In the media dungeon

The Center for Public Integrity has a stunning study out on the concentration of ownership in telecommunications. The even more stunning news is that the Federal Communications Commission, which theoretically represents you and me, is about to make all of it even worse.

And behind this betrayal of the public trust is nothing but rotten, old-fashioned corruption. It's the old free-trip-to-Vegas ploy, on a grand scale.

The Public Integrity people examined the travel records of FCC employees and found that they have accepted 2,500 trips, costing nearly $2.8 million over the past eight years, paid for by the telecommunications and broadcast industries, which are theoretically "regulated" by the FCC.

The industry-paid travel is on top of about $2 million a year in official travel paid for by taxpayers.

According to the center, FCC commissioners and agency staffers attended hundreds of conventions, conferences and other events all over the world, including Paris, Hong Kong and Rio de Janeiro.

They were put up at luxury hotels such as the Bellagio in Las Vegas and ferried about by limo. Vegas was the top destination (330 trips), New Orleans second with 173, then New York at 102 and London with 98 trips.

The FCC is what is known in government circles as a "captive agency." It has been captured by the industry it is supposed to regulate. Those who work at captive agencies come to identify with their industry and believe that their function is to service it, not regulate it.

The center, www.publici.org, also found that the FCC increasingly relies on industry-generated data to justify sweeping deregulation proposals. Great -- it doesn't even have its own numbers.

FCC Chairman Michael Powell is about to pass yet another giveaway to the country's biggest media conglomerates. There will be another enormous wave of consolidation.

On Monday, the FCC will vote to end long-established rules on multiple ownership.

The big players are Rupert Murdoch's News Corp./Fox, General Electric/NBC, Viacom/CBS, Disney/ABC and the Tribune Corp.

You will notice that television is not giving this story, with its enormous impact, any coverage at all, and many newspapers have done no better. (William Safire of The New York Times is a noble exception.)

Neil Hickey reports in The Gathering Storm Over Media Ownership that at public hearings all over the country, there has been a huge outpouring of public concern and anxiety about what is happening.

More and more people are speaking out, and the FCC's public reaction counts are completely negative. Yet it goes right on doing it, as though the citizens are nothing.

You can register your protest before Monday by going to www.mediareform.net, or phoning or faxing the agency. But why should you bother, especially if they're not going to pay attention anyway?

Many of the stations you listen to will not break into their programming to tell you if a tornado is headed directly for your town, or to warn you if there's a flash flood on the west side or that a toxic chemical truck has turned over near you.

You think it's a local station because a voice with your local regional accent announces the county fair attractions for next weekend and such. But that voice is an actress in Los Angeles. She reads the announcement there, and then it is inserted digitally into the programming, which is the same across the country -- generic rock, oldies, country, whatever.

When you get this degree of concentration in the news media, the idea of a free press becomes a joke.

Liberals and conservatives alike have a common interest in preventing the huge media conglomerates from getting even bigger. We must keep independent voices alive.

Call your congressperson; even at captive agencies, when the pols who write the budgets speak, the agencies listen. And the pols listen when the people get stirred up enough.

Let's see a little citizenly responsibility from all you patriots out there. You need to do more than sing, "I'm proud to be an American" to keep this country free.

I rarely, if ever, agree with Ms. Ivins, but in this case I'll make an exception. Concentration of the media is one of the first things a dictatorship does. Notable examples include Uncle Joe's USSR, Crazy Adolf's Nazi Germany, Inscrutable Mao's China, and, of course, Crime Family Boss Saddam's Iraq. We do not want to head down that path, ever.

We must be as vigilant about the 1st Amendment, and the ability to disseminate contrarian and opposing views, as we are about the 2nd.

Molly would be silent if talk radio was all-NPR. They can't handle debate, they can't handle competition, they can't handle exposure, they can't handle Americans being informed and having free choice.

Not one TV station or newspapers covers the daily CENTCOM releases - detailed, lengthy reports of our progress across Iraq.

For the left, diversity is skin-deep. They try to silence every voice but their own - in schools, courtrooms, news and entertainment.

Molly, girl, you want a fight. You'll get a fight. For much of America - facts, NOT lies repeated often, or loudly or everywhere - but truth still matters. Your socialist Utopian dreams - anti-God, anti-family, anti-tradition, anti-truth are ANTI- AMERICAN.

Check out Rush's site for his take on this for some balance. I quit reading my local newspaper because Molly is one of their favorite syndicated columnists. The deregulation was a boon to AM/talk radio. What Molly really means is that she doesn't want conservative voices all over tv.

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