Steve LaBaton's lead story in the New York Times today -- Plan Would Ease Limits on Media Owners -- describes the troubling possibility that FCC chair Kevin Martin claims he's got the votes to allow further media consolidation, including elimination of the cross-ownership rules that guarantee that a town's biggest TV station and newspaper will compete with each other to uncover municipal chicanery and corporate crime, instead of being owned by the same firm. Under Martin's proposal, which has been opposed by a vast majority of the thousands of Americans who have attended field hearings on media ownership this year, the winners would be some media moguls (think, Rupert Murdoch) and the losers would be a marketplace of democratic ideas and the American people who want to read or hear them to make informed choices. From the story:

"This is a big deal because we have way too much concentration of media ownership in the United States," Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, said at a hearing on Wednesday called to examine the digital transition of the television industry. "If the chairman intends to do something by the end of the year," Mr. Dorgan added, his voice rising, "then there will be a firestorm of protest and I'm going to be carrying the wood."