Via StopBigMedia I see that former FCC chairman Powell (who never saw a merger he wasn't willing to hand wave through the door) comissioned a study to find out whether or not local ownership meant more local news coverage. Turns out it does. So he hid the study, which only came to light because someone leaked it to Senator Boxer. The studies conclusions include:

• Locally owned stations also aired 3.5 more minutes’ worth of on-location local news reports than non-locally owned stations.
• Network owned and operated stations (those owned by ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox) aired significantly less local news.
• Owners who controlled stations in multiple markets aired less local news content.
• Station owners who also control newspapers did not air more local news content.
• Owners who also controlled radio stations aired significantly less local TV news content.

Nota bene: An interesting document here and a petition. eds. More after the jump.

Sometimes I wonder what planet we live in that the questions of ownership on media content are still in the air. Whenever you start getting into the discussion, the apologists come out. The worst, frankly, are the people who have worked in media, who will say "well, no one told me explicitly to bury a story."

No, no, they didn't. They hired your boss, or your boss's boss, and in effect, they hired you. They decided who to assign to what beats, they chose the editors and producers and they fixed the budgets. They made decisions like whether to release Path to 9/11 or Michael Moore's last movie (yes to the first, no to the second.) And somewhere along the way people started to believe that Iraq was behind 9/11. Somewhere along there the New York Times knew that George Bush was illegally and unconstitutionally wiretapping people with warrants - and held the story till after the election because they didn't want the Democrats to win.

Somewhere along the line, the media tilted right. They show Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin, but you'll never see someone like Noam Chomsky on US television (although he gets on European and Canadian TV), even though he's never called for Conservatives to be hung as traitors or published the private information of citizens so they can be hounded by threats, and one of them can commit suicide.

Which is to say, somewhere along the line right wing extremists got mainstreamed by the media, while people who are not nearly as far to the left, got frozen out in the cold after having been demonized.

Why'd the media tilt right? Because huge corporations almost always tilt right. And the main media conglomerates, five of them controlling over 80% of the US media markets, are huge.

Ownership matters. Not just for local news content, but for the political health of a country. The interests of megacorporations are not synonymous with the interests of the country, or of the citizenry of a country.

And there is only one cure to a monopoly or oligopoly situation - break them up and institute strict controls on how much media any one company can control.

Your politics will be better and next time you get attacked you might have a population that realizes who attacked them. And I can pretty much guarantee you'll have better TV shows, because the right wingers were right about one thing back when they used to believe in free markets - more competition is better.