The [Telecommunications Act of 1996] dramatically reduced important Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations on cross ownership, and allowed giant corporations to buy up thousands of media outlets across the country, increasing their monopoly on the flow of information in the United States and around the world.
The bill, which was lobbied for in great numbers by the communications and media industry, was sadly a bipartisan misadventure – only 3 percent of Congress voted against the bill: five senators and 16 members of the House, including then-Rep. Bernie Sanders.
Rep. John Dingell (D-Michigan) “thanked God” for the bill that would “make this country the best served, the best educated and the most successful country … in all areas of communications.”
Critics have also claimed that the act has failed to enable the competition that was one of its stated goals. Instead, it may have inadvertently exacerbated the ongoing consolidation of the media marketplace that had commenced in the decades before the act’s passage. The number of American major media content companies shrank from about fifty in 1983 to ten in 1996, and to just six in 2005. An FCC study found that the act led to a drastic decline in the number of radio station owners, even as the actual number of stations in the United States increased. This decline in owners and increase in stations has resulted in radio homogenization, in which local programming and content has been lost and content is repeated regardless of location. Activists and critics have cited similar effects in the television industry.
I didn’t see anything in the Wikipedia article mentioning Clinton other than him signing the bill. But it does mention that the bill was introduced by a Republican senator and as you mentioned, had support from 97% of Congress which is well above the presidential veto threshold. Was this something specifically that Clinton was pushing for at the time that wasn’t mentioned in the Wikipedia article? I was too young to be paying attention to politics in 96 so I don’t know the historical context.
The historical context in this case is the date on the article, which is during the 2016 Democratic Primary. It’s a tortured attempt to cast a bad light on Hillary Clinton by proxy by casting Bill Clinton in a bad light by blaming him for something that, as you’ve pointed out, would have happened without him.
It’s the president’s fault as much as anything is the president’s fault during their administration. He didn’t send it back, he didn’t hinder its progress, he didn’t sway congress to not support it. More over, it seems, he or his administration or whomever he friends were in congress didn’t have the foresight to consider how damaging the law would be. The reason it got so much support was because Clinton was promoting it as if to be one of his greatest achievements; and because the telecom industry was lobbying the fuck out of Washington at the time and has only continued to grow larger and larger year over year thanks in part to the Citizen’s United ruling (to be clear, not Clinton’s fault). The internet likes to bash Reagan for the Fairness Doctrine but (1) that was limited to broadcast television and (2) they forget how impactful the Telecommunications Act was on consolidating media ownership.
For the past three years, President Clinton and Vice President Gore have worked for telecommunications reform that stimulates private investment, promotes competition, protects diversity of viewpoints and voices among the media, provides families with technologies to help them control the kinds of television programs that come into their homes, and strengthens and improves universal service so that all Americans can have access to the benefits of the information superhighway. With passage of the Telecommunications Reform Act of 1996, this important national goal has been met. Signed into law by President Clinton today this legislation will lead all Americans into a more prosperous future by preparing our economy for the 21st Century and opening wide the door to the Information Age. https://clintonwhitehouse4.archives.gov/WH/EOP/OP/telecom/summary.html
This is Bill Clinton’s fault.
https://truthout.org/articles/democracy-in-peril-twenty-years-of-media-consolidation-under-the-telecommunications-act/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996#Later_criticism
I didn’t see anything in the Wikipedia article mentioning Clinton other than him signing the bill. But it does mention that the bill was introduced by a Republican senator and as you mentioned, had support from 97% of Congress which is well above the presidential veto threshold. Was this something specifically that Clinton was pushing for at the time that wasn’t mentioned in the Wikipedia article? I was too young to be paying attention to politics in 96 so I don’t know the historical context.
The historical context in this case is the date on the article, which is during the 2016 Democratic Primary. It’s a tortured attempt to cast a bad light on Hillary Clinton by proxy by casting Bill Clinton in a bad light by blaming him for something that, as you’ve pointed out, would have happened without him.
It’s the president’s fault as much as anything is the president’s fault during their administration. He didn’t send it back, he didn’t hinder its progress, he didn’t sway congress to not support it. More over, it seems, he or his administration or whomever he friends were in congress didn’t have the foresight to consider how damaging the law would be. The reason it got so much support was because Clinton was promoting it as if to be one of his greatest achievements; and because the telecom industry was lobbying the fuck out of Washington at the time and has only continued to grow larger and larger year over year thanks in part to the Citizen’s United ruling (to be clear, not Clinton’s fault). The internet likes to bash Reagan for the Fairness Doctrine but (1) that was limited to broadcast television and (2) they forget how impactful the Telecommunications Act was on consolidating media ownership.
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