A challenging year for U.S. consumers.(View point: the consumers union perspective)

Media mega-mergers. Spiraling prices of prescription drugs. Staggering numbers of identity-theft victims. As the year closes, consumers face high-stakes battles in those and other areas of a complex, ever-changing marketplace.

Consumers Union has tried to focus the public and policy-makers on these and other issues critical to consumers' health, safety, and pocketbooks. What follows are the highlights:

Media ownership. When the Federal Communications Commission considered relaxing the rules on media ownershipa-a move that would let media conglomerates swallow up local TV stations and newspapers--Consumers Union launched a major advocacy campaign to preserve media-ownership limits. CU believes the limits are needed to ensure that consumers get diverse, competitive, and local media outlets in their communities. The response from the public and lawmakers may force the FCC to rewrite the rules.

Financial privacy. Preserving rights to financial privacy and preventing identity theft are hot-button issues for consumers. So CU created a tailored Web site that allows consumers to contact their elected representatives directly on those topics. Californians have the toughest financial-privacy law in the U.S. thanks in part to CU's West Coast Regional Office, which was the leading consumer force behind its enactment. In short, the law requires financial institutions to get consumers' consent before sharing sensitive financial information with most third parties.

Prescription drugs. As drug expenditures continued to climb at double-digit rates, fueling hikes in health-insurance premiums, CU worked on legislation to give consumers objective information about the comparative effectiveness of prescription drugs and thereby lessen reliance on misleading ...