Rupert Murdoch: Chris Christie Must 'Re-Declare' For Mitt Romney 'Or Take Blame'

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92. That's exactly what happened. reagan got rid of the ownership restrictions toward the end of his

reign of nightmares.

It used to be that any one corporation or person or entity could only own THREE media properties in any one market (metro area). So it usually meant an AM, an FM, and a TV station. Then all of a sudden, the brakes were off. And this greedy buying and vulture-ish acquisition was unleashed. Ma and Pa stations were being snapped up by corporate carnivores who assembled big networks of stations that then started laying off masses of people and cookie-cuttering the programming, cloning it in multiple markets. Cheaper! Saved money! All those salaries and benefits you didn't have to pay anymore! Whoopeeeeeee!!! I was still working on radio then and a lot of my friends started losing their jobs. You'd have the same damn syndicated shows everywhere with no local radio and local personalities and surprise and uniqueness and experimentation in the programming. Diversity, they said! YES this will serve the local listeners beautifully! No problem!

Soon enough, as AM turned to talk programming because it couldn't compete with the audio quality of music on FM, you suddenly found the cloning of wrong-wing extremists from coast to coast. limbaugh got started that way, and a little success always begets a whole shitload of copycats everywhere. More stupid, short-sighted, thoughtless "Me-too" shit monopolizing our public airwaves by the minute. They were smart, those corporate planners and strategists. And our Dems were busy taking nice naps while this was going on, believing the reassuring lies and just SURE the bad guys weren't REALLY gonna act like bad guys, and the carnivores were suddenly going to switch to lettuce-only diets.

Hell, we saw Obama and his campaign fall for that YET AGAIN, as recently as the first Presidential debate. Take a nap. It'll be okay. Meanwhile, the bad guys are up, wide-awake, making trouble, and planting an awful lot of poisonous seeds. And they never consider even switching to decaf.

With adversaries like this, we can NEVER afford to drop our guard, even for a weekend!!!! Look what happened when we failed to fight broadcast deregulation.