The rule would apply in the country’s top 20 markets. Newspapers wouldn’t be allowed to buy any of the top four TV or radio stations, based on audience size.

In 1975, the FCC had established rules against cross-ownership to prevent any one company from dominating the media in a given community.

However, the current “FCC chairman, Kevin Martin, has embraced the argument that new technologies like the Internet make the old rule obsolete, that newspapers will die without the rule change, and that newspaper-TV cross-ownership provides "synergies" that benefit the public,” reported the Denver Post.

"Newspapers in financial difficulty often have little choice but to scale back news gathering to cut costs. Allowing cross-ownership may help to forestall the erosion in local news coverage by enabling companies that own both newspapers and broadcast stations to share some costs," wrote Martin in an op-ed piece in The New York Times last month.

While this is cleverly worded, the obvious downside of a possible change to the FCC regulation would be the increased concentration of news outlets within a few centralized media conglomerates.

“His proposal would potentially allow an unhealthy media consolidation that would not serve the public good,” concluded The New York Times.

Source: New York Times – Denver Post through I Want Media