There's a movement among some of my blogbuddies to line up in the outrage column in the wake of this week's FCC decision on broadcast licensing, which drops a longtime general ban on assignment of new licenses to owners of daily newspapers in the same market.
I just can't get excited about it. It may feel good to carry a lance against big corporate media ownerships, but it seems to me a case of fighting the last war.
NPR's David Folkenflick reported Friday on the continuing campaign to change basic cable TV from flat-rate to "a la carte" pricing. He explained Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin's efforts as an attempt to impose conservative "family values" restrictions on cable, removing from basic services anything that might offend.
I've long argued that gatekeeping is dead and that our new role is more akin to that of a guide, pointing out both truth and falsehood in a rich and open bazaar of information.
I was stuck in an airport lounge Saturday morning, sitting in Lubbock, Texas, waiting for the fog to clear in Houston so I could go home. The TV was babbling away. It was CNN's airport channel. I have no idea what happened in Iraq, because CNN didn't see fit to tell me what was going on. I heard two things, repeated over and over: CNN is the most trusted name in journalism (promo, with booming voice and imposing music). And Alec Baldwin yelling at his daughter on the phone.
If you agree that TV news has more in common with professional "wrestling" than journalism, you'll enjoy this from the folks at Jib Jab:
Yahoo News has launched local pages for metropolitan areas across the United States, aggregating local news from RSS feeds and via screen-scraping. Users of Yahoo's personalization tools will get a link that aggregates their hometown news by default, and a cluster of local headlines on the news.yahoo.com page.
It's a provocative introduction to the "State of the Media 2006" report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism: "Will we recall this as the year when journalism in print began to die?"
It's not that bad, the report says: "We believe some fears are overheated. For now, the evidence does not support the notion that newspapers have begun a sudden death spiral. The circulation declines and job cuts will probably tally at only about 3% for the year. The industry still posted profit margins of 20%."
