One of the more interesting articles I've read in a while is one from Marshall Herskovitz, who co-produced "thirtysomething" and "My So-Called Life,". Seems he's walking away from producing TV shows, along with his partner Ed Zwick.

Why?

Ultimately, because of an FCC decision.

It started in 1995 when the Federal Communications Commission abolished its long-standing "finsyn" rules (that's financial interest and syndication, for those unfamiliar with the term), allowing networks for the first time to own the programs they broadcast. Before that, under classic antitrust definitions, the networks had been confined to the role of broadcaster, paying a license fee to production companies for the right to broadcast programs just two times. The production companies owned all subsequent rights. In the mid-1990s there were 40 independent production companies making television shows. If a particular network didn't like a show -- as famously happened with "The Cosby Show" many years ago -- the production company could take it to another network.

But not after 1995. The abolition of the old rules set in motion an ineluctable process, one that has negatively affected every creative person I know in television. Today there are zero independent production companies making scripted television. They were all forced out of business by the networks' insistence -- following the FCC's fin-syn ruling -- on owning part or all of every program they broadcast.

The most profound change resulting from that ruling is the way networks go about the business of creating programming. Networks today exert a level of creative control unprecedented in the history of the medium. The stories my friends tell me would make me laugh if the situation weren't so self-defeating. Network executives routinely tell producers to change the color of the walls on sets; routinely decide on the proper wardrobe for actors; routinely have "tone" meetings with directors on upcoming pilots; routinely give notes on every page of a script. (When we did "thirtysomething" in the late '80s, we never received network notes.) And by the way, they have every right to do these things. As owners, they have a responsibility to satisfy themselves that their product is competitive and successful.

And, as usual these days, the money didn't just flow to the top, it got strangled at the bottom:!--break-->

But the changes have gone further. Over the last few years -- during a time when network profits have been increasing -- salaries and profit participation for the writer-producers who create the shows have been slashed. Fees were cut by one-third to one-half, and profit participation in many cases was effectively eliminated.

Why does TV suck so much? Why is it so uniform. Why are there 200 channels and nothing on?

Yet what we have now is a complete absence of either in the world of television. Your TV may receive 200 channels, but virtually every one of them is owned by one of six big companies -- NBC Universal, Disney, Time Warner, Viacom/Paramount, Sony and News Corp. And each channel has a brand identity dictated by those companies to which each program must adhere. Producers are now employees, not creators. If you were foolish enough to independently produce a TV pilot today, when you took it to the network, you would give up at least half of your ownership and all of your control, even though the network wouldn't pay any more than it used to pay as that old license fee.

As usual, what's happening is that an oligopoly has taken full control -- not just of one part of the process, but in a fully vertically-integrated fashion, where if you want to play, they get to extract the majority of the profit, because if aren't willing to give almost all of it up, they simply won't play your stuff, or hire you and you can't work anywhere else.

This is what always happens in largely unregulated monopolies and oligopolies. The firms with such power use the power to make sure that the vast majority of all profits go to them; that they make all the important decisions. As such they squeeze out a lot of the more interesting and the more odd and apparently marginal players.

And so you get lousy TV. But as Herskovitz says, you lose more than that:

The relaxation of the Fairness Doctrine (which required the networks to present the news in a balanced way), the lapse of any oversight of networks' civic responsibility, the commoditization of network news -- these are all parts of a troubling move toward the aggregation of control of information in an ever-shrinking number of entities.

Our founding fathers could not have foreseen that freedom of the press might eventually be threatened just as much by media consolidation as by government. And if you doubt that's happening, just watch Bill Moyers' recent expose on the networks' passive collusion with government in selling the Iraq war.

It ain't just about bad TV, it isn't just about strangling creative types, it's about collusion in selling an illegal war based on lies to the US's population.

At every step monopolies and oligopolies need to be broken up unless they are natural monopolies. In such cases they need to either be government run, or very heavily regulated so they can't use their monopoly power to damage the public interest.