On election night in Honolulu, a Honolulu resident recorded the coverage aired by her local TV news outlets. Although she kept changing the channel, the coverage was the same on every station. That’s because three of Honolulu’s TV stations are controlled by a single company, Raycom Media. The stations share a single newsroom and broadcast identical news coverage.

Watch the video.

The nonprofit group Media Council Hawaii (MCH) is working to restore diversity and competition to Honolulu’s media landscape. MCH filed a complaint against Raycom with the Federal Communications Commission a year ago, citing contractual agreements that appear to violate the agency’s media ownership rules and asking the FCC to revoke Raycom’s station licenses. The FCC has yet to take action. Tell them they should.

Under FCC rules, it’s illegal for one company to own three TV stations in a single media market. Raycom has gotten away with controlling three because it doesn’t own the stations outright – it just operates them. But under an agreement signed with MCG Capital, which owns one of the three stations, Raycom paid $22 million for the majority of its assets, and receives 90 percent of the cash flow from the station. Raycom now controls production and sales and makes other key business decisions for all three stations. It’s ownership in all but name, and it’s a clever way to circumvent the FCC’s ownership rules by way of a contractual agreement that Raycom is not required to submit to the regulatory agency.

When Raycom signed the deal with MCG a year ago, there were dramatic changes to Honolulu’s media landscape. More than 60 people lost their jobs, many of them journalists. Operations for the CBS, NBC and mynetworkTV affiliates moved to the same building and consolidated newsrooms. Honolulu lost two whole news teams, and suddenly had access to just one set of viewpoints and one-third of the coverage, which is broadcast on all three stations. The stations even stopped pretending to maintain separate identities, calling their coverage “Hawaii News Now,” and doing away with network affiliation.

Raycom has so much power in Honolulu that it appears politically untouchable. In the run-up to the midterm elections, Raycom partnered with Honolulu’s leading daily paper to provide news coverage, with the result that residents could no longer turn to the paper for a different set of viewpoints and stories. And there’s almost no one left to cover Raycom’s flagrant violations of FCC ownership rules since Raycom is quickly becoming the only media game in town.

And Honolulu is not alone. All over the country, media companies are striking similar deals to get around FCC ownership rules and eliminate competition. It’s the newest pathway to consolidation, forged in the wake of the huge public outcry that put the brakes on big media’s plans to deregulate entirely in 2007. To help prevent covert consolidation from spreading, help Media Council Hawaii set precedent at the FCC.