Michael Powell on C-SPAN - Corporate Tool

[KharmaTrain]

This post is from one with nearly 30 years in broadcasting. It makes me virtually sick every time I hear this man talk spewing so much disinformation of the status of corporate ownership in media...especially radio.

I've heard the argument many times over...first chirped by Viacom/CBS's Mel Karmazin...that the large corporations own such a small percentage of the "12,000 radio stations" in the country. Karmazin quoted to Congress that "my company only owns 8 radio signals out of 200 in New York". What Karmazin did was group his WFAN...50,000 watts that reaches an average daily audience of 2,000,000 people with that of the College of Brooklyn's 100 watt station.

On the national front, Powell uses this same line in defending Clear Channel (known in the industry as Cheap Channel...and a large BushCo. contributor) who owns 1,200 plus prime station across the country with thousands of light-bulb powered college and high school stations. Even worse, in this group are thousands of stations owned by religious predominately right-wing NON-PROFIT organizations that have had the rules written and bent in their favor in recent years so that the dial is now loaded with bible-thumpers and demogouges.

Being a non-Christian I find nothing on religious radio redeeming and question the special status these organizations get in the allocation and licensing of broadcast frequencies, but that's for another discussion.

Powell and his corporate cohorts continue to push for the lockdown on the lucrative conduits of "entertainment" from movies to television to radio to cable to video rental and so on to a few, very rich and powerful hands.

I've seen the devestation past deregulation has done to local radio. When the lights went out throughout the East, there were only a handful of "live/local" stations that were on the air...most were hooked up to satellites or automation systems...many communities had NO local information. In my area, where there used to be a dozen thriving local radio operations (not to mention the jobs that went along with them), today there's none. All are part of corporate jukeboxes...the type Mr. Powell advocates we need more of.

A lot of the push for this dereg is the way broadcasting is financed. Many of the large corporations are leveraged through their massive past acquisitions and need to show massive revenue increases to keep ahead of the bill collector. One favorite way of doing this is the continued buying of properties that drive up stock prices and also keep the license values of their other properties artificially high and out of reach, financially, of all but the deepest-pocketed competitor. The other favorite way is to take operations and "combine" them...replacing humans with computers and farming in "outside talent" (aka Rush, Hannity, O'Reilly and others). And that makes Mr. Rove quite happy.

The lack of this chairman's real open dialogue with the public (he met with corporate lobbyists over 1,000 times in the run-up to the last de-reg sham and only with 1 citizen's advocacy group)and his blatant disregard for public opinion (that forced Congress to put a hold on the current BushCo. giveaway) just demonstrates how corrupt this regime is.

Have a nice day...

[LittleApple81]

1. I just feel sick when I see all these liars spewing garbage

He said he was not part of the administration per se but a regulatory agency... He is part of the nepotism we have been willing to accept in government. A government that has totally sold out to the corporations.