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Comment by jmclnx | Hacker News Reader

This is what we get allowing mega-corporations control our media.

I hope the US brings back fairness doctrine. Or if not, force these companies and all their parent/subsidizes to own no more than 3 Media companies.

By media I mean: Radio, TV, Cable, Streaming, Movie Production and Social Media.

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The FCC's Fairness Doctrine only ever applied to broadcast radio and television, and was justified based on the limited supply of spectrum. It never applied to other types of media for which supply and distribution is effectively unlimited. Anyone can make a movie or build a new social media app. Traditional broadcast is kind of dying; younger people almost never consume OTA broadcast radio or TV.

Zero chance of that happening unfortunately. The current Supreme Court would consider restrictions on corporate media ownership a violation of the first amendment, much like restrictions against unlimited campaign donations and restrictions on discriminating against non-Christians.

Looks like the old "they're a private company, they can do what they want" chestnut is coming back around. Whoever could possibly have foreseen this?

> This is what we get allowing mega-corporations control our media.

What mega corporation is the Washington Post part of?

Amazon, yes?

I think people struggle with the fact that it's not a legally so. However, per the article, Bezos is exerting power over WP because Amazon lost contracts to Microsoft (due to WP being critical of Trump). Their balance sheets may not be aligned, but their interests are.

And if Bezos toes the line and does things that Trump likes, then Amazon may benefit.

Trump sees "friends" and "enemies" [0], and doesn't care about actual ownership of shares. "Bezos is a friend and sorted out that WaPo mess, so I'll cut him some slack and kill off that Amazon anti-trust thing" is something we can all picture Trump saying.

[0] Obviously I have no idea what he actually sees or thinks, but this picture seems to match his public pronouncements.

Bezos fully owns WaPo personally. It is not under Amazon

Apparently there are a lot of people confused about this, but no, Amazon does not have ownership over the Washington Post. Jeff Bezos bought it with his own personal funds using an LLC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos#The_Washington_Post

And surely there is no relation between Bezos and Amazon so the part about "This is what we get allowing mega-corporations control our media" is obviously false.

It is literally false in this case, yes. The corporation has no control over WaPo, even though the same individual has some control over both.

This is a practically useless distinction.

But a pedantically, technically accurate one, just on brand for this site!

The distinction is not wholly useless, since it provides a frame whereby we can interpret this as evidence that the corporate veil is fictive, and that the "evil corporation" problem is actually caused by evil individuals.

My instinct is that Evil Man theory is as simplistic (and wrong) as Great Man theory: there's probably some better explanation that this also provides evidence for, that I'm missing.

Some control?

> The corporation has no control over WaPo, even though the same individual has some control over both.

And I'm sure Jeff Bezos is so pure he'd never use his power over WaPo to help Amazon!/s

Jeff Bezos himself could be considered a mega-corporation.

We're at the point where the personal wealth of oligarchs such as him has begun eclipsing the wealth of all but the very largest corporations. His own personal wealth would rank him somewhere around 60th on the Fortune 500.

It puts him in the top half of countries, just below Croatia, by national net wealth.

The answer is not giving the government even more power to decide whether what is published is “fair”.

if the Fairness Doctrine was implemented for the Internet and you had a Democrat leaning political blog you would have to give equal time/space to MAGA narratives on your site. That's what you want?

If that's what it takes to get 50% of the US to not be forced fed only one side by dipshits. Yup.

I think if you are going to claim fair coverage, then yes. If you are going to openly say you are for one side or the other, then okay. Having a tag line like "fair and balanced" without the balance or being fair then no.

The fairness doctrine does not require equal time. It requires you to dedicate some amount of time to controversial topics, and then give some amount of time to opposing parties within those topics.

Which, if you're going to argue against someone's position, I'd think it best to get that position directly from them, rather than building a strawman to beat down.

Or you could do what Ezra Klein did a couple of days ago and get a mentally ummm not all there member of the other side and let them free associate the entire interview.

Either way, it's not compatible with the First Amendment. Come up with something else to try.

The Fairness Doctrine was never found incompatible with the First Amendment. It was removed by a politicized FCC. The topic was taken up by the Supreme Court and they did not find that it violated the constitution, quite the opposite actually.

When applied to broadcasters using licensed public resources under Federal jurisdiction, yes. When applied to privately-operated Internet sites that readers have to go out of their way to access, no.

Not just "no," or "Hell, no," but fuck no.

The biggest issue with US media is allowing for opinion to be mixed with news. Essentially everything is opnion, everything is biased in some way. If you look at the other side of the pond you have news outlets reporting news without stating opinion, and highlighting multiple view points. Then there are separate talkshows where people around a table discuss news and other actualities. Doesn’t mean there isn’t bias in the news outlets, because they can still choose not to report on something - but generally it is fairly in the middle.

Ownership limits are only effective in a pre cable / internet world. Now one media company located anywhere can be seen by customers everywhere. So what do you do? You can't have the government tell people what to watch. If you try to restrict a company to broadcast on only one channel e.g. radio / social media / streaming it's a clear violation of freedom of the press.

This is strikingly ignorant of how the fairness doctrine was used in practice historically, like for example Nixon using it to suppress dissent about the Vietnam War by threatening networks airing coverage he didn't like.

The predecessor law was used int the 1930s to close non English language radio stations in Chicago and FDR used it to threaten people criticizing the New Deal.

You could go on and on with examples of abuse by administrators of both parties. The fairness doctrine violated the first amendment and was garbage.

As an exercise, imagine applying it to a story about climate change. Now image Trump’s FCC gets to decide what is fair. Do you really want that?

It also, more importantly, basically required you to platform a crazy person to argue for a side if there was no rational or reasonable take for that side.

The fairness doctrine would be just as godawful as the Debate between Kent Hovind and Bill Nye. It only serves to legitimize crazy outliers.

The problem with Fox News is not that they don't have the fairness doctrine, the problem is that your average american has so little media literacy that they can't recognize that Fox News is absolute horseshit, and that a company that has multiple times had to admit to a judge that they willfully lie to their audience should not be trusted. Republicans love to bitch about how bad CNN is as a "liberal" media source but educate liberals do not watch CNN because they once asked a physicist if MH370 could have disappeared into a black hole, and other utterly insane and clearly not journalism things. OAN and Newsmax currently exist. There is no equivalent for "liberals". A bunch of extreme right wing youtubers were found to be paid by RT, ie literal Russian State Propaganda outlet, and none of them lost their audience. There isn't a communist state funded liberal equivalent.

But apparently most americans didn't learn how to evaluate a media source, like at all, which is weird because we spent a couple classes in the library learning exactly that, along with learning how to use boolean operators to better search google for example. We were even tested on it.

But I guess all the kids who thought english class was worthless didn't pay attention, and now believe "Truth of media" === "How much it confirms my biases"

The funny thing about Fox News to me is that it’s such a bogey man in some crowds, but they only get about 3 million viewers on their best days.

The primary benefit of taxing the shit out of billionaires is not actually the revenue it produces, but the fact that it means that we don't have billionaires.

"People with more money than God own and influence media" has historically not been a recipe for social stability.

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