Saturday, December 04, 2010

FCC Commish: "We Will "Fix" Radio, But Good!"

The Era of Big Government has just begun, no matter the election results.

A Bush-appointed FCC Commissioner, Copps, has a few ideas to "help" you hapless listeners. Excerpts from the article include these gems:

"If a station passes the Public Value Test, it of course keeps the license it has earned to use the people’s airwaves," Copps said.

...the FCC's Public Value Test would include seven areas ...

Increasing the human and financial resources going into news would be one way to benchmark progress. Producing more local civic affairs programming would be another.

Requiring information about what programs a station airs allows viewers to judge whether their local station should be subsidized with free spectrum privileges, Copps said

I propose that the FCC quickly determine the extent of its current authority to compel release of what interests are paying for this flood of anonymous political advertising

"Nowadays, when stations are so often owned by mega companies and absentee owners hundreds or even thousands of miles away—frequently by private equity firms totally unschooled in public interest media—we no longer ask licensees to take the public pulse. Diversity of programming suffers, minorities are ignored, and local self-expression becomes the exception..."

...the goal is more localism in our program diet, more local news and information, and a lot less streamed-in homogenization and monotonous nationalized music at the expense of local and regional talent.

All of that looks real good, assuming someone wants to run a not-for-profit radio station.

2 comments:

Al said...

"Public Value Test"

"Danger Will Robinson! Danger! Danger!"

OK, I thought ratings aka market share was what determined radio programming, not the government. We have seen what results when the public determines values these days & I don't want that over the airwaves.

Anonymous said...

Point of order - even though Copps is a Bush appointee, because the slot he took was a Democrat's slot, Bush had to take a 'Rat.