Hinchey Speaks Out on Media Ownership

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.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 4th, 2006 at 1:21 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.