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The logic of thieves, and the impassioned histrionics of their victims.

"...a handful of major media companies, most prominently Walt Disney Co., Viacom, AOL Time Warner Inc., News Corp. and Clear Channel Communications Inc., already own the country's biggest online service; hundreds of television stations; more than 1,000 radio stations; three of the country's four national TV networks; and most of the largest U.S. movie and TV production studios, cable networks and magazines. These include CBS, ABC, Fox; Time, Fortune and People magazines; and MTV, HBO, CNN and ESPN."*

Never mind the consolidations of the last twenty years — media concentration is on the brink of a sudden acceleration (*Jonathan Krim in the Washington Post). More:

Over the next few months, a single federal agency will begin to fundamentally alter the nation's communications and mass-media landscape, rewriting a broad swath of rules that affect the choices consumers have for getting online and the variety of television and radio programming they watch and hear.

If all of the changes being reviewed by the Federal Communications Commission are enacted as proposed, major telecommunications and media corporations will be less regulated, and more free to grow, than at any time in decades.

[...] But analysts are increasingly convinced that, for the most part, the deregulatory agenda of Chairman Michael K. Powell will prevail, marking a definitive turn from the policies of the FCC during the Clinton administration. [...]

In an interview, Powell rejected the notion that he seeks mindless deregulation, or that the contemplated changes would necessarily shift the media and telecommunications balance in dramatic fashion.

"No industry is so fraught with impassioned histrionics as this one," he said. Congress requires the commission to review many of its rules every two years, Powell said, and to toss out those that cannot be justified as providing benefit.

Providing benefit, but to whom?

"This is public property we're talking about," said Copps [Michael J., one of two commission Democrats], speaking about the airwaves. The changes have "the potential to change media choices, for better or for worse, for years to come. And what I keep asking is, what if we make a mistake? How do you put the genie back in the bottle?"

The genie is the corporate concentration and control of public property and, by extension, the levers of public opinion.

If this deregulation isn't "mindless," as Chairman Michael Powell (son of Colin) asserts, what are the specifics of its purpose?

The motivation is clear enough. Astronomical profit aside, there is much to be gained from monolithic media across multiple outlets (television, radio, internet, telephony), namely, control. The existing concentration of media control has already damaged government to the extent that the Bush Junior administration views its job as consisting exclusively of media management (Michael Wolff in New York Magazine):

The Bush people likely see their singular job as managing media. They recognize that if you can’t manage media, then you have a failing presidency. That It’s the media, stupid. Good press, or at least a quiescent press, is the absolute goal.

This is achieved not by personal magnetism, as the Democrats have long presumed, or out of the existential fires of national drama and conflict, but by meticulous execution (people in the Bush administration often call this loyalty or discipline): maximum control over minimum information. The press is purely reactive: If you control its stimulus, you control it.

And if the press has a herd mentality already, let's reduce the size of the herd to control it even more easily. To do that, we need a majority of the FCC commissioners to push a deregulatory agenda — the logic of thieves.

Once again, theft by the corporate class is the overarching theme. Theft of the public airwaves and media competition. Theft of shareholder wealth and 401(k) assets by lying executives with political connections. Theft of oil and gas drilling rights in protected national lands. Theft of an entire war on "terrorism," and the meticulously planned theft of Central Asian resources. Theft of an election. All these things that rightly belong to citizens are being stolen by their so-called representatives — and a complacent monolithic media will not help matters at all.

Today Junior announces his economic "stimulus package." The anti-Robin Hood will not rest until all wealth — worldwide, by the looks of his foreign policy — trickles up, in defiance of gravity, into the hands of the few.

Because of the enormous complexities of these issues, even those who are paying close attention won't know what's really happening if there isn't an independent chorus of diversified voices from a press controlled by more than "a handful" of owner-masters. What Powell characterizes as "impassioned histrionics" is a reflection not of emotional disgust, but of rational outrage.

UPDATE: Rob Carlson points to the Center for Digital Democracy's feedback form where you can send your own comments to the FCC right here.

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