Both Comcast & ATT should be broken up.
Telecom must not also control the news.
>> Telecom must not also control the news.
And this is the problem, not FOX.
Dangerously Intolerant Liberals Destroying Our Society = DILDOS
The longstanding policy in this country is that the government (FCC) does not dictate programming content. Comcast and AT&T legally own their cable and satellite networks and if they choose not to put OAN on their systems, it’s no business of the governments. If enough people want to see it, the cable and satellite providers will put it on, or they will lose customers to streaming or other services.
Free enterprise.
NEWS FLASH!The wire services in general, and the AP in particular, essentially created national news. As such they define it, and they control it.
It’s hard for us to get our heads around the difference that the telegraph (demo’d by Morse in 1844) made. People were awed at the new ability to receive from far-flung places reports of events within a day of their occurrence. We take it for granted, and we take the wire services for granted.
But think about it:
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.- Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776). . . and what is the AP “wire,” for example, but a continuous, unending, virtual meeting of the membership of the AP? And something similar could be said about any and all other wire services.The wire service was invented by 1848 to exploit the value, and minimize the expense, of telegraph bandwidth when the telegraph was new and bandwidth was expensive. The Sherman AntiTrust Act dates only to 1890, and by then the AP was definitely “too big to fail.” Even in 1945, when the AP lost an antitrust case, nobody could seriously think about abolishing the AP.
But that was before the revolution in digital communications which empowers the Internet. Now FR alone almost certainly uses more bandwidth than the AP did in 1945. There is absolutely nothing preventing the wire services (and esp. the AP) from losing a lollapalooza of an antitrust action.
Except for fear of the very propaganda power which it abuses.
The other factor is the Warren Court’s unanimous 1964 New York Times Co. v. Sullivan decision.
Sullivan limited the ability of government officials and judges to sue for libel. But absent the vote of Antonin Scalia, the Morrison v. Olson decision of the Rhenquist Court woulda been unanimous, too - but nobody now thinks that Morrison is good law. And guess what! Antonin Scalia called Sullivan bad law, too. He pointed out that prior to 1964 no court held that the First Amendment modified libel law. For the simple reason that the purpose of the entire Bill of Rights was to reassure the public that the Constitution did not reduce anyone’s rights, and it (including 1A) were crafted to achieve that purpose.
". . . libel can claim no talismanic immunity from constitutional limitations. It must be measured by standards that satisfy the First Amendment”is just a fig leaf Justice Brennan put in his Sullivan decision to cover the fact that he (and the entire Warren Court) was making it up. 1A was crafted not to touch libel (or pornography) law, and the Ninth Amendment (The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people) exists to preserve them.Blanket “freedom of the press” would have affected libel and pornography laws, but 1A refers to “the freedom . . . of the press. And the freedom of the press already existed and was limited by libel and pornography laws. Reducing those latter constraints on the press would have been controversial - and controversy (over the newly, and just barely, ratified Constitution) was precisely what the Federalists creating the Bill of Rights were trying to transcend.