Garage Sale on Freedom of the Press

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin wants to give away local ownership of local broadcast stations to newspaper chains to help their cash flow:

Click to read The Daily Show

The commission should modify only one of the four rules under review — the one that bars ownership of both a newspaper and a broadcast TV or radio station in a single market. And the rule should be modified only for the largest markets.

Marty Kaplan at the Huffington Post has summed up this outrage against the American people better than I could. Please read his article, especially what he says about newspapers being the "white boys' club." I love this guy.

Click to read FCC at Work

The public has given away, for free, its airwaves, to stations that generally do a dreadful job covering politics in their news programming, but that reap big bucks from political candidates, who in turn get the billions they spend on political ads from the public, and now the public is being asked to cut the newspaper industry in on that extortion racket in order to save democracy.
I am tired of the wholesale giveaways to big media, big oil, big timber and corporate America. Yet, if you oppose anything being done by the current administration, you are automatically labeled as "unAmerican." When we stop allowing our rights to be undermined in the name of "democracy?"