By: E&P Staff The Senate vote to restore a stricter prohibition on same-market common ownership of a newspaper and a broadcast station is "incomprehensible," Newspaper Association of America (NAA) President and CEO John F. Sturm said Friday.
"The United States Senate has voted to re-impose a 1975 regulation on newspapers as if the largest explosion of media choice in the history of the world had never happened," Sturm said in a statement. "It is incomprehensible that Congress would shackle local newspapers -- and only newspapers -- with a ban that fits the 8-track era, but not the I-Pod world we live in."
The Senate's "resolution of disapproval," sponsored by Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., and 26 other senators, is intended to rescind the changes to the 1975 media cross-ownership ban approved by a partisan vote of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) last December.
Under those changes, newspapers in the top 20 markets would be permitted to own either one TV station or one radio outlet, neither of which can be the top-rated station.
"Every local media ownership rule passed in the '70s has been relaxed or
eliminated by the FCC over the past 30 years except for the ban on the
common ownership of a newspaper and broadcast station in the same market," Sturm said. "At long last, an FCC decision last December provided modest relief which it limited to only the top 20 markets. ... In addition to apparently missing the dramatic change in the way consumers receive news and information, the vote ignores the well-established benefits that cross-ownership brings to local communities."
Sturm added that FCC studies show that newspaper ownership of broadcast stations "invariably results in more and better local news and information."
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