Click on the banner to learn more...

In Noam man's land, consolidation is academic

Columbia University professor Eli Noam has been tackling the problem of media consolidation for some time now - - long enough to have a book on the topic almost ready for distribution. "Media, Ownership and Concentration in America" takes a statistics-based approach to the problem. The professor does more than just enter bytes onto his hard drive - - he offers nothing less than an alternative way to measure media consolidation.

Noam suggests that according to the traditional antitrust measuring tool - - the Hirschmann-Heferindahl Index (HHI), the mass communications industry is not all that concentrated on a national basis, but is very concentrated on a local basis. That dichotomy, along with the difficulty in defining, let alone measuring, a robust "marketplace of ideas," makes it unsuitable as a standalone measuring device for media diversity.

On the other hand, Noam says, the FCC's diversity index was practically laughed out of court by the judges at the 3rd Circuit, since it failed to discriminate between gargantuan and tiny media operations.

Noam proposes a new index which starts with HHI, used as a "measure of market power," and then divides it by a number keyed to the number of independent ownership voices, with a 1% market share benchmark established as a minimum to be considered in the computation - - Noam says an entity of that size is "small but not trivial."

He expects his system to be criticized by those who think it may lead to more consolidation. Or less consolidation. Others will consider it too mechanistic. However, given the fluidity of the subject - - again, the marketplace of ideas - - probably the best we can do is count voices.

"Given the contentiousness of the issue," he concludes, "it would be best to create such a system in advance rather than to do so ad hoc, ad hominem and ad infinitum."