Washington – Federal rules try to limit media power by prohibiting a company from owning a newspaper and a TV station in the same city.
Billionaire Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. faces no such hurdle in its pending deal to acquire the country’s second-largest paper, Dow Jones & Co.’s Wall Street Journal, even though it owns a broadcast-TV network and a national cable-news channel that blankets the U.S.
Some Democrats contend that such national combinations should be scrutinized as well. Already not particularly fond of Murdoch’s News Corp. because of the perceived Republican tilt of Fox News Channel, they are urging the Federal Communications Commission to review the deal.
“The proposed merger between News Corp. and Dow Jones raises the serious question of whether a single company’s concentration on a national scale should continue to be unfettered and unchecked,” Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., wrote to FCC Chairman Kevin Martin last week. “The FCC should consider studying whether the public interest would be served if media cross-ownership rules existed at the national level.”
News Corp. declined to comment.
Near term, a national ban is considered a long shot. None the less, Dorgan and some other lawmakers, as well as Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards and FCC Commissioner Michael Copps, also a Democrat, would like to see the Dow Jones purchase pass the same litmus test local media owners must under existing cross-ownership rules.
New York is drawing special attention. Although The Journal circulates nationally, about 302,000 of its 2.1 million daily copies are sold in the New York metropolitan area, where News Corp. owns the New York Post and operates two TV stations with FCC waivers.
“In my view, this buyout will result in an overly consolidated media market, imperiling the diversity of opinions available to residents of the greater New York area and across the country,” Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., wrote to Martin last week.
