A federal appeals court on Thursday upheld decades-old media ownership rules that prevent a single owner from controlling a newspaper and broadcast station in the same city.
According to a posting by Cecilia King at washingtonpost.com, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia ruled that the Federal Communications Commission didn’t give the public enough notice to weigh in on its 2007 decision to relax cross-ownership rules under former chairman Kevin Martin. The court sent the rules back to the FCC to be rewritten.
The original ownership rules date to the mid 1970s, when the FCC decided that a single owner should not have broadcast and print media holdings in the same local market. The idea was that having multiple owners of media outlets provided a diversity of voices.
Since then, the media industry has undergone massive change. Newspapers and television stations compete with smartphone apps and news aggregators such as Google and the Drudge Report. Power is being concentrated in other ways: Comcast serves the highest number of high-speed cable Internet users and owns some of the nation’s most coveted media franchises through NBC Universal.
Public interest groups, which challenged the FCC’s action, argue that even as options for accessing information continue to multiply, allowing a small concentration of companies to create that content — news reports, videos and columns — limits the number of voices and opinions in the public discourse.
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