In our current political climate, it would be perilous to cede additional prerogative to the media conglomerates and their operatives on the FCC Commission.

Commissioner Copps is leading the opposition to this latest attempt to usurp, an oligopolist equivalent of the mythical vampire’s urge to drink blood.

The Deans spoke up in solidarity with Copps’ cause, and inadvertantly dissed the internet. Jarvis is gainsaying them simply to score points.

I agree with you both that the importance of traditional media is fading, but most people still form their opinions based on the pablum they are being spoon-fed on TV, radio and in the papers.

Why make it worse? With the FCC playing Russian roulette with all of our media: broadband, internet, television, radio, newspapers, this is no time to acquiesce on any front.

re: http://onlinejournalismblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/thoughtful-criticism-would-have-been.html

http://www.democracynow.org/2007/12/26/fcc_michael_copps

Repeat: Is there ANY article that doesn’t hew to that net.Party-Line, that couldn’t be flamed on the basis of not hewing to the net.Party-Line?

Aren’t there entirely too many blog posts with this sort of canned response, and again, see my point about driving out thoughtful criticism?

Note this interacts badly with the idea that it’s “early days”, and thus the marketing hype cannot be provisionally examined to see if it’s wrong. That is, anyone pointing out that the optimism has not been validated, e.g. per-topic there’s a few very OldMedia-like sites with enormous power, while in practice NOBODY ELSE GETS HEARD, can be brushed off with a glib dismissive phrase.

Do you see the logical problems here, the argument structures which are optimized for demagoguery and not thoughtfulness?

The piece was 8 guys trying to cram an argument into 670 words. I can’t imagine how they could be expected to deal with all issues facing journalism today. They were dealing solely with the pressing issue before the FCC.

That said, they still fumbled. There were so many nuances to this proposal that they ignored. Now that I’ve re-read the column, and re-read the analsysis (from the Stop Big Media coalition), it’s clear that what they were asking for (news coverage as a factor in merger waivers) *was* included in the proposal. They should have addressed the facts of the proposal.

And Jarvis’s column was similarly just pulled out of the air of his own convictions.

Good journalism should help the reader learn / act / teach. I took a look at Lemann’s CJR, and found an interview with Mark Cooper, of the Consumer Federation of America, which neatly goes into the issues in depth.

And here’s the real irony: when you look at it closely, a standard blog post is NO BETTER than a weak column. If “conversation” is supposed to be the prevailing theme in media today, why aren’t many more media innovators doing regular printed interviews? (because it takes much more work than doing a measly blog post.) The Cooper interview was vastly more informative. But since the NYT was bitten by the blog bug, it’s not added any straight interview/conversations to its online Opinion offerings.

(re: Seth’s point — it’s germane to the larger issues, but I wanted to strictly address the cross-ownership debate here.)

While you are at it (well… whenever you get around to posting it) it would be good to know what you think of Seth’s position on this. Thanks!

Delia

Instead of dealing withe key issue of serious business models to support online journalism, they call for new regulation of a medium whose business model is going through some big changes, too.

I’m not against consolidation of traditional media, actually, provided that we ensure some sort of packet-switched system that doesn’t discriminate the way the telcos have announced they intend to discriminate. I am even more vehemently against traditional media getting in bed with the telcos to create a cartel that would make the current concentration seem utterly benign.

So the FCC is going in double-bad directions here: consolidation of traditional content combined with concentration of access. This is the worst of both worlds — and the fact that the deans couldn’t be bothered to focus on the real threat, assuming they grasp it, is more alarming than anything.

And none of them, as I stated above, have made an effort to summon forth any evidence pointing to specific benefits/drawbacks of cross-ownership. Most of the reactions were derivative of Jarvis’s, not the original piece.

As to the question, a quick Google search informs me that PEJ has studied this in 2003. In “Does Ownership Matter in Local Television News?” they specifically considered cross-ownership.

Stations with cross-ownership-in which the parent company also owns a newspaper in the same market-tended to produce higher quality newscasts.
…
On the whole, they were more likely to do stories that focused on important community issues, more likely to provide a wide mix of opinions, and less likely to do celebrity and human-interest features. Cross-owned stations were also, however, slightly less enterprising than other stations-perhaps in contrast to the expectation that the combined resources of a newspaper and TV station in collaboration would lead to more.

They conceded that they were only able to study 6 out of 26 nationwide cross-ownership cases. So it’s possible that this evidence is incomplete, or out-of-date; that’s what should be debated.

Jon