This is just a quick follow-up to an entry I posted late last year about Clear Channel’s possible divestiture of a significant number of its radio stations across America. Now we’re getting details and the sell-off is ready to begin. On Wednesday, Clear Channel said it would be selling 362 of its 1,150 radio stations as the company continues to shed assets and go private. Clear Channel hopes to fetch roughly $820 million from the sale of these radio stations. The company is also selling off TV assets. All total, the company expects to divest itself of almost $1.9 billion worth of properties.
As I’ve said many times before in this ongoing “media deconsolidation series,” this is just another sign of how dynamic the media marketplace is. Despite all the hand-wringing we’ve seen over media consolidation in recent years, critics fail to realize that this industry has continued to rapidly evolve, expand and innovate regardless of the ebbs and flows of media ownership patterns. A few years ago, mergers and acquisitions were all the rage. Today, however, a “back-to-basics” strategy is back in vogue that is seeing operators shed assets to figure out how to make customers happy while also weathering the storm of technological changes reshaping the media landscape. In other words, markets work!
But don’t expect the media Chicken Littles to say a peep about any of this. They’re always too busy concocting their next horror story about how the media sky is about to fall on our heads. This week, it’s the Rupert Murdoch offer for the Wall Street Journal. Who knows what it will be tomorrow, but there’s always something they want to complain about. Meanwhile, the rest of us are struggling to deal with the avalanche of media options that we’re showered with every second of our lives.
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Say what you want about Rupert Murdoch, but the man certainly knows how to make news. His bid for Dow Jones two days ago – despite being initially rejected by Dow Jones’ controlling family — is still reverberating through media, financial, and political circles.
From the start, the proposed deal came under a hail of criticism. That is in itself unsurprising. Murdoch is so unpopular that any acquisition would be roundly condemned. If he tried to buy a ham sandwich for lunch that would be condemned.
But isn’t this a debate over media concentration, not just Murdoch? Anti-media consolidation activists, of course, have trotted out all the usual concentration-of-power arguments. The media market has been called a monopoly, an oligopoly, and every other type of poly that can be found in Greek dictionaries. But these arguments have sounded even more hollow than usual. There’s little overlap between Dow Jones and Murdoch’s News Corporation. Dow Jones owns newspapers – mostly small ones and one really big one – but has no broadcast holdings. News Corporation owns TV stations but only one newspaper in the U.S.
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Tech Policy Weekly from the Technology Liberation Front is a weekly podcast about technology policy from TLF’s learned band of contributors. The shows’s panelists this week are Jerry Brito, Hance Haney, Tim Lee, Adam Thierer, and Mike Masnick of Techdirt.com. Topics include,
- The FCC releases its report on violence in the media
- Copyright and the economics of abundance
- Patent reform heats up in Congress with a new bill
There are several ways to listen to the TLF Podcast. You can press play on the player below to listen right now, or download the MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the podcast by clicking on the button for your preferred service. And do us a favor, Digg this podcast!
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I’ve spent the last 7 years closely monitoring the ongoing debate over media ownership in this country and what I find most intriguing about it is the inherent schizophrenia of the media criticism emanating from the political Left. That is, although we find ourselves in the midst of unprecedented explosion of media options and diversity, critics on the Left are still spinning gloom-and-doom stories about our modern media environment and the state of deliberative democracy. But they are doing so from two radically different perspectives.
This is the subject of a new article of mine that appears in the latest issue of the City Journal entitled “The Media Cornucopia.” In the essay I note that:
This media cornucopia is a wonderful development for a free society–or so you’d think. But today’s media universe has fierce detractors, and nowhere more vehemently than on the left. Their criticisms seem contradictory. Some, such as Democratic congressman Dennis Kucinich, contend that real media choices, information sources included, remain scarce, hindering citizens from fully participating in a deliberative democracy. Others argue that we have too many media choices, making it hard to share common thoughts or feelings; democracy, community itself, again loses out. Both liberal views get the story disastrously wrong. If either prevails, what’s shaping up to be America’s Golden Age of media could be over soon.
I go on to describe these two competing schools of Leftist media criticism, which I label the “scarcity-obsessed” critics versus the “information-overload” critics. I discuss the views of the various theorists who occupy each camp of thinking and explain how they have quite successfully used these competing theories of media criticism to spin reality out of the political dialogue about these issues. In the end, I conclude that: “What unifies the two schools of leftist media criticism, beneath their apparent opposition, is pure elitism. … Both liberal groups would love to put their thumbs on the scale and tilt the media in their preferred direction.”
Anyway, if you are interested in reading the entire essay, the folks at the City Journal have posted it on their site here.
Tech Policy Weekly from the Technology Liberation Front is a weekly podcast about technology policy from TLF’s learned band of contributors. The shows’s panelists this week are Jerry Brito, James Gattuso, Tim Lee, Adam Thierer, and Ryan Paul of Ars Technica. Topics include,
- More states governments defy congress and reject REAL ID
- Won’t someone please think of the children?!
- the FTC’s new report on marketing violence to children
- the Child Online Protection Act
- and the .xxx domain is rejected
- How the net neutrality debate is bleeding into spectrum auctions and other quick bits
There are several ways to listen to the TLF Podcast. You can press play on the player below to listen right now, or download the MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the podcast by clicking on the button for your preferred service. And do us a favor, Digg this podcast!
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The proposed XM-Sirius merger continues to generate intense debate here in Washington. Broadcasters are aggressively pushing regulators to spike the deal, calling the proposed merger a “monopoly.” As I pointed out in my earlier essay on this, I just can’t buy that argument. I just don’t understand how anyone can honestly believe that satellite radio, terrestrial radio and digital music are not in fierce competition for our ears.
I recently stumbled upon two good essays that make the same point. One is by my former PFF colleague Randy May, who is now the president of the Free State Foundation. In his article, “Thinking ‘Siriusly’ About Satellite Radio Competition,” Randy argues that “the notion that satellite radio constitutes a discrete market for purposes of assessing the merger’s competitive impact seems problematical–and to defy common sense.”
Tim Farrar of TMK Associates agrees. In a new paper entitled “The Competitive Landscape for Satellite Radio,” Farrar argues that “the potential alternatives to satellite radio are, in essence, those technologies which provide (either live or recorded) in-vehicle audio content (i.e. talk, music, sports and information services such as news, traffic and weather).” He continues:
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WASHINGTON, March 13, 2007 – The Electronic Frontier Foundation on Tuesday released a paper about the entertainment industry’s move to take copyright controls global.
The report is the result of EFF’s participation in a closed-door session of the Digital Video Broadcasting Project (DVB), the predominant global standard for digital television. (America uses a different digital standard that supports high-definition.)
EFF’s report documents the extent to which the DVB consortium has signaled its assent to copyright control technology. EFF called these a series of “unparalleled restrictions” on consumers’ rights to enjoy lawful digital content. These include “enforcing severe home recording and copying limitation,” “imposing controls on where you watch a program” and “dictating how you get to share shows with your own family,” according to EFF.
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Tech Policy Weekly from the Technology Liberation Front is a weekly podcast about technology policy from TLF’s learned band of contributors. The shows’s panelists this week are Jerry Brito, Tim Lee, Adam Thierer, and Braden Cox. Topics include,
- Top Wikipedia editor “Essjay” is revealed as a fraud
- States are pushing age verification mandates for social networking sitesl
- Do first responders really need more spectrum?
There are several ways to listen to the TLF Podcast. You can press play on the player below to listen right now, or download the MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the podcast by clicking on the button for your preferred service. And do us a favor, Digg this podcast!
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Last Friday, France’s Constitutional Court approved a law cracking down on violence — well, at least documenting it. According to IDG News Service, the new law “criminalized the filming or broadcasting of acts of violence by people other than professional journalists.”
The law was — apparently — spurred by disturbing stories of people being assaulted randomly solely for the purpose of recording it for entertainment value (a practice known as “happy slapping.”) But the legislation’s reach goes far beyond that — broadly criminalizing the filming of violence by eyewitnesses.
In an unfortunate irony, the decision approving the law was published on the anniversary of the amateur videotaping of the beating of Rodney King by LAPD officers in 1991. Unless the cameraman were a professional journalist, such recording would now be illegal in the French Republic. The penalty, according to IDG: up to five years in prison, “potentially a harsher sentence than that for the committing the violent act” itself.
It gets worse. Since professional journalists are exempted from the ban, the government has “proposed a certification system for Web sites, blog hosters, mobile-phone operators and Internet service providers, identifying them as government-approved sources of information if they adhere to certain rules.”
No word yet on the criteria to be used to get France’s approval to report news.
(Thanks to Declan McCullough for the heads up on this.)
Today’s Wall Street Journal profiles ($) Free Press, a media activist group that opposes loosening ownership rules for broadcast stations. As the Journal reports, the group has been wildly successful in its drive to block further consolidation in local markets, organizing thousands to protest and contact the government.
Free Press’s stated concerns are “diversity of viewpoints and coverage of local issues.” But no surprise, there’s more than a bit of media elitism at work, too.
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.