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FCC removes broadcast TV ownership cap, allowing a single owner to reach more than thirty-nine per cent of US households. {NYT 6 August}
Broadcast media consolidation in the former United States, beginning in earnest in 1996, hath proven a disaster — save, that is, for the enrichment of a select coterie of corporate vampires and ambitious conmen. Untold thousands of livelihoods have been extinguished, programming hath degenerated into a homogenised uniformity across virtually every channel and station, and creativity hath been squelched. One must also, if only in passing, acknowledge the media's complicity in cultivating the very conditions that enabled this most corrupt of tyrants and charlatans to ascend to power. This is not even scratching the surface, and I am not trying, within the confines of a single blog post, to enumerate all the ways in which media consolidation hath been a cancer upon the republic and the world at large. Anyone possessed of eyes to see and ears to hear apprehends this truth, albeit our number is steadily decreasing.
Whilst I certainly am not in favour of the FCC’s actions, I am uncertain whether further consolidation shall prove materially consequential in the long term — though it bears noting that FCC Chairman Brendan Carr hath made it a pointed goal of his tenure to grant broadcast affiliates greater latitude to ‘pre-empt or refuse to air national programming that does not fit their communities’ values’ (and, ask yourselves, why this man is putting communities before individuals? Sounds suspiciously collectivist to me, but another rant for another day). The real damage hath already been wrought — free and independent media stand effectively muted, and the ‘ruling classes’ (for lack of a more precise term) have the populace exactly where they want it: dumbed down, perpetually embroiled in mutual hostility, and distracted by a circus clown playing dictator (a creature whose presidency would never have been conceivable without the selfsame media apparatus he so routinely disparages). All the while as the earth is burnt to its core.
What y’all voted for, #Murica.
πͺπ #QueSeraSera π ¨ π
