Speaking out for a truly free - and effective - Texas media

Concerned about encroachment on free speech in the Lone Star State, Senators Rodney Ellis (D-Houston) and Robert Duncan (R-Lubbock) coauthored SB 966. It protects journalists from having to reveal confidential sources unless they were eye witnesses to a crime or somebody's life depends on information from that source.

Predictably, papers across this state are editorializing in favor of this measure — as they should be. The measure reinforces the First Amendment respect for press rights which are too frequently getting violated these days.

However, while invoking the era of Watergate to champion their current position, these journalists paradoxically are not remembering the tough questions their predecessors and their papers once were asking. Today’s comparative silence could be one of the unpleasant side effects of corporate media consolidation — one corporation owns several media outlets in an area, thereby effectively controlling the ‘news spin’ in that geographic location.

I’ve seen Texas’ ever shrinking media market for myself. In Houston, only the Chronicle now stands as the city's daily paper after the Post was bought out and closed in 1995. Media consolidation began earlier in Dallas when the Times-Herald folded in 1991, promptly followed by the San Antonio Light in 1993. Media consolidation certainly is effective from a business standpoint where the mantra is to make as much money as possible, but questions must be asked: who benefits from media consolidation, and what gets left out as the ultimate consequence of those actions?

When a singular corporate entity monopolizes news media in one town, residents are adversely impacted because they are not able to be certain they receive accurate and unbiased information within that town. Internet research for alternate resources is potentially an option, but can take time and facilities which, yes, not everyone still has access to in the 21st century. Access to complete and balanced news about our own lives must be a basic right for all Texans.

Make no mistake about it: I support this measure, but I think that it is only a starting point — because whoever controls the media also controls the shape and the content of the message itself.