Re:Re:Re:Wired.com on Reversing Consolidation

[Garrett Wollman <wollman@lcs.mit.edu>]

<<On Thu, 9 Jan 2003 04:57:46 GMT, Dave Faneuf <tklaundry@juno.com> said:

> Am I remembering the GOP Congressman story incorrectly?  Apparently
> IIRC the dominant media forces in his district were all owned by a
> person who disagreed with him politically and slanted news etc to
> his own end.

He was in a weird situation: his district is north of Dallas/Fort
Worth, in an area which was raped for DFW rimshot move-ins, so none of
the local stations which ostensibly ought to have served the area had
any interest in him -- and the one he ran into trouble with was
essentially the only *local* station left.  There are few places in
the country that got screwed by the FCC and Docket 80-90 nearly as
badly as the small cities within a hundred miles of every big city in
Texas.

(Dallas has been playing this game for a long time: the original
Dallas 570 station -- originally WFAA-WBAP and now KLIF -- was a
move-in from Wichita Falls in the thirties.  In some other parts of
Texas, you're now seeing move-ins from rural third-tier communities to
provide more service to the second-tier cities that lost most of their
stations to large nearby metros.)

-GAWollman