ABSTRACT
Having presented the economics of the television industry and the background for the financial interest and syndication rules, I now turn to the question of how the regulation has had an effect on diversity. As was discussed in the opening chapter of this book, the FCC has maintained diversity as a fundamental policy goal. The FCC, however, often fails to define what diversity means. Is it more diverse content? More outlets? More sources of programming? The underlying goal of the fin-syn rules was to increase content diversity. However, the Commission did not regulate the content itself. Rather, they put restrictions on who could and could not own programming. The following analysis will demonstrate that this sort of structural regulation is not an effective means of achieving the ultimate goal of content diversity. To demonstrate this, diversity will be examined in terms of (a) content diversity (types of programming) and (b) marketplace diversity (suppliers of programming).
