Doesn't matter.
They will NEVER win this mind over again.
You CAN'T REBUILD TRUST, folks!
Once that's lost, so is the relationship.
Sorry, Times.
"Plan Would Ease Limits on Media Owners" by STEPHEN LABATON
WASHINGTON, Oct. 17 — The head of the Federal Communications Commission has circulated an ambitious plan to relax the decades-old media ownership rules, including repealing a rule that forbids a company to own both a newspaper and a television or radio station in the same city.
Kevin J. Martin, chairman of the commission, wants to repeal the rule in the next two months — a plan that, if successful, would be a big victory for some executives of media conglomerates.
Among them are Samuel Zell, the Chicago investor who is seeking to complete a buyout of the Tribune Company, and Rupert Murdoch, who has lobbied against the rule for years so that he can continue controlling both The New York Post and a Fox television station in New York.
The proposal appears to have the support of a majority of the five commission members.
The deregulatory proposal is likely to put the agency once again at the center of a debate between the media companies, which view the restrictions as anachronistic, and civil rights, labor, religious and other groups that maintain the government has let media conglomerates grow too large.
As advertising increasingly migrates from newspapers to the Internet, the newspaper industry has undergone a wave of upheaval and consolidation.
[The BLOGS have WON!!!!!!]
That has put new pressure on regulators to loosen ownership rules. But deregulation in the media is difficult politically, because many Republican and Democratic lawmakers are concerned about news outlets in their districts being too tightly controlled by too few companies.
In recent months, industry executives had all but abandoned the hope that regulators would try to modify the ownership rules in the waning days of the Bush administration.
Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, said at a hearing on Wednesday called to examine the digital transition of the television industry, his voice rising:
“This is a big deal because we have way too much concentration of media ownership in the United States. If the chairman intends to do something by the end of the year then there will be a firestorm of protest and I’m going to be carrying the wood.”
Supporters of the changes say that the rules are outdated and that there is ample empirical evidence to support their repeal. A small number of media companies, including The New York Times Company, are able to own both a newspaper and a radio station in the same city because the cross-ownership restrictions, which went into effect in 1974, were not applied retroactively.
Lobbyists for broadcasters, newspapers and major media conglomerates provoked a wave of criticism from a broad coalition of opponents. Among them were the National Organization for Women, the National Rifle Association, the Parents Television Council and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
[Can't get a more diverse group than that, Americans.
Makes one wonder if the Zionist hold over the media -- the great unspeakable -- will be broken.]
The agency was flooded with nearly three million comments against changing the rules, the most it has ever received in a rule-making process.
[That's AMERICA!]
Mr. Martin has proposed to expedite the rule-making and hold a final vote in December.
[So they can CLOSE DOWN the society for '08, huh, when all the Globalist plans are to come to fruition?]
Media consolidation has provoked deep public skepticism in the past. Mr. Martin’s proposal to complete a relaxation of the rules in December would require procedural shortcuts, giving the public too little time to comment on the proposals and industry experts too little time to weigh their impact on news operations.
[In other words, RUSHING IT THROUGH IN SECRET, like EVERYTHING this government does!!!!]
