ABC is gaining exclusive media access to the White House for the President’s presentation on Health Care. It’s a bad move, to have that amount of media exclusivity.
FOX News agrees vehemently. But that’s the problem. FOX News held the same amount of exclusivity with President Bush several years ago, with many Iraq War sales pitches and White House interviews given exclusively to FOX.
Now I am fairly certain that ABC will, in turn, complain about FOX when the next Republican President again grants FOX exclusive access. And so it will deteriorate into a continuous, hypocritical media circus.
This is the problem with near-monopolistic control of a market sector. The global media system is almost exclusively dominated by Timewarner (owner of CNN) , Disney (owner of ABC), News Corporation (owner of FOX), Viacom (owner of CBS), and GE (owner of NBC and everything else). No matter WHAT you flip the channel to, you will always be turning to a source of information input that is owned by someone driven by profit. All that information you receive will be tuned to get you to help maximize that channel owner’s earnings. This manipulation goes all the way up to the executive and legislative level with lobbyists to both the FCC and Congress, allowing them to significantly influence elections and policy through YOU. And as demonstrated by this rivalry between ABC and FOX, each one will act without shame to gain the position of top dog.
This is what happens when you cross modern communication technology with relaxed anti-trust laws.
If you want a side-by-side video of the ABC-FOX corporate duel, go here.
Humanizing the Mob 
Yeah, it’s kind of a sad state of things. I think it’s safe to say that the mainstream media will always be profit-driven, though. The alternative is a state-run media, which is of course much worse.
Although the internet has definitely upset things some. We’re actually getting more independent reporting that’s not controlled by the media giants.
Now if we could only get that on TV…
Large, consolidated Private Media is every bit as bad as state-run Media. That’s why we need anti-trust laws. Even our harshest anti-trust regulations have been nowhere near as harsh as the EU’s, so we wouldn’t have to worry about scaring away international business. Businesses should simply not be allowed to become as big and as consolidated at Timewarner, for example (they own an ISP and a whole bunch of popular media running through the ISP, all at the same time. That kind of information-input monopoly is very, very bad).
The problem is that many people grow up watching TV, then go find the web version of whatever TV channel they like to watch, and so they continue to constrain themselves to the same source of information.
And even the good aspects of the Internet will vanish if Net Neutrality is not observed. If the Telecom corporations continue to make inroads into claiming that they should get money off of all information that flows through their data-lines, then the Internet would lose all objectivity and independence. It would simply become like TV is now.