Bill Gates recently observed that within five years the Internet will have revolutionized video distribution so much that current broadcast television will no longer be interesting. Newspapers face the same technological challenge. For many investors, the newspaper and broadcast industries have little future, and regulation of these industries is akin to rearranging tombstones in a cemetery.

A conference this Thursday afternoon at the Columbia University School of Journalism, “Media Reform: Is It Good for Journalism?” is set to address the timely issues of ownership and consolidation, and will include a broader discussion about the largely undeveloped topic of the intersection of regulation and journalism.

The broadcast industry has labored for decades under rules limiting ownership of broadcast licenses. The very origin of some of the ownership rules is ironic. After the Washington Post exposed the Watergate scandal, the Nixon Administration subsequently promulgated rules that limited the broadcast ownership of companies such as the Washington Post.

A reasonable person might imagine that liberal groups in favor of freedom of speech would champion the abolition of these rules. They are unconstitutional and have their origins in efforts to silence political enemies. But in a paradox that is uniquely American, progressive groups have become the most articulate defenders of the Nixonian press and broadcast ownership rules. But the old definition of a liberal, one who is in favor of open discourse and free exchange of ideas, no longer holds.

Some conferences on press and broadcast ownership have resembled more 1960s-style teach-ins than intellectual debates. At the recent National Conference for Media Reform in Memphis, Jesse Jackson, Jane Fonda, and other celebrities of the left spoke. A candidate for president and congressman from Ohio, Dennis Kucinich, announced plans to hold oversight hearings on the FCC’s press and broadcast ownership rules.

Organized by the dean of the School of Journalism, Nicholas Lemann, Thursday’s conference will have an impressive panel of intellectuals and journalists. Mr. Lemann, no stranger to press and broadcast ownership rules, a few years ago wrote one of the most insightful reviews of FCC proceedings for the New Yorker.

Conference attendees should be entertained by the sight of journalists reviewing a public-policy issue self-consciously from the perspective of journalists. For professionals who often champion detached objectivity, introspection is awkward. If a policy is good for society but bad for journalists, is it any less worthy? Conversely, if a policy is bad for society but good for journalists, can it have any merit? And if a policy is bad for society, is it any worse merely because it is bad for journalists?

Part of the American public seems to idealize a time when Walter Cronkite, the conference’s keynote speaker, was watched by a third or more of American households on a daily basis. Paradoxically, those are now widely deemed the “good old days” for press and broadcast ownership. Today, when Americans have choices of countless sources of news from Al Jazeera to the China Daily, and when a television personality would be wildly successful with even a 5% market share, there is concern that press and broadcast outlets are too concentrated.

A professor at the University of North Carolina, Hodding Carter III, is another speaker. His father founded the Delta Democrat-Times, the daily newspaper in Greenville, Mississippi. Smalltown newspapers and small-town broadcast stations are dying, some more rapidly than others. Do current federal rules hasten their untimely demise and with them journalistic opportunities in small towns?

Yet another speaker is the former editor in chief of Time, Norman Pearlstine. Its parent company, Time Warner, recently announced retrenchments on print magazines and greater focus on online distribution. Inexplicably, federal rules limit newspaper ownership for broadcasters, but not magazine ownership.

The real draw Thursday could be the commissioner of the FCC, Michael Copps. More than anyone else, he has kept press and broadcast ownership a viable issue when all such rules seemed destined to end in 2001. Together with his colleague Jonathan Adelstein, Mr. Copps has been the most effective Democrat in Washington over the past five years. Fortunately for Republicans, but not for Democrats, Mr. Copps is not running for president.

A former FCC commissioner, Mr. Furchtgott-Roth is president of Furchtgott-Roth Economic Enterprises. He can be reached at hfr@furchtgott-roth.com.