CBS owned 41% of broadcast media, in clear violation of Federal law, in 2000. CNN sat at the crossroads of a merger AOL and Time Warner wanted, for profits; but the Clinton FTC didn’t let it happen. Along comes W, promising less regulation, and the stage was set. Suddenly all the media had a bottom-line motive for scuttling any political opponent of W. Not just “mainstream media” but the ENTIRE news industry: W promised them PROFIT$.

First, go read McCamy Taylor at Democratic Underground’s excellent backstory on this. Then tell me why Bush hasn’t been impeached yet.

This timeline from Bill Moyers shows what was happening in 2003 and early 2004 about the media merger issue:
Moyers timeline

The Republican Congress was persuaded to raise the media ownership cap just enough to put NewsCorp and Viacom in compliance with the law, but they had no room to grow. (And since Viacom had been described as owning 41% of the nation’s television channels in the court documents from 2001, I wonder if some one was fudging the math.)

No problem, said the Bush administration. Just as soon as we win this re-election campaign, we are taking the appeal to the Supreme Court, which will raise the federal media ownership cap back up, so you guys in the entertainment business can start expanding again.

So, if you were Sumner Redstone and it was 2004 and you were faced with a choice of George W. Bush who was promising to write you a blank check for unlimited media acquisitions and mergers or John Kerry, who was really uncomfortable with the whole idea of too much media power concentrated into one set of hands, which candidate would you prefer?

And if, as I suspect, you were actually out of compliance with the law (television holdings don’t just shrink from greater than 41% down to 39% overnight), you might be a little nervous, too, that the current administration might decide to start enforcing the law.

The irony of it all is that the Bush administration never intended to keep its promise to launch a court appeal of the lower court ruling that threw out the FCC federal media owership rule changes.

It was Michael Powell, who had done the administration’s dirty work for years, who suddenly had a fit (of) conscience — or maybe he got pissed off at how they treated his dad, and he decided to get even in the best way he knew how, by turning the mainstream media against the Bush administration, by revealing them to be liars and cheats.
Washington Post

Unfortunately that didn’t work too well…