Communications and Technology Subcommittee Discusses Media Ownership in the 21st Century

The Communications and Technology Subcommittee, chaired by Rep Greg Walden (R-OR), held a hearing to assess the state of media ownership, and the rules that govern it, in the digital age.

Members discussed the Federal Communications Commission’s inaction on the statutorily required 2010 quadrennial review of the media ownership rules, and the commission’s decision to forge ahead with new rules on joint sales agreements (JSAs) and other media ownership changes without the completed quadrennial review.

“Our laws need to reflect the reality of the world we live in today, not the world of the Ford administration,” said Chairman Walden. “As Americans’ habits have changed, so too should the way we look at local media. We live in a competitive landscape where increasingly we cherry-pick articles; we scroll through feeds and aggregators; we have multiple national news programming options, and we DVR almost everything to time-shift the programming we love. It’s a different world, why don’t our media laws reflect these changes?"

David Bank, Managing Director of Global Media Equity Research at RBC Capital Markets, added, “Much is made of the fact that the current regulatory framework for media ownership dates back to 1975. The current regulatory framework was constructed in a media ecosystem that basically didn’t include the Internet. While it may have contemplated a broad PC based Internet consumption environment, it certainly didn’t contemplate a mobile application based ecosystem.”