Just What the Doctor Didn’t Order: More Media Consolidation
By Amy Kroin, Editor, Free Press
Breathe in and breathe out, take a seat and brace yourself for a real shocker: The National Association of Broadcasters is once again supporting a plan to allow more media consolidation.
The powerful lobbying group and trade association representing dominant industry players like the Sinclair Broadcast Group, the NAB all too often works against the public interest. It opposed the FCC’s move to make the cost of political ads more transparent. It fought to limit the growth of Low Power FM stations. And it’s done everything it can to stop the FCC from closing the ownership loopholes that have led to runaway consolidation in the local TV market.
Some of those loopholes still exist, but on March 31, 2014, the agency put an end to Joint Service Agreements (JSAs), which broadcasters had exploited to operate allegedly independent TV stations in the same market. Now the NAB’s endorsing a bipartisan effort to undermine this rule.
On Monday, Sen. Roy Blunt introduced a bill to grandfather in JSAs implemented before the March 2014 vote. Sens. Barbara Mikulski, Chuck Schumer and Tim Scott are co-sponsoring the legislation, which would harm the public’s ability to access competing news sources in a given market.
Blunt claims that JSAs have “helped save TV stations from going dark, increased program diversity, and enabled local news programming for many TV broadcasters.” In a word: hogwash.
As my colleague S. Derek Turner has shown, the broadcasters’ use of JSAs has shuttered newsrooms nationwide and led to dumbed-down cookie-cutter newscasts:
Cheap-to-produce traffic, weather and sports updates now comprise nearly half of all local news programming. And in many communities, the same company owns multiple media outlets: Changing the channel brings the same content from the same newsroom, packaged with slightly altered graphics.
Most Americans get their news from their local stations — which heightens the impact of all this covert consolidation. The FCC needs to close all of its ownership loopholes and take action to ensure that local news programming truly serves the public.
And in the meantime, Sen. Blunt and his co-sponsors need to ditch this bill.