Archive for August, 2006
Monday, August 28th, 2006 by Jen Howard
Big Media’s latest opponent is former Vice President Al Gore. In an interview on Sunday, Gore blasted corporate media giants, calling them “a major threat to democracy.’
“Democracy as a system for self-governance is facing more serious challenges now than it has faced for a long time,” Gore told the Edinburgh International Television Festival. “Democracy is a conversation, and the most important role of the media is to facilitate that conversation of democracy. Now the conversation is more controlled, it is more centralized.”
He noted that in places like Italy and Russia, a few economic and political interests control the media, stamping out free expression and censoring important information. But he didn’t pull his punches when it came to the U.S. media.
“The only thing that matters in American politics now is having enough money to put 30-second commercials on the air often enough to convince the voters to elect you or re-elect you,” Gore said. “The person who has the most money to run the most ads usually wins.”
Click here to read the full article.
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Monday, August 28th, 2006 by Tim Karr
Last week, the LA Times editorialized against limits on media ownership, which the FCC is trying to eliminate or relax again after its earlier 2003 attempt was “smacked down” (in the Times’ own desperate-to-be-hip phrase) by a Federal appeals court.
Of course, the Times has the right to editorialize as it sees fit. As A.J. Liebling said, “Freedom of the press is guaranteed (only to those who own one).” And the paper did mention, as part of its un-full “full disclosure,” down in the penultimate paragraph, that it does happen to be owned by the Tribune Co., which would profit greatly if media ownership limits were lifted.
What’s noteworthy is how wrong and biased the “facts” are that the Times presented to make its case. For example, the paper marginalizes those who tried to block then-FCC Chairman Michael Powell’s wholesale lifting of ownership limits as “a motley alliance of anti-corporate zealots and conservative activists.”
Hmmm…. Well, in my own full disclosure, the group I head, the Center for Creative Voices in Media, opposed the FCC in 2003, but I’m not sure which side of that alliance we’re on.
At any rate, here’s how it really went down (my own desperate-to-be-hip phrase), and what the Times doesn’t care to mention as the editorial page dutifully carries Tribune’s corporate water. It was the Republican-controlled US Congress, in a bill then signed into law by a Republican president, that overturned key portions of the FCC’s Tribune-friendly 2003 decision. Then, in 2004, a Federal appeals court overturned as “arbitrary and capricious” the rest of the FCC’s decision.
The Republican US Department of Justice then refused to join Tribune in appealing that court decision up to the US Supreme Court. In 2005, the US Supreme Court then rejected Tribune’s appeal.
So now, the FCC is starting the process of doing Tribune’s bidding all over again. So let’s see who’s in this conspiratorial “motley alliance” against Tribune’s efforts to buy up more local and national media:
President George W. Bush
Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez
United States Senate
United States House of Representatives
United States Supreme Court
Third Circuit US Court of Appeals
Now THERE’S a “motley alliance”…. The editorial also fails to mention that the FCC received over three million public comments in its media ownership proceeding, of which well over 99 percent opposed the Tribune/FCC push to allow large media companies to buy up more national and local media outlets.
At what point does “motley alliance of zealots and activists” turn into overwhelming bipartisan public consensus?
Whatever point that is on the issue of whether Big Media should get Bigger, surely we’ve passed it. The Tribune/FCC effort to eliminate reasonable media ownership limits failed not because of some marginal “motley alliance,” but because the public and its elected representatives from both parties overwhelmingly realized it was a really, really bad idea.
Reasonable media ownership limits on national and local media conglomerates are absolutely necessary to preserve competition in news, as well as diverse voices and viewpoints in our democratic discourse. With the Times’ editorial shamelessly slanting and omitting the facts to promote Tribune’s business interests over the public interest, it unwittingly proves that very point.
– This post was written by Jonathan Rintels, the founder of the Center for Creative Voices in Media. It was originally published at Huffington Post.
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Thursday, August 17th, 2006 by Ben Byrne
The FCC officially re-opened the ownership proceeding on June 21, meaning the deadline to comment with the FCC is coming up in September. There's a lot at stake in this proceeding, and we can't afford for anyone who wishes to have a say in our media system miss their opportunity to weigh in.
Fortunately, we've made it easy to know precisely how much time is left on the FCC's clock. Our new countdown timer is easy to display on your blog or Web site, and will help your readers realize it's important to take action sooner rather than later. To publish it, simply paste this code on your site where you'd like it to appear:
<script src="http://www.stopbigmedia.com/countdown.js"></script>
If you post the timer or spot it somewhere, comment below so we know where to see it in action...
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Thursday, August 10th, 2006 by Tim Karr
The runaway consolidation of radio station ownership has led to industry layoffs and stifled wage growth, according to a study released yesterday by the Future of Music Coalition — a StopBigMedia Coalition member.
The Future of Music Coalition (FMC) study found that cities with higher radio consolidation had greater job losses among news reporters and broadcast technicians from 1996 to 2003. According to the study’s authors these job losses impede FCC mandates to promote localism and diversity in media.
The FMC and other organizations cited the study in calling on the FCC to recognize the correlation between deregulation and job loss among radio employees as it now debates whether to further loosen ownership limits.
Fewer newsroom jobs equals fewer resources for reporting local news, said Linda Foley, president of The Newspaper Guild-CWA (also a coalition member). “No wonder radio news, once the primary source of local news and information, has all but disappeared from the American landscape.”
“Before the FCC moves forward to further loosen already weak ownership limits, it should understand the impact that deregulation has had on jobs and communities,” Jenny Toomey, executive director of FMC, said in a release yesterday.
According to Toomey consolidation “has devastated the broadcast profession and virtually eliminated the ability of radio stations to provide unique coverage of local news, music and community issues.”
The 1996 Telecommunications Act eliminated the cap on the number of radio stations one company, organization, or individual may own nationally, and loosened limits on ownership of stations within a single market. Since 1996, as radio companies have consolidated, they have cut costs by centralizing some operations in distant markets, according to FMC’s study.
A similar study on jobs and diversity in the communications and media sector by Institute for Women’s Policy Research also corroborates FMC’s findings on job losses and depressed wage growth. This study, entitled “Making the Right Call”, can be found at http://www.iwpr.org/pdf/C364.pdf.
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Sunday, August 6th, 2006 by Craig Aaron
That’s the question tackled by Robert W. McChesney of Free Press and Norman Lear, the famed TV producer and founder of People for the American Way, in a must-read op-ed in Saturday’s Los Angeles Times.
They warn that if FCC Chairman Kevin Martin gets his way, “the last vestiges of local media competition would be swept away, smoothing the way for ‘media company towns’ in which News Corp. or, yes, the Tribune Co.” — owner of the LAT — “could dominate public discourse.”
Then they break down why “what’s good for Big Media’s bottom line isn’t always good for the rest of us”:
The first casualty of “media company towns” would be journalism. When one firm owns most of a city’s news outlets, who needs a bunch of competing newsrooms? Investigative reporting and extensive local coverage requires a costly staff. It’s far cheaper to syndicate fare from headquarters than to support a diversity of local voices. If your readers and viewers don’t like it, where else are they going to go? … Once the big chains start selling and swapping their properties to build up larger fiefdoms, the already declining number of independent and minority owners will be further squeezed out.
And they blow up the myth of “deregulation”:
Industry and Wall Street propaganda says local media can’t compete without further consolidation. Yet media companies already enjoy higher profit margins than most industries. They say we must deregulate. But radio and TV station ownership is by definition regulated — these are the public airwaves and there are only so many channels available in a community. The only question is on whose behalf will Washington make the rules: major media companies or the public?
Well, maybe there’s one more question: Will more major media outlets with a financial stake the outcome actually cover this fight over the future of local media?
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Friday, August 4th, 2006 by Craig Aaron
Read a guest blog from Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-N.Y.), chairman of the Future of American Media Caucus:
With the FCC announcing that it will review media ownership rules in the near future, this week I led a group of 84 House members in calling on the agency’s chairman, Kevin J. Martin, to conduct the review in an open and transparent fashion that allows for public input.
In a letter to Chairman Martin, we wrote:
While we were pleased to learn that the FCC is planning to upgrade its website and schedule meetings to respond to public interest in its Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM) on media ownership, we strongly believe that this does not go far enough. Indeed, the FCC has the opportunity and the responsibility to get it right this time by scheduling an extensive, national series of town hall meetings during this round of discussion, both in major media markets and small rural towns, to collect empirical data and conduct a thorough analysis on the state of media ownership and consolidation … Furthermore, the FCC must also fully disclose all proposed rule changes and give the American people a fair chance to review and weigh in on any such proposal. Such activity should include, at the very least, another extended comment period with second visits to all of the markets targeted by the current ANPRM’s town hall meetings.
Since first being enacted in the 1940s, media ownership rules have served to ensure that a wide array of companies and individuals own news outlets. However, since the 1996 Telecommunications Act, along with other steps under the Reagan administration, the United States has seen a significant relaxation of caps that limit the number of outlets one company may own in a single market. The result has been the creation of media conglomerates such as Time Warner and Viacom, while independent broadcasters have been forced out of business. The American public has lost the wide array of sources for news and entertainment that they once had.
In 2003, the FCC sought to further weaken local TV ownership limits, national TV ownership caps, and newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership rules. If those rules had been enacted, a single corporation would have been allowed to acquire as many as three television stations, eight radio stations, and the only daily newspaper in a single media market. The Third Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals agreed that the FCC was overstepping its bounds, rejected the new rules, and remanded the issue back to the Commission. The Court also criticized the FCC for failing to disclose parts of the new rules for public comment.
In our letter to Chairman Martin, we wrote:
The FCC’s new rulemaking process will greatly affect the democratic discourse in our nation, impacting how media companies control and influence what the American public reads, sees and hears. Access to diverse sources of information is necessary to maintain the informed citizenry that is crucial to a functioning democracy. We therefore urge the Commission to invite the greatest level of public participation possible in your deliberation of new ownership rules.
Hopefully, Chairman Martin will respond favorably to the letter we sent him. It is absolutely critical that we implement policies that would restore fairness in broadcasting, reduce media concentration, ensure that broadcasters meet their public interest requirements, and promote diversity, localism, and competition in American media.
Click here to read the full letter and see the list of signatories.
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