why media consolidation is NOT a good thing

[Donna Halper]

>Garrett wrote--
>
>Please name a TV market in which one owner controls all of the
>stations.

It may not seem like such a big deal in Boston or Philly, but in smaller 
markets, it can be a major issue, since some of the giant media 
conglomerates now also own the newspaper and a bunch of radio stations, and 
can thus keep certain stories from being reported or covered in print, on 
radio, or on TV.  This has been thoroughly documented by Columbia 
Journalism Review (check their who owns what 
page:  http://www.cjr.org/tools/owners/

In smaller cities, it tends to be religious broadcasters that own a 
majority of the stations.  A friend of mine lives in Savannah TN, and in 
her market, there are as many as 29 low power TV transitters.  And I have 
consulted in plenty of small markets where there was basically one channel 
that got into the market well, and everything else was from the cable 
networks.  Another problem is that in some cities, while the local station 
*seems* to originate from that market, the news comes from one central 
location-- Sinclair Broadcasting elininated its local news shows and 
syndicates all of its newscasts, making it seem through little mentions 
("Gee, Garrett, it's such a sunny day and the Red Sox won!") that the show 
is coming from that city, when in fact it's all done from a studio in 
Baltimore and adheres to Sinclair's conservative philosophy.  As one media 
critic wrote in his article "The Death of Local News":

[Tune into the evening news on Madison, Wisconsin's Fox TV affiliate and 
behold the future of local news. In the program's concluding segment, "The 
Point," Mark Hyman rants against peace activists ("wack-jobs"), the French 
("cheese-eating surrender monkeys"), progressives ("loony left") and the 
so-called liberal media, usually referred to as the "hate-America crowd" or 
the "Axis of Drivel." Colorful, if creatively anemic, this is TV's version 
of talk radio, with the precisely tanned Hyman playing a second-string 
Limbaugh.

Fox 47's right-wing rants may be the future of hometown news, but – believe 
it or not – it's not the program's blatant ideological bias that is most 
worrisome. Here's the real problem: Hyman isn't the station manager, a 
local crank, or even a journalist. He is the Vice President of Corporate 
Communications for the station's owner, the Sinclair Broadcast Group. And 
this segment of the local news isn't exactly local. Hyman's commentary is 
piped in from the home office in Baltimore, MD, and mixed in with 
locally-produced news. Sinclair aptly calls its innovative strategy 
"NewsCentral" - it is very likely to spell the demise of local news as we 
know it...] end of excerpt, but entire article can be read at 
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15718

(Btw, the fact that they are conservative doesn't bother me as much as the 
fact that they are the only game in town in several cities... so, in a 
market which is dominated by Sinclair, where else can people get a "local" 
newscast?)