SPOTLIGHT
FCC: Ready, Set, Consolidate
The new rules are awful, but the fight is far from over
"The big guys will get bigger and the little guys will have to decide whether they want to exist anymore." That thumbnail synopsis from a Wall Street analyst at the Sanford C. Bernstein firm says a great deal about how the FCC's revised rules on media ownership, handed down on June 2, may affect the way Americans get their news.
The battle over the rule changes raged for eighteen months, with media companies lobbying fiercely for relaxation, or even elimination, of ownership regulations. Consumer advocates waged a spirited but unsuccessful defense. The oddest of bedfellows joined forces to fight the proposed changes. On the right: the National Rifle Association, Family Research Council, Parents Television Council; on the left: Common Cause, Consumers Union, NOW. ("A dark day for democracy," said Common Cause's president.) Legislators, from Mississippi's Trent Lott to North Carolina's Ernest Hollings, demanded that the rules be left in place. More than 750,000 messages from angry citizens and groups clogged the FCC's mailroom and e-mail servers.
But FCC Chairman Michael Powell's mind was made up. He and his two Republican colleagues on the commission — amid bitter dissents from the two Democratic members — greased the skids for the national TV networks to buy up more television stations than they already own, for media companies to own both newspapers and TV stations in the same market, and (among other changes) for one entity to own as many as three TV stations in the same area. Broadcasters see a triumph of the First Amendment in the FCC's action, as the government loosens its regulatory chains. The groups representing consumers consider it a body blow to the three defining public interest goals: diversity of views, competition, and healthy local news and commentary.
Federal limits on broadcasters' power in the U.S. have an honorable history, starting in the 1930s when dictatorships in Europe strangled dissent by monopolizing access to the public. The U.S. Supreme Court repeatedly has ruled that the public's First Amendment rights trump those of media corporations, and that placing reasonable limits on Big Media's capacity to conglomerate is justified to defend citizens' rights.
The FCC's June 2 action is part of a larger picture: a natural extension of the present administration's policies on taxation, the budget, and the environment, which have supported the interests of the business community. Reed Hundt, a former FCC chairman, told Salon that the vote was less about principles of diversity, competition, and localism than an effort to strengthen a powerful alliance between the political right and Big Media.
Big Media worked hard for its victory. According to a report issued in late May by the Washington-based watchdog group The Center for Public Integrity, media companies spent $2.8 million over the last eight years transporting FCC commissioners and their staffs, free of charge, to meetings in places like Paris, Honolulu, Las Vegas, Rio de Janeiro, and London. Chairman Powell was the leading beneficiary of the industry's largesse: forty-four trips costing $84,921. The survey also noted that in the months leading up to June 2, FCC commissioners and their aides held seventy-one off-the-record meetings with broadcast executives, and only five with consumer advocates.
Broadcast and cable TV coverage of the crucial debate on media ownership in the months just before June 2 was disgracefully meager, when it wasn't brazenly pro-administration. (The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and Bill Moyers's Now were among the exceptions.)
The debate about media ownership, in fact, is not over — now that the waters have been roiled and the public is beginning to understand the stakes. In late June, a bipartisan group of Senate Commerce Committee members, in a rebuke to the FCC, approved legislation that would roll back much of the commission's deregulatory action of June 2. [Update: By a vote of 400 to 21, the House of Representatives passed legislation on July 23th to block the commission's deregulatory action.] Challenges also will be brought in the Washington, D.C., Circuit Court of Appeals. The issue will be campaign fodder for the 2004 elections.
By law, the FCC is obliged to review the regulations every two years, and therefore this entire process will be reprised in 2005, perhaps with even more dramatic results. For now, many Big Media execs swear they won't rush out and hungrily swallow up media properties to boost their power and their revenues. ("We're going to take little bites," said a Tribune Company vice president.) But that misses the point. What we risk over the long haul is ownership creep that may eventually see the end of the few remaining rules, and with them, the public's right to the widest possible array of news and opinion — at which point, robust, independent, antagonistic, many-voiced journalism may be only a memory.
Enjoy this piece? Consider a CJR trial subscription.
