this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
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[–] oxjox@lemmy.ml 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is Bill Clinton's fault.

The [Telecommunications Act of 1996] dramatically reduced important Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations on cross ownership, and allowed giant corporations to buy up thousands of media outlets across the country, increasing their monopoly on the flow of information in the United States and around the world.

The bill, which was lobbied for in great numbers by the communications and media industry, was sadly a bipartisan misadventure – only 3 percent of Congress voted against the bill: five senators and 16 members of the House, including then-Rep. Bernie Sanders.

Rep. John Dingell (D-Michigan) “thanked God” for the bill that would “make this country the best served, the best educated and the most successful country … in all areas of communications.”

https://truthout.org/articles/democracy-in-peril-twenty-years-of-media-consolidation-under-the-telecommunications-act/

Critics have also claimed that the act has failed to enable the competition that was one of its stated goals. Instead, it may have inadvertently exacerbated the ongoing consolidation of the media marketplace that had commenced in the decades before the act's passage. The number of American major media content companies shrank from about fifty in 1983 to ten in 1996, and to just six in 2005. An FCC study found that the act led to a drastic decline in the number of radio station owners, even as the actual number of stations in the United States increased. This decline in owners and increase in stations has resulted in radio homogenization, in which local programming and content has been lost and content is repeated regardless of location. Activists and critics have cited similar effects in the television industry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996#Later_criticism