"More than half of Americans surveyed said it should be illegal for a company to own both a newspaper and a television station in the same market, a coalition of consumer and telecommunications advocacy groups said on Wednesday."

Now now fellow amerikans that's starting to smack of either communism or you're finally starting to grow brains.

However, it is rather a tad late considering that Big Brother has already made himself (legally) quite at home in every nook and cranny of your life and domain. The slop that has been pouring into your homes in the form of regurgitated government propaganda (in six flavors) and sold to the braindead as news has proved to be a diet of info-niblets and poisonous goop responsible for the disasterous state of mental health of the nation, on a par only with the waddling "patriotic" protoplasm cheering the junta on to the next bout of zionazi christofascist amerikan genocide.

Getting the thug to move out again will be the big problem not (finally) expressing your concern as to the legality of monoplies and privatisation of everything you once took as your-gawd help us- "inalienable" rights.

Best of luck!

Americans Oppose Media Market Concentration: Survey
Yes I am definitely opposed to such a concetration of ownership. That and we should get our secret government agencies [including military]out of the media altogether. We should guard against foreign ownership of our media. What we have now is something worse than the communist era Pravda.
Every news paper, radio station and television station I would like to see all independently owned. They should quit meddleing with the internet.
The mobsters running this place should all be tried for treason and have their citizenship revolked. And then stripped of their ill gotten wealth and shown the door.

This is why I am not a libertarian. Unrestrained free markets will squash democracy and people will lose the ability to respond flexibly in shaping their own society.
This is one of the great unreported issues of the times, because that monolithic media already exists. If we lose Democracy Now! and Common Dreams, then it's all over for freedom and empowerment for everyone.

Sure why not give more power to the new American propaganda minister Heir Rupert Murdoch.

The average voter is just too ignorant and uniformed to be able to discern the truth from the distorted jingoistic, racist, intolerant news being broadcast by Fox and Rush.

The redneck bigots, which includes most of America these days, will always gravitate to these Imus type shows for their lopsided news anyway.

So what's the difference if Murdoch owns the NY Post and Fox News, these corporate spin artists will get their pro war propaganda message out one way or another.

What we need is an educated electorate, which will automatically put a stop to these growing monopolies.

Getting back to the discussion pertaining to the difference between the Dems and the Repubs.

I guess Lincoln was correct, "…you can fool some of the people all of the time."

Talk about the definition of insanity.

These republican operatives are indeed very effective at distorting the truth especially those few posters on Common Dreams who keep spewing out their venom and exaggerating the facts regarding the position of Democrats.

It is not the Democratic Party that is moving to the right it is the country and the electorate that has become more conservative as voters get greedier as they do better financially.

It is ridiculous to say that the 1960 democrats were more liberal than they are today.

Southern democrats were very conservative and bigoted, the only reason they were democrats and not republicans was because the man who freed their slaves was a republican and at that time they could never belong to the party of Lincoln.

In fact the Civil Rights legislation that Kennedy was pushing for was unable to pass the democratic congress and did not come into law until after his assassination when it got the sympathy vote.

It is inaccurate and irresponsible to keep claiming that there is no difference between the two parties.

This is a republican war, which only keeps perpetuating itself with republican support.

With all they're admitted faults the democrats would never have come up with such a carefully calculated, deceptively dishonest, justification for war.

Continue to bang your heads against the wall, third party advocates, until you help to enable enough republicans so they can finish the job of dismantling our constitution and killing every innocent Muslim on the face of the planet. Just ask Rudy, "the only good Islamofascist Muslim……." You know the ending to this sentence.

While the democrats might not be the most liberal FDR types, they are certainly a million times more preferable than the warmongering republicans.

Lets not throw our votes away by supporting a third party, which will only get 1 or 2 percent of the votes, unless the Green Party can demonstrate through national polls that their candidate can actually win.

If you want to continue to have leaders like Bush/Cheney keep listening to the delusional republican mouthpieces that say that the dems are just as bad as the killers who are now in office.

They want to divide us, because if we vote for a liberal third party candidate, they know it will only help the republicans maintain their stranglehold on the executive branch and allow them to expand the war.

Kucinich will stand taller than Bill Clinton if we the people empower him.

re jim10040 6:45 am

"...they regularly get letters complaining how left wing they are."

maybe they plant those letters AS IF the public were writing them?

In Dallas Texas, there is Belo Broadcasting (http://www.belo.com/). They own the Dallas Morning News (only daily newspaper), and WFAA (popular radio & TV stations). They helped convince the FCC to drop that law in the first place. Funny thing is, they regularly get letters complaining about how left wing they are. I'm scared to meet the people who write them.

Democratize the media and direct people to CommonDreams and other non-corporate media, including print, radio, TV, and internet.

Start democratizing politics by having public funding of elections, proportional representation, and verifiable paper ballots.

Start democratizing the economy by breaking up large corporations, ending corporate welfare, getting corps out of politics, encouraging cooperatives and collectives, raising and indexing the minimum wage, ensuring full employment, shortening the work week.

This would be a good start!

"Fund new local media, new syndication and distribution organizations. Buy up gift certificates to your local arts and craft fairs for holiday gifts. Redirect your resources away from them and toward us."

I can't believe that average Americans are so slow-witted or lazy to realize that the greatest form of protest is boycott (ie) get off yours asses and switch channels to PBS or shut the set off. If Americans won't do that then they deserve the hegemony of media conglomeration

But how will the republican party retain its death-grip on America? No more propaganda? What will the republicans do?

Take back the public airwaves

Democracy-corrupting mainstreamn media (MSM) consolidation, via FCC regs and congress-passed statutes, was accelerating even previous to Bush II's first term, and the Dems never mounted any ardent arguments against this disastrous trend - even back into Clinton times.

On a host of constitutional and general policy issues, the Dem party has for years been moving rightward, arguably less-than, but certainly proportionately with, the GOP's far greater leaps in that direction - the direction of plutocracy, ologarchy, tryanny.

So that as of today, the centerline even for the Dems is so far to the right, it really makes no sense to talk about 'left Dems' at the national level. Both parties are effectively extreme rightwing power fonts in relation to historical constitutional interpretations of the functions and sources of government authority.

And altho there's no formally-objective centerline in US politics, we can adduce an historical centerline based on analysis of the Supreme Court's constitutional interpretation of congressional statutes and Executive power plays, over the past 200 yrs.

Even such a grossly generalized (historical) analysis reveals the extreme rightward shift of today's two major parties, no matter that the Dems are slightly less extreme in relation to the Repubs. The point is, the Dems are no longer different Enough.

What Daniel David and other Dem loyalists fail to acknowledge is that: Both major parties, today, are so extreme in relation to the historical political centerline as to be functionally indistinguishable from each other.

Both major parties have illicitly sold, from-within, the functions of what was, unarguably intended to be, a People's Government, to the highest private bidders (mostly, corporate interests.).

That most of our government's present policy problems, and American citizens'economic and social crises now flow from this sellout-from-within, isn't even an arguable point.

Dem apologists want us to believe that the present (unprecedented-in-degree) situation is merely "a mess."

But is it really just correctible 'mess' we are facing? Or is it, instead, the final stage of a slow-motion coup d'etat that has now reached its critical-mass/failsafe point? Out of which a rescue of our constitutional system is no longer viable from within a corruptly locked-down two party duopoly?

I think it is the latter -- and I am (and always have been) a moderate!

Metroeloise:

Your fabulous sentence, "Redirect your resources away from them and towards us," sums up an entire strategy of political resistance. This is an idea that can be built upon in myriad ways. I am coming to the conclusion that the a very effective form of resistance is economic in nature, as you suggest. The oligarchy will only start to sweat when we stop buying what they dish out: goods or ideas. And our hearts and minds will be transformed in the process of the checking out of the "grid"...This is, in a way, sort of what "The Fight Club" was about...except I don't know why that film had to focus on masculinity and violence.

The simple solution is not to watch it or read it. People can tell when they are being swayed.

This subject is one we must remember to blame Clinton for. He's not a stupid man, and you have to wonder what he was thinking.Maybe: I want to be a millionaire? His recent HOW DARE YOU outburst at a speech when questioned about 9/11, and his easily forgotten history of media deregulation,a lousy welfare reform program, NAFTA; huge huge mistakes~for our Democracy anyway. Hillary is running on being Mrs Bill Clinton~Ferget aboudit Lady~that was your FIRST mistake, and all because he likes chunky legs!Bill Clinton ushered in media consolidation, from which our country may never recover. Thanks Bill. No Thanks Hillary.

This is the trend however, you've had concentration everywhere. Insurance, banking, coffee. It's difficult sometimes to determine who owns what, rest assured the FCC is as bought and sold as both leading parties are, and the press has never been free.
Thank the FCC directly for any overage minutes you pay on your wireless phone or any other number of obscenity charges that subsidize corporate tyrannies over your ability to communicate. If you question these things, you're anti-American, a Communist, or just nuts. Fine. The problem is there's only a certain class of Americans who can freely publish, disseminate and communicate using optimum methods. The uber-corps run everything, you get your free web page that nobody sees. Nothing's changing, we'll still have a media endorsed baboon selected into office, no matter how many colorful varieties of alternative information are available (and most don't see or care to see, by design).

Yes! Restrict media ownership. And while we're about it, demand
media cease selecting who we're allowed to vote for. From last
night's debate you'd think we had only three from which to choose.

America wake up! You're being diddled into submission, into being led to the slaughter . . . You all get the picture. Too bad our congressional reps don't.

Between Hillary's senate voting record and her amassing more campaign money than any other presidential candidate EVER HAS (and one year to go before the election), the Republicans don't need to steal the 2008 election. The corporate paymasters may not get the 110% of what they asked for like they have under Bush, however you can count on Hillary delivering at least 99% to them.

I understand "it's a mess" being said of the Democratic Party. I also understand that no alternative to Republicans exists in the United States, and that Republicans will try much harder to steal the election in 2008 than they've ever tried before. This is why Democrats winning by 51% won't work. We need the country voting about 60% Democrat to overcome the shenanigans and then win by a hair after the theft attempts.

Daniel David, you've got it wrong. The Republicans didn't win the last two presidential elections, they stole them. And if they hadn't misjudged the level of voter anger, we would still have a Republican Congress. There's good reason for them looking so stunned after the 2006 election. Go read Greg Palast to see how they did it and how they will do it again in 2008.

If all the votes had been counted in 2006 we would have your huge Democratic majority and you would have the opportunity to see "the more things change, the more they stay the same". I think you're thinking of the Democratic party of the 60s. We don't have that now. There are three major voting caucuses, the Blue Dogs, who vote Republican (most of them changed their registration from Republican to Democrat), the DLC, who vote corporate, and the out-in-the-cold Progressives, who cave in far too often. And Raum Emmanuel was appointed chair of the DCCC by Pelosi to go out and guillotine progressives in the primaries. He's good at his job, ignoring the DCCC policy of hands off in primaries. It isn't a party, it's a mess.

Like I said, we wrote such noble stuff on web sites, and the major voting blocks DID NOT CARE what was written by the purists. They just elected Tweedle Dee to govern you, me, us, and them. (again)

[quote]Daniel David October 31st, 2007 1:45 pm -- Many people at CD think that only a third-party progressive movement can do everything they desire, not realizing that the ATTAINABLE goal is to merely roadblock some of the things they don't desire–a modestly doable thing with Democrats, lots and lots and lots of Democrats.[/quote]

Right!!! Lets transfer all the power to the corporate representatives who display different colors. Or, as Johnathan Swift might have observed, they open their eggs at the other end. Tweedle Dum will surely save us all from the depradations of Tweedle Dee.

I won't bother to quote the usual definition of insanity. Homer Simpson did it so much better when he climbed the pole to switch the red and blue wires over and over again with the same painful results each time.

Stop reading it. Write them to tell them and send in the cancellation notice. use the net to contact the advertisers. Buy local.
Refuse to reframe discussions as if any part of the lies is true. They Never Won those elections. They lie about everything. Democracy can work. Kucinich is a viable candidate. Bush&co have lied to us about the reasons for war and our children are being turned into murders and thieves. They are returning to us dead, injured, sick, and mad. They went for honorable reasons. Do it for them. But we are being lied to. And the media is the means.
Fund new local media, new syndication and distribution organizations. Buy up gift certificates to your local arts and craft fairs for holiday gifts. Redirect your resources away from them and toward us.

If you don't like right-tilted media owning everything in your market, or in your country, you might want to consider electing a left-wing government, complete with a Democratic president that appoints left-wing Supreme Court Justices.

Many people at CD think that only a third-party progressive movement can do everything they desire, not realizing that the ATTAINABLE goal is to merely roadblock some of the things they don't desire--a modestly doable thing with Democrats, lots and lots and lots of Democrats.

Fans of Dancing With The Stars were stunned last night (10/30) to learn that "fan voters" can do odd and stupid things en masse. Let's not wake up in mid-November 2008, staring at 4 more years of Republicans, wondering how it happened (again.) Gee, we wrote such noble stuff on web sites, and nobody in the major voting blocks even cared what we wrote, they just voted for the #@$&% Republicans again. It can happen, and it may happen over the mistaken objection of every progressive in the USA.

Since even the average citizen knows that diverse, small scale media ownership is essential to a democracy, why hasn't the DLC hasn't conducted extensive polling on this issue and used the results to undergrid reform legislation in congress?

I suspect the answer is: The DLC is not interested in democracy.

.

Arvy,

Well put.

"More than half of Americans surveyed said ..."

You polled the wrong constituents -- or, rather, you polled 'the people' who are no longer constituents at all, if they ever really did matter in the 'greatest democracy on earth.'

"The FCC should listen to the public ..."

They are listening to the public. That is to say they are listenting to the only 'public' that truly matters to the entire governing apparatus -- namely, the 'corporate persons' who are the actual constituents and sponsors of U.S. 'freedom and democracy' at home and throughout the empire.

Next time, don't be so silly. You don't conduct a poll amongst the sheep if you want to determine their 'manifest destiny' at the hands of the sheep herders.

But if the monopoly is ended, how can the right wing continue to control the population?

The solution to vertical monopoly in telecommunication is strict adherence to the Taft-Hartley Act.