>“It will open the door to pro-competitive combinations that will strengthen local voices,” he said, and “better serve local communities.”
How?
I'm not quite sure how the combination of a more consolidated industry and the removal of local studios results in stronger local voices.
Tax reform - less taxes
EPA - hired a guy who fought the EPA, authorized keystone pipeline immediately.
Betsy Devoss - privatizing stuff and slashing budgets
HUD - Ben Carson, neurosurgeon
Department of Energy - Rick Perry who didn't know what it does and wanted to close it, who isn't a scientist
And of course Ajit Pai, probably the best example of rollback of progress.
Jeff Sessions disappointed Trump when he recused himself.
You gotta understand... Trump's a fiscal conservative's dream. Short of Ron Paul no conservative would have the guts to sabotage the executive branch with crazy directors as much as Trump.
President Trump placed Ajit Pai as Chairman in 2017.
It happens all over the political spectrum to a degree, but the GOP and its supporters have really embraced it and have been using that kind of rhetoric for a long time (and it's worked very well for them in terms of framing and dominating debate): Consider talk radio, such as Limbaugh, which goes back to the 1980s or early 90s; Fox News hosts, such as O'Reilly and Hannity; and the Wall St Journal opinion pages. Look at the rhetoric used by Cheney and Rumsfeld in the Bush administration, or, for a specific example, the GOP congressman who yelled 'you lie' during an Obama State of the Union speech. Over-the-top, hyper-aggressive attacks on the other side is their common rhetorical tactic; they are demonstrations of aggression, for their supporters and for anyone who might disagree. (That's not meant to be partisan; I believe those are the facts and it would be false to say the politically correct thing, 'everyone does it equally':)
It's much broader than politics too. It's in reality TV, but by far the biggest example is Internet discussion boards. It's a continuing problem on HN, though my impression is that it's improved significantly here (thank goodness!). Certainly that predates Trump!
It's an obvious tactic in an argument: Act so aggressively and angrily that the other side is intimidated, and at worst no serious discussion is possible. It ends the discussion.
* Point: This War Will Destabilize The Entire Mideast Region And Set Off A Global Shockwave Of Anti-Americanism
* Counterpoint: No it won't. It just won't. None of that will happen. You're getting worked up over nothing. Everything is going to be fine. So just relax, okay? You're really overreacting.
https://www.theonion.com/this-war-will-destabilize-the-entir...
Oddly enough it is exactly like Google in a way, the ability to sustain a network depends on the ability to sell advertising which depends on viewership for pricing. And being unable to get viewership denies an ability to exist through advertising. So having a monopoly on advertising makes you the defacto monopoly on the viewership because it denies capital to a competitor to develop additional viewership.
Make no mistake this is a political move, and one that is right out of a fascist/authoritarian playbook.
Seattle's KOMO news crams all of these ridiculous political segments (including Clinton smear-pieces and other alt-right recruitment videos) into their 2-4am slots just to keep too many viewers from seeing them.
But I wonder if this might incidentally happen to be the right move for the government to make? The flow of information and news is very different today from the landscape that existed in the 1970s. Maybe letting investment flow into some of these businesses makes sense.
Hearing once voice will be more clear and therefore stronger.
And do you serve us better?
"Oh no. God, no."
The key word there is “possible”. Money makes it possible to better serve you. They just choose not to.
As for cost, we selected initial values based upon data from the Open Beta and other adjustments made to milestone rewards before launch. Among other things, we're looking at average per-player credit earn rates on a daily basis, and we'll be making constant adjustments to ensure that players have challenges that are compelling, rewarding, and of course attainable via gameplay.
We appreciate the candid feedback, and the passion the community has put forth around the current topics here on Reddit, our forums and across numerous social media outlets.
Our team will continue to make changes and monitor community feedback and update everyone as soon and as often as we can."
Quote from EA when asked why heroes took ridiculous playtime to unlock, skippable with microtransactions, for a $60 game.
"What we are doing will lead to more...
Freedom
Access
Competition
Quality"
Regardless of the logical content of the argument.
It's done on the Left as well, but Pai is especially egregious in his lack of steps of reasoning.
Anyway, this is just my take after a cursory glance. Happy to listen to other viewpoints.
It literally does the opposite
But as far as I can tell, there is nothing about newspapers that makes them a natural monopoly. Why should anyone regulate combinations in that area?
Very, very few regulations are designed with the sole purpose of dealing with natural monopoly. Most are there to prevent some monstrous or dystopian consequence of unfettered capitalism that we as a society have decided is undesirable.
Having a tiny group of wealthy oligarchs own all media, press, acceptable thought in an area is one of those horrifying dystopian consequences that we apply these regulations to prevent.
Be careful any time you see an analysis of media consolidation that ignores the reality on the ground -- the media's unique ability to define and shape public opinion. Such an analysis is either so purely academic as to be not relevant to any actual political or social discussion, hopelessly naive or, worse, willfully ignorant in service of a particular ideology.
When regulations aren’t designed to address identifiable market failure modes, like for example a natural monopoly or negative externality, they’re usually driven by vague public interest handwaving. Economic theory is hardly infallible, but it’s a lot better of a basis for law than that.
While I can't provide theory, in practice they certainly are. Every city has one or two papers of any significance; it's hard to name a new major newspaper that started in the last 50 years. In many places, the leading papers have combined for economic survival, but kept their editorial pages separate, for diversity of voices.
Maybe it's due to high barriers to entry? You need a printing press, distribution, and a reputation for reliability - the last probably being a newspaper's most valuable, irreplaceable asset.
The Internet provides more competition and lower barriers to entry, but I'll bet the leading Internet news source almost every town is the local newspaper(s).
Producing a newspaper of a certain number of pages of a certain quality requires the same amount of work, regardless of whether it is read by 10 people or 10 million, but your revenue will be proportional to readership; you have a small per-reader additional cost, to print or provide bandwidth, but it's largely a fixed cost, to research and write the articles.
I'm not sure how the internet helps or hurts. It will help in that you can start smaller on the internet, with a one or two person operation publishing infrequently, but when you try to scale up you'll run headlong into the "people don't pay for news online" problem.
In any case, if you want to run a "real" newspaper, you need a certain minimum number of subscribers to be viable, to hire enough people to research enough articles to provide enough information each day to really be considered a "newspaper". This, in turn, is where you could imagine unfair competition from monopolies. First, your larger newspapers will be able to undercut you, producing better news articles at lower cost per reader, if they have more readers. Second, a large enough conglomerate of regional newspapers can afford to run some at a loss. There are only so many available subscribers, and if you can deny your competitors enough to be viable, they'll also be running at a loss, and your deeper pockets will let you wait them out.
Not yet, but as local newspapers continue to lose readership to the internet, the will start consolidating and/or failing. After say 20 years of this, there will be only the big online national papers, NYT, WaPo and some others that serve a large niche. There will always be room for the smaller niche papers though.
http://streamingradioguide.com/licensee-list.php?showall=on&...
I’ve read the Wikipedia page a couple times now and still haven’t reverse engineered that labyrinth. Don’t read about mass media ownership in large doses; you’re likely to stroke out.
Given the Bain buyout and associated debt has spun iHeartMedia firmly around the drain for years, it’s a bit amusing to see Pai soften up the very regulations that made it a complicated deal in the first place. Sinclair 1, Clear Channel 0.
It's kind of unreasonable for regulators to be too harsh on consolidation in a shrinking market, what else are they going to do to survive?
freedom is slavery
ignorance is strength
. When a Republican politician accuses someone else of something, they're doing it themselves.
. When a Republican politician makes a claim on controversial legislation, the opposite of that claim is the truth.
You can claim this is partisan grumbling, or you can pay attention and realize this is far more true than anyone would want to believe.
Fixed that for you.