Wednesday, July 02, 2008

FCC TV REREGULATION PUSH IS 'MISGUIDED'

Letter to the Editor, as published in TVNEWSDAY, Jan 1 2008

Editor: Washington’s war on broadcasting—and cable—is blatant and unconstitutional discrimination (“Martin Turns His Sights on Broadcasting,” Dec. 14, 2008).

The federal government’s Department of Defense established the Internet. Yet Internet content—and the prodigiously profitable businesses built upon it—are virtually unregulated.

Meanwhile, though it never built a single commercial broadcast transmitter or laid a mile of coaxial cable, the government asserts the right to micro-manage the businesses most beleaguered by Internet competition: broadcasting and cable TV.

The stock prices of most publicly traded companies in these industries have cratered in this increasingly hostile environment.

These misguided government policies threaten the survival of local radio and TV broadcasting, through which most Americans receive the bulk of their news and entertainment, and cable, the first real competition for the telephone oligopoly.

The policies also make a mockery of the First Amendment by empowering the FCC—an unelected five-member panel—to determine what Americans will be permitted to see and hear and to what extent and in what form individuals will be allowed to speak to their fellow citizens.

That self-serving politicians and special interest groups on both the left and the right are demanding even more government control over broadcasting and cable should alarm all who value a robust media marketplace and treasure the First Amendment.

Lee Spieckerman

SpieckermanMedia LLC
Dallas-Fort Worth

Copyright 2008 TV Newsday, Inc. All rights reserved.

This article can be found online at: http://www.tvnewsday.comhttp://www.tvnewsday.com/articles/2008/01/01/daily.1/.
Please visit http://www.tvnewsday.com/ for more on this and other breaking news concerning the TV broadcasting industry.




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