The effort to loosen the FCC rules on cross-ownership long remained an under-the-radar, stealth story. Certain newspaper owners sought an easing of the rules to allow cross-ownership - not to limit diversity of opinion but rather to preserve news outlets and enhance the quality of news provided.
That has been the experience in grandfathered Tampa, the nation's effective beta site for convergence. There, The Tampa Tribune and WFLA have converged in the Tribune newsroom. Working together (and with an online news outlet as well), they have demonstrated the positive outcomes possible in a cross-ownership environment: better news generating more informed opinion in tandem with broader access to the public via three information platforms - newspaper, television and the Internet: diversity indeed, albeit in a different form. (Disclaimer: The Tampa Tribune and WFLA are owned by Richmond-based Media General, for which I work.) Other sites in various stages of convergence: Cedar Rapids (Iowa), Lorain (Ohio), Sioux City (Nebraska), Quincy (Illinois), and Miles City (Montana).
Curiously, late opposition mobilized on grounds amounting to hostility to media diversity. Couched in terms antagonistic to the media bigboys, opponents often argued and still do, that the rise of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., with its generally conservative outlets, threatens to alter the media landscape - meaning dilution of the leftist concentrate so obvious in much of the Establishment Media. Call it the reverse diversity theory - or something. Opposition also emanates from the right based on concern about the sex, violence and indecency prevalent on big-media cable and network TV.
Any licensing power limits access to the field. The federal licensing power makes little sense generally; the FCC's licensing power makes no sense now. FCC prohibitions on ownership have worked to restrict diversity in several crucial forms - in several distinct meanings of the word - when open access would only expand the diversity so extensive on the Internet.
Finally the FCC - under the chairmanship of Colin Powell's son Michael - has eased the rules on cross-ownership by a 3-2 vote. It was a vote opposed editorially by The New York Times for, yes, largely ideological reasons. Yet in the long term, the stealth story on the FCC and cross-ownership could prove bigger than the one about the lack of ideological diversity - and the diminished credibility - of The Times itself.