Third Wayers are better than most Republicans

[Scuba]

40. Also, don't forget that Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 ....

http://www.salon.com/2001/06/28/telecom_dereg/

In his remarks that day Clinton boasted that the “landmark legislation fulfills my administration’s promise to reform our telecommunications laws in a manner that leads to competition and private investment, promotes universal service and provides for flexible government regulation.”

Five years later nobody doubts that the law was indeed a landmark — not only because congressional efforts to update the country’s vast communications industries for the first time since the 1930s had themselves dragged on through the ’80s and well into the ’90s but also because the Telecom Act, as it became known, unleashed unprecedented deregulation and media consolidation, among the most pronounced in American history. Nowhere has that consolidation been more acutely felt than in radio — where just two companies, Clear Channel and Infinity, now dominate the nation’s commercial radio stations. The result, many longtime radio industry observers feel, has been the degradation of commercial radio as a creative, independent medium.

...

In late 1995, when the Telecom Act was being assembled, it was most often portrayed by its backers as a way to allow Baby Bell phone companies to get into the long-distance business, promote competition, introduce the V-chip to parents, police Internet porn and deregulate cable rates. Indeed, the Telecom Act’s laundry list of initiatives covered nearly 200 pages of legislation. Down toward the bottom of that list, though, was a provision, one that received very little public attention (Clinton never even mentioned it during his extended remarks at the bill signing), that lifted all ownership limits for radio station broadcasters nationwide — and allowed them to operate as many as eight signals in the country’s largest markets.

To describe the new law’s sweeping implications for radio as “radical” would be an understatement. Prior to this law, tightly regulated broadcasters could own just 40 stations nationally, and only two in a given market. Years earlier, those limits had been relaxed, very cautiously, by the Federal Communications Commission. But suddenly, without the FCC’s input or any public hearings, the kind of sweeping deregulation that most broadcasters hadn’t even fantasized about two years earlier was ushered in overnight.