- The Federal Communications Commission is presently conducting
an inquiry--a "rulemaking"--to determine whether to relax, or
even to eliminate, the remaining few regulations that limit how many media
entities a single company may own. Regulations still standing include:
prohibiting the ownership of a TV station and a newspaper in the same community;
limiting a company to owning not more than 35 percent of all TV stations
in the United States; and limiting a single company to providing cable
TV services to no more than 30 percent of the US population. The FCC will
likely reach a decision by the summer. This rulemaking is going on in virtual
secrecy, with powerful corporate lobbyists dominating the deliberations.
The stakes are extremely high. For the firms, such a relaxation could mean
a dramatic rise in company value almost overnight. For the public, further
deregulation will lead to another wave of media consolidation, with all
that that suggests for the marketplace of ideas.
-
- The case opposing further deregulation is being organized
by the Consumer Federation of America and the Center for Digital Democracy.
The following was written to be part of their brief:
-
- We have read the various reports and filings before the
Federal Communications Commission concerning the proposed relaxation, or
elimination, of the last restrictions on media ownership. Our purpose here
is not to lay out any new empirical data in support of a position. Rather,
we wish to offer a few general points concerning the importance of these
rules--observations based on our combined four decades of research as media
scholars.
-
- First, there are no grounds in either law or history
for the notion that cable and broadcasting are essentially "free-market"
enterprises, in whose affairs the government must never intervene. The
very fact that these are now commercial enterprises was itself determined
not by God or nature, but at a certain point in time by public policy.
Such markets could not even exist without government licensing of monopoly
rights to spectrum or cable franchises. When the government allocates these
privileges, it does not set the terms of competition so much as it selects
the winners of that competition. The issue, therefore, is not whether government
will play a role, but the precise identity of those whom it will serve
by intervening. To put it bluntly: Will it serve the people--and, if so,
how--or will it serve a few large profit-making entities? It is that question
which the policy debates are meant to answer.
-
- Second, for communication policy to be most effective
in a functioning democracy, it requires the greatest possible degree of
informed participation by the public. If the hearings on these regulations
are restricted to self-interested commercial parties, with only marginal
participation by any other interests, the outcome will surely be agreeable
to those well-fixed insiders--and no one else. Given the importance of
these regulations, it is imperative that the FCC and Congress act to open
up such hearings to the general public, and to facilitate their contribution
to the ongoing debate. The commission certainly should not relax the rules
concerning media ownership without the informed consent of the American
people.
-
- Third, in these times of excessive corporate influence
on US politics, the FCC must be particularly vigilant against corruption
of its policy-making. The same large private firms that have been lobbying
aggressively for relaxation of these rules are also among the largest donors
to the campaigns of Congressional and presidential candidates. (They are
also among the main beneficiaries of outlandish campaign spending, as TV
stations profit hugely from political advertising, and therefore lobby
hard against campaign finance reform.) Thus there is a powerful whiff of
impropriety to this whole process--especially since these hearings are
unknown to nearly all Americans. The commission must do everything within
its power to ensure that it does not lose popular respect. In our view,
hearings should be held in communities across the nation rather than in
tightly controlled Washington offices.
-
- Along these lines, we should add that during the course
of discussing media issues with several members of Congress in January
2002, it became clear that virtually none of them, including a member of
the committee that oversees the FCC, are aware of the current FCC hearings,
despite the fact that these hearings rank among the most important in the
FCC's sixty-eight-year history. This has the earmarks of the sort of backroom
politicking that has marked some of the darkest chapters in American history.
-
- Fourth, the FCC should not share the presumption, common
to the media corporations, that whatever is most lucrative for them is
also best for the American people. On the contrary: The commission ought
to honor the ideals of our democracy by holding the presumption that our
media should not be centralized by any sort of concentrated ownership,
whether governmental or commercial. As the commissioners know, this nation
was founded on--and, indeed, enabled by--the principle that centralized
control over the press is incompatible with genuine self-government. The
Founders understood the crucial democratic value of a press system that
would give the people more than just a choice of different items penned
by others, but a daily chance to speak up for themselves. A huge cartel
that deals in very similar journalistic "product"--and one dominated
not by citizens but by transnational corporations--was surely not what
Jefferson or Adams had in mind.
-
- Fifth, to put this another way, unless there is overwhelming
evidence that letting media firms own still more media will somehow raise
the quality of broadcast news and entertainment, the FCC should at least
maintain the regulatory status quo--or even consider further tightening
the rules. The fact that further concentration poses no immediate threat
to the Republic does not justify the relaxation of the current rules. The
historical record offers ample evidence that we cannot foresee the full
effects of such a move, and so caution here is well advised. Trying to
restore such regulations once they have been lifted would be near-impossible,
so powerful are the media lobbies.
-
- Sixth, one need only look at the current state of radio
to see what's likely to ensue should the regulations be relaxed. The 1996
Telecommunications Act deregulated radio broadcasting so that any single
firm could thenceforth own as many stations as it wished. (Previously the
national cap had been twenty-eight.) The consequence: Over the past six
years, the nation's radio stations have been gobbled up by just a handful
of colossal firms, like Clear Channel and Viacom, that each own hundreds
of stations--and up to eight in certain of the cities where they operate.
These behemoths use their market power to standardize their fare, lower
the amount of local programming (which now appears to cost too much) and
jack up the amount of advertisements and overall commercialism. Small stations,
unable to compete, sell out, and listeners pay the price. (Drive across
the country with your car radio on, and you will hear the same thing playing
everywhere.) It may be good for Wall Street and the pricey lobbyists inside
the beltway, but on Main Street it means mostly trash and boredom.
-
- Seventh, the claims of the media giants should be taken
with a giant grain of salt. All their arguments are mere fig leaves, posed
to hide their naked self-concern. For example, the giants claim that deregulation
will spur competition, lower prices and better service. If there were any
truth to that proposition, those corporations and their lobbyists would
not be pushing for it. The truth is that such deregulation will permit
those firms to get so much larger that they will have less fear of real
competition and all the more ability to commercialize their content for
the sake of greater profit. This truth is well-known in the business community,
whose members categorically dismiss the cant that these firms feed the
FCC in their pursuit of more deregulation.
-
- Eighth, the media giants also claim that the emergence
of the Internet moots all social, aesthetic, political and cultural concerns
about increasing media concentration. After all, the argument goes, what
does it matter if a few companies have massive empires when there are millions
of websites operating at minimal cost competing for our attention? The
problem with this argument is that the market-driven Internet has not given
rise to a new generation of commercially viable media content providers.
Capitalism trumps technology. It is now clear that for the Internet to
provide a well-funded alternative to corporate media fare, it will require
explicit policies to enable that development. And it is also clear that
if the media corporations are allowed to get larger than they are already,
they will be even better positioned to maintain their dominance in the
digital era and to snuff out any potential challenger in its digital infancy.
-
- Ninth, there are some--even among those who are critical
of the US media system--who believe that such concerns as ours are overblown.
After all, they say, media content was no better decades ago, when there
was greater competition. Or, they might argue, the much-romanticized small
commercial media frequently provide worse fare than what the media giants
offer us. These comments are beside the point. Certainly, the concentration
of the media is not the only factor that affects the conduct of the press
or the quality of entertainment. Even more competitive markets in broadcasting
have flaws, due to the obsessive pursuit of profit and, in particular,
the reliance upon advertising as a major source of funding.
-
- To a great extent, commercialism per se is the problem,
for while the commercial media have given us some excellent material over
time, there are some kinds of work--dramatic, comedic, journalistic--that
they are disinclined to invest in. Moreover, the media giants' overemphasis
on a few large demographic blocs has neglected many other, smaller audiences,
and has contributed immensely to the dumbing down of both news and entertainment.
For these reasons, we need, as a crucial complement to the commercial media,
a broad range of independent, nonprofit and noncommercial outlets. Such
a new resource would certainly enrich our culture and society--and so would
a more competitive commercial sphere. While concentration at the top is
surely not the only factor that affects the media's performance, the fact
is that in nearly every instance, the overall effect of such consolidation
has been negative, both for the media's workers and the audience.
-
-
- Tenth, the champions of further ownership deregulation
do make two noteworthy points: First, the emergence of digital technologies,
which undermine the distinctions among media, has made traditional regulations
obsolete. Second, it is indeed unfair that some media companies and industries
cannot compete on equal terms with firms that have had the good fortune
to perform in the less-regulated media sectors. The solution to this problem
is, however, not to abandon media ownership regulations entirely, but to
revise them to take the new technologies into consideration, and then to
generate new rules that apply across all media. Such regulations can never
be generated in the forums currently provided by the FCC, where high-roller
lobbyists make their case behind closed doors, without participation by,
or awareness of, the public.
-
- To conclude, the FCC should not now relax the media ownership
regulations to permit greater media concentration. Any hearings into the
alteration of these rules should be moved well outside the beltway, with
numerous public forums established for broad-based citizen participation.
The commission should be openly--and proudly--biased toward media multiplicity
and not further concentration, which now poses a considerable threat to
our democracy.
-
- http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=special&c=2&s=miller20020221
|