IP: Salon: Consolodation of Radio and soon TV

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

> Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 21:50:15 -0700
> From: "Robert J. Berger" <rberger () ultradevices com>
> Organization: UltraDevices Inc.
>
>
> The Media Borg
> - - - - - - - - - - - -
>
>
> One big happy channel?  The Telecommunications Reform Act handed over
> control of the radio airwaves to a chosen few. Will TV be next?
>
> Second in a series on the consolidation of power and ownership in the
> media landscape.
>
> ...Five years later nobody doubts that the law [Telecom Act of 1996]
> was indeed a landmark -- not only because congressional efforts to
> update the country's vast communications industries for the first time
> since the 1930s had themselves dragged on through the '80s and well
> into the '90s but also because the Telecom Act, as it became known,
> unleashed unprecedented deregulation and media consolidation, among
> the most pronounced in American history.
>
> Nowhere has that consolidation been more acutely felt than in radio --
> where just two companies, Clear Channel and Infinity, now dominate the
> nation's commercial radio stations. The result, many longtime radio
> industry observers feel, has been the degradation of commercial radio
> as a creative, independent medium.
>
>
> But Clear Channel and Infinity are also raking in the cash. So now the
> question is, who's next? Because just across the broadcast spectrum,
> big owners in the television industry are looking at what happened to
> radio and licking their lips. If they get their way, the same thing
> that happened to radio may well happen to TV: more consolidation, more
> homogenization and, of course, more profits for the few at the top.
> <snip>
>
> http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/06/28/telecom_dereg/index.html
> --
> Robert J. Berger
> UltraDevices, Inc.
> 257 Castro Street, Suite 223 Mt. View CA. 94041
> Voice: 408-882-4755 Fax: 408-490-2868
> Email: rberger () ultradevices com  http://www.ultradevices.com



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