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TRIBUNE KEEPS FIGHTING TV, NEWSPAPER OWNERSHIP BAN
[SOURCE: Reuters, AUTHOR: Jeremy Pelofsky]
Tribune Co. keeps battling U.S. regulations that prevent it from owning a newspaper and a television or radio station in the same market even as its largest shareholder has asked the company to split its divisions or find a buyer. Tribune owns the Los Angeles Times newspaper and KTLA-TV, and has cross-media platforms in four other cities. Its ownership of the two lucrative properties in Los Angeles is a rare exception to the 1975 ban, but it will expire when the television station's broadcast license comes up for renewal later this year. Vincent Malcolm, general manager of KTLA-TV, said the explosion of Internet sites, cable television and other sources for local news renders the ban obsolete. Malcolm also said the depth of reporting at KTLA on community issues had improved by having the resources of a major metropolitan newspaper. "The L.A. Times has more reporters than any television station could afford especially in the case of KTLA," he said. Tribune has asked the FCC for a waiver for its common ownership in Los Angeles, either permanently or at least until the FCC decides on new limits. Consumer groups are unconvinced cross-ownership should be allowed. They say further consolidation in the media industry would snuff out independent voices and degrade local news. "The newspaper-TV combinations that result dominate the local market, raising concerns about undue economic concentration and inordinate influence over public opinion," said Mark Cooper, director of research at the Consumer Federation of America
http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID...

"UPDATING" MEDIA OWNERSHIP RULES -- IS THAT LIKE BOILING A FROG?
[SOURCE: Tales from the Sausage Factory, AUTHOR: Harold Feld]
[Commentary] It's an old cliche that it's easy to boil a frog. Don't drop the frog in the boiling water -- he'll just climb out. Drop him in the pot and raise the temperature a little at a time. Before he knows it, he'll be dead. We have that with media consolidation and the non-stop relaxation of the rules. But instead of calling it “boiling,” proponents of consolidation call it “updating.” This attempt to describe relaxing the ownership rules to allow more consolidation as “updating,” when the evidence shows that the last round of consolidation kicked off by the 1996 deregulation has been a disaster for the industry and a disaster for democracy, came up again at yesterday's media ownership hearings. An “update” means setting limits that make sense today. And the evidence is pretty clear that the current rules don't need to be relaxed to be “updated.”
http://www.wetmachine.com/totsf/item/609

JON STEWART AS SUBSTANTIVE AS NETWORK NEWS
[SOURCE: Indiana University press release]
Which would you think has more substantive news coverage -- traditional broadcast network newscasts or The Daily Show with Jon Stewart? Would you believe the answer is neither? Julia R. Fox, assistant professor of telecommunications at Indiana University isn't joking when she says the popular "fake news" program, which last week featured Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf as a guest, is just as substantive as network coverage. While much has been written in the media about The Daily Show's impact, Fox's study is the first scholarly effort to systematically examine how the comedy program compares to traditional television news as sources of political information. The study, "No Joke: A Comparison of Substance in The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Broadcast Network Television Coverage of the 2004 Presidential Election Campaign," will be published next summer by the Journal of Broadcast and Electronic Media, published by the Broadcast Education Association.
http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/4159.html

MEDIA TAKE CENTER STAGE IN FIGHT FOR VOTES
[SOURCE: Reuters, AUTHOR: Claudia Parsons]
Democrats call Fox the FAUX news channel. Republicans used to refer to CNN as Clinton network news. With U.S. elections a month away, TV viewers have been getting a steady diet of gloves-off politics that experts say serves both politicians and programs. It works especially well for cable television where anchors of news shows both real and imaginary rankle and rile in a way shunned by major networks more prone to balance opposing views.
http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=politicsNews&storyID...