The Chairman Speaks

FCC Chairman Michael Powell, who has spearheaded efforts to abolish limits on media concentration, recently spoke to Newt Gingrich's Progress and Freedom Foundation and shared his thoughts with the Online Journalism Review. Thanks to the Internet, he says, "the problem in society is not concentration and scarcity [of information media] but actually abundance, fragmentation and hyper competition. There's so much of it the audience is getting fragmented across so many different media that they're very hard to reach and hold onto. When I was a kid, there were three networks. and if you had me you could hold me a while. My kids swing that remote control like it's a pistol, and two seconds into a show, if they are not entertained, you're gone. ... If you're an advertiser chasing my son, you're trying to chase him around this whole electronic sphere. It's because there's so much, because it's so fragmented." (And that's a problem?)