Great job, Dana, and good critical thinking! Yours is the best paper I have graded so far. Please read the attachment and let me know if you have any questions.
You did a great job on this. Please review the notes below and the rubric parameters. This assignment’s main purpose was to lead students to see the ‘big picture’ of the state of political media coverage in the USA today. Our forefathers recognized the importance of a well informed populace who can vote intelligently on issues affecting the country. Thomas Jefferson said, ". . . whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that, whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them right." He also said, "The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure." --Thomas Jefferson to Lafayette, 1823. ME 15:491 and "The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them." --Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, 1787 and "Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press, nor that be limited without danger of losing it." --Thomas Jefferson to John Jay, 1786.
When only 5 huge corporations own most of the media, they are not interested in the common good or guarding our freedom. Corporations are interested in profit, ratings and entertaining the public. Hard news is rather boring to the general public (like C-Span) so most of what we see on TV and hear on the radio is entertaining or sensational news. There is also corporate bias in the news and contrary to common belief (or propaganda) the bias is to the right not the left.
Media Scholar Bob McChesney calls the 1996 Tele-Com Act one of the most anti-democratic pieces of legislation passed in the 20th century. Here is a summary of what the 1996 Tele-Com Act changed:
- Lifted
the limit on how many radio stations one company could own. The
cap had been set at 40 stations. It made possible the creation of radio
giants like Clear Channel, with more than 1,200 stations, and led to a
substantial drop in the number of minority station owners, homogenization
of play lists, and less local news.
- Lifted from 12 the number of
local TV stations any one corporation could own, and expanded the limit on
audience reach. One company had been allowed to own stations that reached
up to a quarter of U.S. TV households. The Act raised that national cap to
35 percent. These changes spurred
huge media mergers and greatly increased media concentration. Together, just
five companies – Viacom, the parent of CBS, Disney, owner of ABC, News
Corp, NBC and AOL, owner of Time Warner, now control 75 percent of all
prime-time viewing.
- The Act deregulated cable rates. Between 1996
and 2003, those rates have
skyrocketed, increasing by nearly 50 percent.
- The Act permitted the FCC to ease
cable-broadcast cross-ownership rules. As cable systems increased the number of
channels, the broadcast networks aggressively expanded their ownership of
cable networks with the largest audiences. Ninety percent of the top 50 cable stations are owned by the same
parent companies that own the broadcast networks, challenging the notion
that cable is any real source of competition.
- The Act gave broadcasters, for free, valuable digital TV
licenses that could have brought in
up to $70 billion to the federal treasury if they had been auctioned
off. Broadcasters, who claimed they deserved these free licenses
because they serve the public, have
largely ignored their public interest obligations, failing to provide
substantive local news and public affairs reporting and coverage of
congressional, local and state elections.
- The Act reduced
broadcasters’ accountability to the public by extending the term of a
broadcast license from five to eight years, and made it more
difficult for citizens to challenge those license renewals.
The consequences from the
1996 Tele-Com Act have been far reaching and continue to impact the American
public, as is documented well in a Common Cause report entitled “The Fallout from the 1996 Telecommunication Act.”
One of the consequences of the 1996 Tele-Com Act has been the reduction in female and minority ownership of media,
which has also resulted in a decrease in women’s and minority voices in news
coverage. . It has also greatly increased profit motivation in news reporting
that is sometimes frivolous (such as celebrity lives) yet of interest to the
general public.
One
more important outcome of the Clinton administration’s passage of the 1996
Tele-Com Act has been the ongoing relationship between the telecom industry and
the Democrats. According to the Center for Public Integrity, from 1998-2004 the Democrats received over $82 million
from the telecom industry and the Republicans just over $63 million.
In the same way that Clinton’s support of NAFTA, the war in Iraq, and welfare reform have been a detriment to
working people, media
deregulation under Clinton has only benefited big business. Clinton is now
sorry that this happened.
Sorry
it took me so long to get all of these graded but it has been a very busy
semester and this is a time consuming grading job. The state of media in our
country is adversely affecting our democracy and it is important that we all
understand this. Let me know if you have any questions about the assignment.
:-)
I
gave you a few extra points that were hard to differentiate in the rubric.
It is a pleasure having you in the class and I hope you have
learned a lot in this class!
Dr. B.
Dr. B.
You are obviously interested in
learning the truth but have some confusion that can possibly be due to listening
to FOX news. Here are some studies about various news sources that show without
exception that FOX is the least reliable source.
Fox
Acknowledges Its "Hard Right Turn"
Fox News
Viewers Know Less Than People Who Don't Watch Any News: Study
Fox:
The Liars' Network
Study: Fox News
Viewers Misunderstand Issues More than Others
How Roger
Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory
PBS
Most Trusted News Source
- http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/PPP_Release_National_0119930.pdf
The Science of Fox News:
Why Its Viewers are the Most Misinformed
Fox News
Viewers Uninformed, NPR Listeners Not, Poll Suggests
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2011/11/21/fox-news-viewers-uninformed-npr-listeners-not-poll-suggests/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2011/11/21/fox-news-viewers-uninformed-npr-listeners-not-poll-suggests/
Some News Leaves People Knowing Less http://publicmind.fdu.edu/2011/knowless/
Study: Fox
News Viewers Have an IQ 20 Points Below US Average
Study:
Watching Fox News Makes You Less Informed Than Watching No News
By
Michael Kelley This post originally appeared in Business Insider on May 22, 2012.
4th Annual TV News Trust Poll
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