Concerns are mounting about the state of the US media landscape now that it looks increasingly likely that Paramount Skydance—a company controlled by the son of billionaire Larry Ellison, a donor to President Donald Trump—will succeed in its bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery.
One day after Netflix announced that it was dropping its previously accepted bid to buy Warner, many critics demanded that antitrust laws be invoked to block the Paramount-Warner merger from going through.
Alvaro Bedoya, former commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission, warned that the Ellison family could soon use their control over vast swaths of US media properties to engage in mass censorship, and he pointed to their decisions to cancel Stephen Colbert’s program and to refuse to air an interview with Democratic US Senate candidate James Talarico.
This is revisionist.
The FCC created a set of rules to manage a broadcasting cartel. Changes in technology shifted the domain of ownership from the production companies to the telecommunication companies and eventually the data center companies.
But we started as a cartel. We’re still a cartel. The FCC has done nothing to change that (and made many moves to entrench it - the forced sale of TikTok being only the latest).
The Fairness Doctrine was an enrichment of the two party system. Reagan simply took the next logical step and made it a one party system.
FCC did not force the sale of TikTok, Congress did
FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr labeled TikTok a “clear and present danger” to US national security, urging its removal from app stores due to concerns over data access by China. Citing reports of ByteDance personnel in Beijing accessing sensitive American user data, Carr argued the app acts as a surveillance tool
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521/text
This is revisionist
The forced sale of Tiktok was passed by Congress and pushed by Biden who kept reiterating it was a threat