He spoke at the FCC's Future of Media workshop yesterday and gave an almost perfect postmortem on the last fifteen years. It good to see that somebody in Washington understands what went wrong.
"Some say there are more outlets now than ever, but in terms of the real localism and diversity that more outlets should have produced, we ended up with a "wasted vastland" as someone once called it. A lot of broadcasters, I think, weren't thrilled and many wanted to keep their emphasis on serving their local communities, but it became harder and harder -- almost impossible -- for them to do so. 'Play the game or get voted off the island' became the mantra of this dangerous game of Media Survival.; So it's no great wonder that things went sour. The market kept saying 'more profit, more profit.' So if you're making 15% this year, you have to do 20% next year. If you make 20% next year, you'll need 25% or 35% the following year -- or you're bought off your island and put onto Big Media's consolidated mainland. The result: Newsrooms were decimated (those more than 30% ABC News jobs cut last week being only the most recent example)."
