Media monopoly should not pass go anymore

My Friday post about the news business drew an interesting response from reader Richard Ingraham, who noted that huge media conglomerates are not just unwieldy and inflexible and thus unlikely to respond quickly enough to new societal and market conditions, but may also be the poster children for strengthened antitrust laws.  Ingraham wrote:  

“Lastly I would just say that we are reaping what we’ve sown. By not having any sort of public outcry while the FCC changed rules about how one organization can own more and more newspaper and other broadcasting organizations all in the same market we have allowed these huge media juggernauts to be created, who as you just admitted are too large to change fast enough to keep up with the times. Hmmmm… maybe if we had insisted on much smaller organizations and less consolidation of all our media, they would be quicker to adapt and we would all have been better off.”

I don’t think there’s much doubt that government enforcement of antitrust laws has been, shall we say, toothless in recent decades. The obscene binge of mergers and takeovers that characterized the Reagan years may have subsided, but the government’s mindset hasn’t seemed to change a lot – many markets remain dominated by organizations that have grown gargantuan from buying up their competitors, severely limiting the public’s choices and making it impossible for entrepreneurs to challenge them profitably. Clear Channel and Time Warner are just two that come to mind.

But the Zeitgeist is changing and it looks as if the Obama administration may try to restore the power of regulations meant to keep corporations from driving everyone else in their industries out of business or into their stables.

So what will this mean to news outlets? Well, it’s possible that if media conglomerates ended up having to divest themselves of all but one outlet in each market (so that in a particular city, they own either a newspaper or a broadcast station, but not both, which is how it used to be) they might not be able to find buyers for their least-profitable properties and would have to close them instead. Undoubtedly, some enfeebled newspapers would be among them.

If that proved to be the case, we’d probably end up in the short run with even fewer news outlets than we have now. But with the media giants reduced to normal-sized adversaries and community demand for news going unmet, the opportunity for entrepreneurs to step in and create new – maybe much better – small media companies would be both great and healthy.

I hope with all my heart that we don’t lose our grand old newspapers – we as a nation desperately need their news-gathering skills, integrity and reach. But the conglomerates that own many of them have already sacrificed some of the unique editorial voice, investigative drive and spirit of experimentation that made those papers grand in the first place. It’s time to loosen the big bullies’ hold on the media marketplace and give other initiatives and ideas a chance to thrive.