Former FCC commissioner blames himself for approving mergers that ruined journalism
Former FCC commissioner Michael Copps says that a decade of mega-merger deals approved by the communications regulator helped destroy independent journalism and local media, and he is sorry for the role he played in making that happen.
[See open letter From the desk of a former FCC Commissioner - Journalists need to generate a national discussion on the future of the internet, Columbia Journalism Review, February 13, 2014.]
...Copps, who was sworn in as a Federal Communications Commission board member in 2001, says in the letter that he had a “front-row seat watching government policy undermine your profession and our democracy” for more than a decade. Based on some of the FCC’s decisions, Copps says that he “saw first-hand how my agency’s decisions limited your ability to accomplish good things.” He goes on to say that thanks to the FCC’s desire to approve almost any merger deal:
Gone are hundreds of once-independent broadcast outlets. In their stead is a truncated list of nationwide, homogenized, and de-journalized empires that respond more to quarterly reports than to the information needs of citizens...
Everywhere I looked, I saw newsrooms like yours being shuttered or drastically downsized, reporters getting the axe, and investigative journalism hanging by the most slender of threads. Instead of expanding news, the conglomerates cut the muscle out of deep-dive reporting and disinvested in you...”
Not surprisingly, the recently-announced $45B merger of Comcast and Time Warner Cable helped spark Copps’ thoughts in this regard, since it will result in a media behemoth that not only controls a huge chunk of the U.S. market for cable but will also have unprecedented control over the kinds of content that subscribers can access via its internet pipes....