Obama’s FCC Plans Sale of U.S. Media to Foreigners

[Disir]

If you think it’s hard to get unbiased news from radio and TV now, just wait until your local broadcast stations and other media properties are owned and operated by the Chinese, Russian or Mexican governments, or the Muslim Brotherhood.

Amazingly, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) wants to make it easier for foreigners to buy and run local radio and TV stations. The federal entity that monitors the media is proposing more foreign ownership of the U.S. media in the name of “diversity.”

By law, foreigners currently can only own up to 25 percent of a TV or radio station business unless they can show on a case by case basis that they have “special considerations” which demonstrate that granting them a broadcast license would be in the American public’s interest. Only then can the FCC waive the 25 percent ownership cap that is imposed by law.

The process can be time consuming and present a high hurdle that few have overcome. Rupert Murdoch is one of a small number of media owners who successfully jumped those hurdles, and he did so in part by changing his citizenship from Australian to American. But now the FCC wants to remove those limits altogether. The FCC wants to routinely grant licenses to foreigners just like they do for the mom & pop broadcasters next door. Essentially, they want to fast track the approval process for foreign ownership. They recently issued a public notice (GNDocket No. 15-236) and they are asking for comments from the public about their plans to do so.

The change is technically titled, “Review of Foreign Ownership Policies for Broadcast, Common Carrier and Aeronautical Radio Licensees under Section 310(b)(4) of the Communications Act of 1934, as Amended.”
Obama’s FCC Plans Sale of U.S. Media to Foreigners

This is an interesting little tidbit in the works.

 

[Jroc]

Obama's utopia includes Jihad radio

 

[Pogo]

O'bama doesn't have an FCC. No President gets that. It's deliberately set up in such a way that no POTUS can stack it.

However, Congress can have an effect and opened these floodgates in 1996 when the Telecommunications Act of that year washed away a slew of cross-ownership rules and permitted the mass consolidation that famously resulted in, among other things, ClearChannel getting to own over twelve hundred radio stations. A later attempt at further giveaways of the public airwaves was rebuffed, but FCC always, by law, allows public comment periods to its proposals, and inasmuch as that commentary effectively requires overwhelming numbers to counteract the corporate influence, such a commentary period deserves a spirited response.

Observation must also be made that the source link is "Accuracy in Media", a notoriously right-wing push site. That they wrote their own headline as "Obama's FCC" indicates the level of both their real agenda and their profound ignorance of how the FCC works. And FWIW the current Commissioner of FCC is a Republican.