Critics: Local News, Culture May Fade Away

June 2, 2003 — -- Your daily media fix might continue for years to come, but critics fear there soon might be a subtle, disturbing change of tune.

It might start with a song playing as the clock radio goes off, followed by a bit of innocuous DJ patter. Tuning in a local TV channel over breakfast, you might see someone touting a local concert by the same song's artist. Later, on another channel, you might see the same personality with the same message. The newspaper might have a similar take. And a billboard on the way to work might advertise the artist's show or album.

A simple case of local competitors trying to stay hip? Not necessarily.

Critics fear the worst from a 3-2 vote of the Republican-controlled Federal Communications Commission today to relax decades-old rules restricting media ownership. The decision adopts a series of changes favored by media companies that will allow them, among other things, to own multiple media outlets in the same market.

That sets up a nightmare scenario that some fear in the future: A world where "rival" local TV stations and newspapers may not really be rivals, and the local media may not really be totally local either.

"The same company that owned the radio station and newspaper also owned these [TV] stations," the billboard and the concert venue, said John Nichols, co-founder of Free Press, a media reform network protesting the rules changes, describing a worst-case scenario.

"Nobody local — nobody — said this [song's artist] sounds like an interesting person that people should hear about," Nichols added. "It was a marketing decision made by someone in a distant office, by someone who may have never set foot in the community."

Nichols — co-author of Our Media, Not Theirs: The Democratic Struggle Against Corporate Media and editor of The Capital Times newspaper in Madison, Wis. — envisions a similar scenario for news consumers, who could spend a day scanning radio, television, newspaper and Internet outlets for local news developments and only get coverage controlled by a single unified newsroom.