As expected, the FCC decided that one person or corporation may own wider and broader swaths of the media than ever before. Already lacking voices outside the mainstream, the big 6 television media owners are already moving to consolidate ownership. Forgive me if I sound like I am beating a dead horse, but I feel this is important: there can be no free press if that press is monopolized. Just as there is no real competition in the OS market because Microsoft controls 95% and dictates to everyone what they must do, so will it be with the media.

We own the airwaves, but politicians run it, and they’ve been bought. And the media, which buried the story except for a brief flurry the weekend before the closed-door FCC sessions (when it was too late), has again started burying the story. Only those who read carefully through business sections or search deliberately for the story will find it. What stories are appearing downplay the damage done, suggesting that Congress will be watchdog to untoward media sales (har!) and There’s Nothing Really to Worry About.

We’ve just lost a very important battle for our freedoms, which are based upon the free and fair dissemination of knowledge–and, ironically, because we are already deprived of said dissemination to the degree we are, most people are not even aware of it.

[exit public gloom mode]