce costs, but it also creates more of an opportunity for abuse. With no specific net neutrality regulations — or even jurisdiction — the FCC could easily be getting in over its  head by allowing this merger.

Sources

NPR: http://www.npr.org/2011/01/18/133024499/comcast-wins-fcc-approval-to-take-over-nbc?ft=1&f=1001&sc=tw&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Washington Post: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/posttech/2011/01/the_federal_communications_com_8.html

===

http://www.cjr.org/resources/

 ===

254

GANGS OF AMERICA

Media Reform

:{:{Like the history of the labor movement, the history of how media}:

evolved in the United States shows how the “mainstream” was defined

in narrow terms favorable to corporate interests. One example is the}:

formation of federal radio policy in the 1920s and 1930s. At a time

when Canada and the countries of Western Europe were moving to organize

strong public media institutions such as the CBC and the BBC,

comparable efforts in the United States were defeated.

Corporate ownership of the media has become considerably more

:{concentrated in the past two decades. :{The first edition of Ben Bagdikian's}:

The Media Monopoly, published in 1983, described how fifty

media conglomerates dominated the mass media in the United States.

By the sixth edition of the book, published in 2000, that dominance had

been concentrated into six conglomerates.}:

A study of sector-by-sector

concentration showed the following: in film production; six firms accounted

for over 90 percent of revenues in 1997; in theater ownership,

twelve companies controlled 61 percent of screens in 1998; in the

newspaper industry, 25 percent of revenues were now created in metropolitan

“clusters” where a major urban daily controlled a constellation

of suburban and regional papers; in book publishing, seven firms dominated;

in cable television, three firms own all or part of 56 percent of

channels; in music, five corporate groups accounted for over 87 percent

of the U.S. market; in cable television, seven firms controlled over 75

percent of channels and programming; in book retailing, 80 percent of

:{books were sold by national chains; in radio, a single chain:{, Clear}:

Channel Communications, created after the lifting of limitations on sta}:

tion ownership in 1996, owned more than 1200 local radio stations nationwide

in 2002.

Led by organizations such as Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting

(FAIR) and the Institute for Public Accuracy, media activists organized

grassroots efforts focused on blocking new Federal Communications

Commission moves toward relaxing rules that prevent media consolidation,

such as a single company owning both newspapers and TV stations

in the same community. Activists exposed the “inside the Beltway” tactics

:{of the media conglomerates, revealing for example that :{FCC employees,}:

members of Congress, and senior staffers had been taken on

over 1,700 all-expenses-paid trips between 1995 and 2000.}:

In addition to focusing on national FCC policy issues, local media

activists battled corporate advertising in schools and cafeterias, and

worked to support non-corporate alternatives such as the Pacifica radio

network. Thousands of community groups sought to establish low

power FM radio stations, designed to literally “fly through the cracks”

in the radio spectrum.

The increased concentration of the corporate media is an issue with

clear connections to the issue of corporate power. With a half-dozen

:{immense corporations dominating media, and with:{ “noncommercial”}:

media such as National Public Radio increasingly dependent on corporate

funding, opportunities for discussion about systemic issues of}:

power were increasingly rare. In this context, delving into such topics

basically amounts to extremely bad manners, a compelling reason “not

to get invited back on the show" [cf nader ]as though a sort of Emily Post of political

manners had said, “It’s not polite to talk about corporate power in

a public forum, just as we don’t argue about religion at a family reunion.”

---

FACT: Comcast owns NBC; Disney owns ABC; and News Corporation owns Fox Broadcasting Company. 

Comcastowns NBC, Telemundo, E Entertainment, Versus, 14 television stations, Universal��Pictures, and Hulu. 

Disney holdings include 10 television stations, 277 radio stations, ABC, ESPN, A&E, the History Channel, Lifetime, Discover magazine, Bassmaster magazine, Hyperion publishing, Touchstone Pictures, Pixar Animation, and Miramax Film Corp. 

Viacom owns 10 television stations, The Movie Channel, Comedy Central, BET, Nickelodeon, TV Land, MTV, VH1, and Paramount Pictures. 

CBS owns 30 TV stations, Smithsonian Channel, Showtime, The Movie Channel and Paramount Network Television. 

News Corp. owns 27 television stations, the Fox Network and Fox News Channel, FX, National Geographic Channel, The Wall Street Journal, TV Guide, the New York Post, DirecTV, the publisher HarperCollins, film production company Twentieth Century Fox and the social networking website MySpace. 

Time Warnerowns HBO, CNN, the Cartoon Network, Warner Bros. Time magazine, Turner Broadcasting and DC Comics.

Currently, six major companies control most of the media in our country.  The FCC could decide to relax media ownership rules, which would allow further consolidation and put decisions about what kinds of programming and news Americans receive in even fewer hands.