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>> is any amount of media regulation acceptable?

A little late to this thread but i'll take a shot.

For a country that supposedly has free press, broadcast media has always been highly regulated. Remember the "fairness dictine"? Was the rule for a long time, but it's gone now and it's hard to imagine it ever coming back.

Now, over the past several years, we have whittled at the onerous regulations that have dictated the number and kind of media outlets an entity is allowd to own. Is there really a reason to have such regulations? I don't think so. The only reason they are there is because, in the early years of broadcasting, people seemed to think it was a good idea, yet there could not have been any evidence at the time to support it, because it had never been tried.

The only regulation we need is licensing to allocate spectrum and protect established users, so when a broadcaster is set up to operate on a particular fewquency in a particular locale and a footprint is established for it's coverage area, nobody else can broadcast a signal that interferes with that.

And believe me, that kind of regulation gives the FCC plenty to do. In this area, a regional outfit bought one of the smaller local FM stations and moved it's transmitting antenna from one of the lower foothills to the highest nearby peak in the Coast Range mountains, ostensibly to provide coverage to Florence, a coastal town which, at the time, had no radio stations (this was about 20 years ago). The move was actually calculated to give them a little more than that. They already owned an AM and an FM in the Eugene market, and while the new station ID'd as being in Florence, their programming and advertising were clearly targeted to Eugene. The problem here is that the new location of the transmitter covers a very wide area, and essentially blocks use of an adjacent frequency anywhere else in Western and Central Oregon. The FCC goofed on this one, other broadcasters cried foul, but it was too late as it had been approved.

That case is interesting because it showed how a broadcaster could circumvent the multiple ownership restrictions that existed at the time, and in doing so cause needless waste of spectrum. Had the broadcaster been allowed to then own a second FM station in the Eugene market, they probably would have kept it in the foothills, and an adjacent channel would have been available for another broadcaster who might have wanted to actually locate in Florence or another nearby town.

Clear Channel now owns that station, along with Eugene's most powerful AM station (50 Kilowatt), three or four lesser FM stations that were similarly moved to higher elevations from the small farm towns they originally served, and the 1.6 Megawatt local NBC affiliate.

And I like it. In this area, before they started buying stations and making them more powerful, there were dead spots where you could get no FM radio at all, but if the FCC had been doing it's job with respect to frequency allocation, it could have been done more efficiently.

Dave in Eugene

>> is any amount of media regulation acceptable?

"Media regulation" here is simply the right to broadcast, not the content. To speak to the question, well, yes, of course media regulation is acceptable and necessary. This is so as long as the government has enforced its proclaimed right to limit and control what any individual can put into the electromagnetic spectrum that permeates free space, (including that free space that is over my supposedly private property).

As it is now, I cannot start my own radio station without leasing the right to use the electromagnetic space from the government. For any new entrants, the government's policy (except such regulation that is now being "whittled" away at)is to decide who gets space by auctioning it off to the highest bidder. But in the few large metro markets, one has to buy the right from someone else. Despite what some would claim, there is a real physical limit to the number of channels in any spectrum, thereby limiting the ability to transmit, communicate, etc.

Actually setting up and running a small radio transmission tower is not that expensive, but getting the right to do so is and will only continue to get more expensive (just as real estate does.) So deciding the who,how, and why someone gets greater rights than others should be of serious public concern. The extreme example to counter the supposition of no regulation is: would we accept that simply because someone has the ability to buy most all the rights to a market (a physical area) that we would then let them do so?

BTW IMHO - Although the FCC trend is worrisome, it does not seem to seriously impede fundamental ability to obtain broadcast rights to other channels (i.e. for now, there are quite enough channels available at a relatively low price, except in the major metro markets.) The immediate effect in my opinion is to allow an easy way for large media companies to further solidify and expand their holdings in important markets (mainly the lucrative large metros. This I am sure is the true 'motivation' behind the sudden interest by the FCC to deregulate.) The result for consumers will be greater homogenization of choices and more exposure to mass produced marketing campaigns.

The sad fact is that there are so many more important and interesting technological issues (e.g. WiFi standards) the FCC should be dealing with than this essentially useless 'deregulation.' Sad even more so because it is apparent the only reason they are discussing it is because it is of concern only to those looking for the opportunity to leverage and therby increase the value of their existing large media holdings a bit more. And so it is clear that those who decide what should be of concern to the American government are those willing to dump huge amounts of money into Washington to gain access to those with the power to do so. And so the cycle continues...