The Vast Wasteland

An update to "NBC Lays Off 700 jobs to Make Savings (read: profit) of $750 Million"

Did you know NBC Universial owns the Spanish langauge network Telemundo? Guess what, due to their budget cuts they're getting rid of local news and you'll get your news from a centralized location:

AMY GOODMAN: Juan, a quick question before we wrap up the broadcast. A few days ago, we ran your testimony in the town hall meeting here in New York around media consolidation, but there are even further developments now. Can you talk about what’s happening in Univision?

JUAN GONZALEZ: Yeah. Well, as some people may be aware, NBC announced huge cutbacks and layoffs of its network staff and at NBC Universal about, I think it’s 700 jobs, 5% of its workforce. But one of the things that didn’t get much attention is that NBC is planning to shut down -- NBC owns the Telemundo network, the Spanish-language network, and it’s planning to shut down the news programs, local news programs, in six major American cities: Phoenix, San Jose, Houston, San Antonio, and a couple of other -- Denver, as well -- and it is basically eliminating its local newscast and doing what Sinclair Broadcasting has done.

It’s going to focus -- create a regional news center in Fort Worth, Texas, and leave only skeleton new staffs in all these major cities. These are some of the biggest cities in America. And these skeleton staffs will send to Fort Worth a couple of news stories that will then be beamed back to those local cities in basically a local news show that is not local. It’s largely canned material. So this is a major, major impact of consolidation on Spanish-language news. So, in San Jose, in Phoenix, in Denver, the local Hispanic communities there will not be receiving locally produced news. And we’ve got the situation now that is developing with FOX News. Fox News has called on the FCC now to eliminate all regulations, of FCC regulations over media ownership concentration.

...and if you're didn't noticed from the excert above, Faux News want get to get rid of all media ownership regulations. What this will mean to you? More of the same programing, and no real competition.