On the Mass Audience…
FCC chairman Michael Powell’s recent interview on OJR, where he admits he’s a wired, gadget carrying news freak who doesn’t watch the evening news, had this interesting quote that ultimately shows he favors big media:
“… the problem in a society is not concentration and scarcity but actually abundance, fragmentation and hyper competition. There’s so much of it the audience is getting fragmented across so many different media that they’re very hard to reach and hold onto.”
I have a couple problems with this statement. First, what’s wrong with fragmentation, which translates to more and smaller more specific audiences? A lot if you’re a big media company or a mass marketer. The “reach and hold on to” part of this statement reduces citizens to mere consumer lemmings of mass advertising pitches.
