Gore today; Gore yesterday, Part Whatever ...

On telecommunications consolidation, from the article ["Gore Lashes Out at Media Consolidation"], published on Monday, Aug. 28, 2006:

Former Vice President Al Gore said Sunday ever-tighter political and economic control of the media is a major threat to democracy. Gore said the goal behind his year-old "interactive" television channel Current TV was to encourage the kind of democratic dialogue that thrives online but is increasingly rare on TV. "Democracy is under attack," Gore told an audience at the Edinburgh International Television Festival. "Democracy as a system for self-governance is facing more serious challenges now than it has faced for a long time.
"Democracy is a conversation, and the most important role of the media is to facilitate that conversation of democracy. Now the conversation is more controlled, it is more centralized."
He said that in many countries, media control was being consolidated in the hands of a few businesspeople or politicians.

And then, back in Jan. 11, 1994, when he was vice president, could really do something about it, and issued the first white paper which later became the 1996 Telecom Bill:

As I announced last month, we will soon introduce a legislative package that aggressively confronts the most pressing telecommunications issues, and is based on five principles. This Administration will: Encourage Private Investment; Provide and Protect Competition; Provide Open Access to the Network; Take Action To Avoid Creating a Society of Information "Haves" and "Have Nots"; Encourage Flexible and Responsive Governmental Action.
Many of you have our White Paper today, outlining the bill in detail. If you didn't get your copy, it's available on the Internet, right now. Let me run through the highlights with you -- and talk about how they grow out of our five principles.
We begin with two of our basic principles -- the need for private investment and fair competition. The nation needs private investment to complete the construction of the National Information Infrastructure. And competition is the single most critical means of encouraging that private investment. ...
Today, we must choose competition again and protect it against both suffocating regulation on the one hand and unfettered monopolies on the other.

Gee, wonder what he thinks now.

And here is Ralph Nader, who got it right at the time and on Aug. 23, 2000, when this text was read:

There is indeed another major area that the two major candidates won’t touch and that is the big media. It is the mass media concentrated in six media conglomerates: Disney, General Electric, Time-Warner, the Murdock chain, etc., which Professor Ben Bagdikian, over there at Berkeley, says now control the bulk of the audiences and the circulation of newspapers, magazines, radio stations, and TV. Well, it was William Jefferson Clinton who signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which allowed corporations to buy up more and more TV and radio stations.
Before 1996, no company could own more than 12 radio stations. Now, one company owns 800 radio stations. They are laying off reporters. They are not covering local news. They’re giving you homogenized syndicated pap like Dr. Laura and Rush Limbaugh. Indeed, Gore and Bush will never raise this in the campaign. They are afraid of the big media. They are afraid that they might unleash a storm of challenge among the American people who would become aware that they, as a commonwealth legal right, own the public airwaves. They are the landlords!
It’s not Bush and Gore who are going to say to the American people that if they become President, they will make sure that some of those public airwaves will be transformed into your own TV and radio stations and cable channels, funded by a fee imposed on the broadcasters who for 65 years have gotten our property, free of charge, without paying any rent to we, the people, who are the landlords.

We've all seen the ill-effects of this bill but it is important to remember some of them. It deregulated most cable TV rates - and we are now all paying huge bills ... it eliminated the rule barring a single company from owning more than 12 TV stations - and now these same stations bar anti-war ads they don't like from the airwaves ... $70 billion in digital spectrum given away for free ... it also allowed radio stations to be consolidated into a few corporate hands and many other deregulations which have led to the pathetic state of media these days.

It is also important to remember that it sailed through the Senate [91-5] and the Congress [414-16] meaning that it was a bipartisan mistake - like most - and all those Democrats now who bitch about it and continue to reelect their corrupt representatives are a bunch of hypocrites.