According to a mail from MoveOn the call in effort has been terrific and the final decision probably won’t be made for a few weeks. That shouldn’t keep you from putting a call in to your Senators on this matter. Head over to MoveOn’s site if you’d like to brush up on talking points.
If you need even more incentive consider this excerpt linked by PR Watch.
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?)
SOURCE: Online Journalism Review, September 4, 2003
More web links related to this story are available at:
http://www.prwatch.org/spin/September_2003.html#1062648002
To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1062648002
And while you have your activism hat on, Common Cause sent out this alert;
The Bush Administration is threatening to veto legislation that would restore safeguards against further media consolidation. We need to tell President Bush to listen to the American people, not to media moguls. Sign the Common Cause Veto Threat Petition! Also, support the Common Cause S.1046 Co-Sponsor Campaign and learn more about media consolidation. [more]