The National Rifle Association’s “urgent bulletin” to its membership on the FCC’s upcoming media ownership rules revision unleashed a flood of petitions and complaints to the agency, at last count topping 100,000 – five or six times the number of public comments filed during the course of the rulemaking itself. The NRA’s bulletin is now online if you’d like to read the full pitch.
Don Schellhardt’s latest installment of Amendment One is also up, adding his voice to the still-growing chorus calling for Congressional involvement to stop Mikey Powell’s grand designs.
There has been some political maneuvering in Washington among Congresscritters speaking in opposition to more media consolidation, including the introduction of a bill to pre-empt/override any relaxation of the ownership cap on television stations, but it remains to be seen whether all this last-minute lobbying has any lasting momentum.
What got the state of the media to where it is today is in so many ways directly related to the Telecommunications Act of 1996. I find it hard to believe that Washington can address the structural problems with the media regulatory system without taking up the fundamental issue of reforming or repealing the Act itself. That’s like treating the symptoms and not the disease. And as things stand now, the political will to take that on doesn’t exist – Congress is still Big Media’s bitch.
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