Thursday, May 03, 2007

Please Help Me Understand Why We're Spending Time and Money on This

The title says it all. From the UCNews website:

The UCC and the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition filed a petition on May 1 with the Federal Communications Commission asking it to deny license renewals for two Fox-owned TV stations in New York because the stations’ owner, Rupert Murdoch, also owns The New York Post.

The FCC’s cross-ownership rule expressly prohibits newspapers and TV stations from being owned by the same entity.


The Rev. Sherry M. Taylor, the UCC’s Central Atlantic Conference’s Association Minister in New Jersey, is one of the petitioners.

“Fox’s common ownership of The New York Post, WNYW-TV and WWOR-TV harms me by sharply reducing the number of independent voices available to me,” Taylor writes. “Unless the licenses are denied, my right to access diverse programming will continue to be harmed.”

When I saw the headline, I thought that this would turn out to be some sort of complaint about a specific program that maybe offended a minority group or something else that might have mattered more to someone somewhere. No, this is about somebody's "right to diverse programming."

Is this a worthwhile cause? I guess this comes from some variant fear of an Orwellian nation or something...all that "we're only getting one point of view" stuff. Still, Somalian children are starving, countries aren't doing a damn thing about Darfur, people in my and your communities are losing jobs and homes, can't make rent money, can't afford medical attention, don't have food.

But my right to diverse programming will continue to be harmed.

Diverse programming vs. food distribution. Hmm.

Parts of the UCC are really taking up their crosses on this one.

It's official. Let's stop throwing up our hands when local churches continue to see the wider church as irrelevant. Or, whenever someone does, just point them back to this story.


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