Fewer Media Owners = Less Freedom

One of the primary requirements of the maintenance of a free democracy is a free and competitive press with many different owners (thus providing many different opinions). It is simply a fact that a problem cannot be fixed if the people are informed about it and able to get their views heard in the public forum. Unfortunately, although our society is becoming larger and more complicated, our media ownership is becoming smaller and the ideas they present to the public are more homogeneous.

We already have the vast majority of media in this country owned by only a handful of large corporations, and now the FCC is considering letting those corporations own even more media. This is not just a trend that must be stopped -- it must be reversed. More and more, the American people are exposed only to the news that corporate America wants them to hear, and lies favored by those few corporations are no longer being exposed as untrue. Fewer media owners will just exacerbate that situation -- and substitute corporate propaganda for hard news.

The last bastion of the free flow of information is the internet, and fortunately a growing number of people are getting more and more of their news from it. But the corporations are trying hard to control that also. We must never forget -- when a free and open and diverse media disappears, so does freedom and democracy. That is just a fundamental truth.