The proposal to change the FCC's media ownership regulations "may be summarized as a plan to let the bigger fish eat more of the smaller fish," the New York Times Paul Krugman writes. Krugman warns of the danger of quid pro quos between the administration and big media.
"Imagine a TV news executive considering whether to run a major story that might damage the Bush administration -- say, a follow-up on Senator Bob Graham's charge that a Congressional report on Sept. 11 has been kept classified because it would raise embarrassing questions about the administration's performance. Surely it would occur to that executive that the administration could punish any network running that story. Meanwhile, both the formal rules and the codes of ethics that formerly prevented blatant partisanship are gone or ignored. ... We don't have censorship in this country; it's still possible to find different points of view. But we do have a system in which the major media companies have strong incentives to present the news in a way that pleases the party in power, and no incentive not to."