No Details on New Rules from FCC
Posted June 21st, 2006 by Craig Aaron
The Federal Communications Commission today launched its latest attempt to change longstanding rules on local media ownership. StopBigMedia.com called for greater public involvement and more details on the specific changes Chairman Kevin Martin actually plans to push through later this year.
At a meeting today in Washington, the FCC issued a “Notice of Proposed Rulemaking,” the first step in any new media ownership regulations. But Martin did not outline exact rules the FCC could implement by the end of the year.
“This innocuous-looking document initiates the single most important public policy debate that the FCC will tackle this year,” said Commissioner Michael Copps. “Don’t let its slimness fool you. It means that this Commission has begun to decide on behalf of the American people the future of our media. It means deciding whether or not to accelerate media concentration, step up the loss of local news and change forever the critical role independent newspapers perform for our country.”
The commissioners voted to launch the new process with partial dissents from Commissioners Jonathan Adelstein and Copps.
“The manner in which the Commission is launching this critical proceeding is totally inadequate,” Adelstein said. “It is like submitting a high-school term paper for a Ph.D. thesis. The large media companies wanted, and today they get, a blank check to permit further media consolidation.”
The new rulemaking allows 120 days for public comment, and FCC Chairman Kevin Martin pledged at today’s hearing to hold “half a dozen” public hearings and conduct independent studies. Numerous members of the StopBigMedia.com Coalition responded:
“For far too long, media policy in this country has been made behind closed doors in the public’s name but without our informed consent,” said Robert W. McChesney, president of Free Press. “Despite overwhelming public opposition to greater media consolidation from across the entire political spectrum, the FCC and industry lobbyists are trying to sneak through the same misguided rules rejected in 2003. Chairman Kevin Martin appears to have learned little from the last ownership rules debacle. But the public’s views are clear: Big Media is already big enough.”
The Wurlitzer Effect is a musical term to describe a continuous that gets louder as it continues. Recently, it has taken on a political meaning. If we keep saying something is true, eventually people will believe it. Now, its time to put a new spin on the word.
We’re in front of this storm a bit, but it’s not a storm just yet. That’s where our voices come in. What follows is an e-mail I sent to one of my US Senators from NC, Elizabeth Dole, voicing my opposition to the FCC changes. In my experience, such things are not very influential because everyone starts too late or sends them for only a short period of time. That’s where our new Wurlitzer Effect comes in. In starting a lobbying campaign now via calls, e-mails, letters to editors, etc.; we can grow grass from its roots until it reaches an unignorable anit-big media message.
I hope some of you will be able to use the letter below to help begin this grassroots approach in your area to compliment our counterparts in Washington. Use it as you will! Change it as you will! Write your own! Just begin the hum of discontent now and let’s work it up into a roar.
Yours,
JR
Attached:
To the Congressional Office of Senator Elizabeth Dole,
I am a student at Appalachian State University and a life-long resident of North Carolina. Recently, it has come to my attention that the FCC is reviewing its policy regulating the ownership of media companies. In 2003, the last time this review took place, the FCC attempted to severly loosen regulations on company ownership, resulting in Prometheus v. FCC (Case no. 03-3388). The deregulation was overturned, but the FCC is making a second attempt.
The core of my stance against this move is that the consolidation of media sources puts a stanglehold on the flow of information resulting in economic imbalances of knowledge, power, and independence detrimental to our nation. As any economist will tell you, the more information the market has, the better its resource distribution. However, when one agent, organization, or side of the market has more information than another; they are able to exploit the comparative ignorance of their opponent causing an inefficient distribution.
In the case of the FCC’s deregulation of media ownership, the anticipated mergers and acquisitions it will license will choke information off from the audience. In the name of economic efficiency; news will increasingly be recycled at every level and medium, more reporting will be done by free-lance writers, and local news will disappear. Not to mention the conflict of interest of marrying news to business. The resulting potential for information hegemony will leave the general public less able to be democratic (by being less informed); more exploitable as consumers, laborers, and entrepreneurs; and less able to critique and actualize themselves.
Because of these things, I feel that is essential for the good of our community, state, and nation that this particular form of deregulation be stopped. As my honarable representative to United States Senate, I am asking you to act on my behalf and on the behalf of the people of our great state.
Sincerely,
June 21st, 2006 at 7:47 pmJason Radford
We already have almost totally sanitized and scripted news information from TV and cable with a lot of redundancy, and times when cable stations go on and on about one case for months and months and even years. We need as many other sources as possible to increase their numbers such as university, local, and regional radio stations, numerous small town and rural newspapers and even bulletins and the whole gamut of possible paper media.
And here we also have the everyday man’s access to the Internet under seige by lobbyists in Washington who are wining, dining, and sixty-nining our congressional representatives while showering them with campaign contributions (and a lot more).
If “Big Business Media Conglomeration, (i.e., BBMC)” (i.e., Rupert Murdoch (owner of Fox News, etc., etc., etc.) is allowed to buy up more and more of the local and regional news media and independents as easily and as cheaply as they want to, much news as we know it will be lost, curtailed, and changed for the worst with yet more mouthpieces of the BBMC in one way or another, decreasing independent media that we need!
June 26th, 2006 at 3:08 pm