You only hurt the one you love

Via Cursor:

Following up on the item I posted yesterday on anti-trust investigation of the alternative media the SFGate reports on the issue and I obviously misunderstood the depth of the problem and was much too flippant in characterizing it as political. Apparently, it is also about whether there is too much style coverage in alternative papers and whether anybody in LA should ever have to answer to somebody in New York. It’s a super-duper crisis in the alternative press that some evidently believe can only be resolved with a tough US Attorney and a visit by some G-men.

The inquiry is the result of a horse-trading deal last October in which each of the two firms agreed to shut down one of its papers in a city where they competed. The arrangement between the nation’s two largest alternative newsweekly chains left Los Angeles and Cleveland with only one citywide weekly each.

[…]

If so, the trend would be one more sign that weekly newspaper chains are moving farther away from their progressive, grassroots origins and acting more like the gargantuan daily newspaper conglomerates they were meant to provide an alternative to in the first place.

Do read the entire article. You will see that the real problem is the corporate dominance of the alternative press by such behemoths as The Village Voice and New Times and how this is hampering the spread of progressive ideas.

Liberal critics seem to agree that we must help John Ashcroft stop these corporate media tyrants. Like progressive political writer “Marc Haefele, a former political columnist for the LA Weekly who resigned from the paper within a month after the New Times-VVM deal, and was first approached by justice investigators in mid November.” He told them, “The LA Weekly to a large extent is being edited under New York oversight at this point in time. This was basically going on before they made the [deal]. I was asked about whether I felt that had an effect on the content of the paper … and I said that, yeah, I thought the paper was basically run from New York by New Yorkers, and it was a paper about Los Angeles, and that did not necessarily work out all the time.”

If that doesn’t require federal intervention, I don’t know what does.

However, some people like Los Angeles Magazine editor in chief Kit Rachlis inexplicably find the much welcomed Justice Department investigation to be a bit more complicated:

“There’s a terrible irony in the John Ashcroft Justice Department investigating the alternative press when, in fact, they have allowed far larger corporate entities to get away with transactions that have certainly raised a lot more antitrust issues than the LA Weekly-New Times deal has, and which had far greater effect on society,” he says. “I don’t think it’s too paranoid to say that they’re looking into the alternative press for political reasons.”

As the article then points out:

Indeed, the U.S. Justice Department has done nothing to derail the endless media mergers that have taken place between corporate giants in recent years, and has yet to block a single joint-operating agreement between competing newspapers since the Newspaper Preservation Act was passed in 1970.

Oh please. Is he trying to say that there is something unusual about Ashcroft investigating a media company for anti-trust violations? Well, so what if there is, anyway? It is far more important that reporters from the LA Weekly don’t have to take orders from some stupid New Yorker. And if it takes crawling into bed with the Bush administration to make that point, well then I don’t see that you have any choice. As long as those rotten editors get theirs (and they stop publishing all that icky arts and culture junk that actually make people pick up the rags in the first place.)

Seriously, this is nuts. It sounds like NewTimes and VVM made a deal that was a technical violation of the Anti-Trust act. But, to believe that this “violation” of anti-trust in any way impedes competition in a marketplace that is totally dominated by mega-media corporations who own everything from the cable coming into your house, your computer dial-up, your only local mainstream newspaper, several radio stations and at least one of your local TV stations plus many more cable networks is ridiculous. The Justice Department is NOT investigating because of its grave concern about competition in the marketplace of ideas and those who are helping them out of myopic concern that these corporate chains are infecting the alternative press with commercial values are hopelessly naive.

Gleefully helping the Feds lean on the Village Voice just doesn’t seem to me to be the smartest thing for liberals to do in this day and age. Call me crazy, but I don’t think that’s going to guarantee a more “responsive” alternative media going forward.