It's easy to argue that media options are more diverse than ever -- Americans can sit in their living room, turn on the digital cable set-top box and flip through 500 channels, or surf through a dozen news sites on the computer.
It's the argument big media companies and their supporters will be making Monday, when the Federal Communications Commission considers scrapping decades-old regulations that have kept one or two companies from dominating news and entertainment outlets in individual cities. The FCC, backed by an administration perceived as friendly to big business, likely will accept those arguments and agree to lift limits on media ownership.
According to opponents of deregulation, however, the key argument to make the change is false. The reality is, those 500 channels are owned by a handful of companies, opponents say. And once the ownership rules are lifted, those firms will buy and consolidate the few independent, profitable outlets remaining.
"We are proponents of the fact that technology can and will change the way people use media, but the revolution hasn't happened yet," said Chris Murray, legislative counsel for Consumers Union.
Although it's true anyone with a website can publish news, it's still the established media players, such as newspaper publishers, that attract the largest share of the online audience, Murray said. While it's also true that more people are using the Internet as their primary news source, the same handful of companies run those sites.
Consider the top ten online news networks. The top five -- MSNBC, CNN, Yahoo News, AOL News and The New York Times -- are owned by giant media corporations, according to the April Current Events & Global News Sites report published by Nielsen/NetRatings. Of the remaining five, three are run by the biggest newspaper chains in the United States.
As for cable, the expansion in channels has not resulted in a corresponding increase in the number of channel owners.
"If we look at measures of concentration in media markets, what we find is there's not the diversity that we thought," Murray said. "Yes, there are 500 channels on cable television, but five companies control the same market share that the three networks did in the 1970s."
The prospect of concentration of ownership has brought together strange bedfellows -- the National Rifle Association, the Catholic Conference, the Writers Guild of America, the National Organization for Women -- to oppose lifting the restrictions.
MoveOn.org, a civil rights advocacy group, espoused the same conclusion in a recent newspaper advertising campaign (PDF), which featured pictures of media mogul Rupert Murdoch under the banner, "This Man Wants to Control the News in America." The group claims that five companies -- Murdoch's News Corp., Disney, Viacom, GE and AOL Time Warner -- control 75 percent of the total U.S. television audience and 90 percent of the television news audience for broadcast and cable.
AOL Time Warner, meanwhile, also ranks as the second most heavily used Internet property, after Microsoft, whose MSNBC site is jointly owned by Microsoft and GE's NBC division.
Still, advocates of deregulation say that competition in the media business remains healthy.
Randolph May, senior fellow at the Progress & Freedom Foundation, a Washington, D.C., think tank that supports loosening of media ownership, says the industry would have to be "a lot more consolidated than the universe we have today" to raise legitimate antitrust concerns.
May said he believes the Internet has played a role in preventing a small number of media outlets from dominating news coverage, as more people are using the Net to supplement or replace television as a source of current events information.
A study commissioned by the FCC reached the same finding, concluding that consumers are increasingly using the Internet, along with cable TV, as a substitute for broadcast television in news and other areas. Deregulation proponents saw the data as further fodder for arguments that existing ownership caps are outdated.
"Now that we have all this media, we're in a position where we don't need to have the government dictate who can own media outlets," May said.
In a Thursday report, media analysts at JPMorgan predicted that FCC commissioners will approve the broad relaxation. The most significant changes are expected to be the loosening of rules that prevent companies from owning newspapers and television stations in the same market, and the end of a limit of on the number of stations a company can own nationally.
But no one's predicting unanimous support from the FCC's five commissioners. While the agency's three Republican-appointed commissioners, including FCC chairman Michael Powell, are expected to support the loosening, two Democratic commissioners, Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein, have allied more closely with those who believe deregulation will hamper the diversity of voices in major media.
