Newspaper Owners Scoff at the Public Process
The newspaper industry’s publication of record today critiqued publishers for refusing to acknowledge public involvement in the debate over common ownership of a newspaper and a broadcast station.
In a commentary for Editor & Publisher, Mark Fitzgerald writes that newspapers and the news media in general “scoff at — and never engage in public debate with — the many pro-regulation activists who have figured out how to stoke and channel public distrust of Big Media.”
Big Media owners imposed a news blackout on the issue when it came before the FCC in 2003, according to Fitzgerald, writing next to nothing about the proposed rule changes:
“When the public did start hearing about the proposals — mostly from ‘media democracy’ advocates and their Op-Ed sympathizers — it turned out the more they knew about media deregulation, the less they liked it.”
Back then, citizens overran the FCC with objections to then Chairman Michael Powell’s plan to lift the last remaining limits to cross ownership and unleash a wave of more media consolidation. Now, Republican FCC chairman Kevin Martin is poised to lift the cross-ownership prohibition.
But, according to Fitzgerald, “the newspaper industry appears to be falling back on the same strategy of engaging bureaucrats and commissioners — but mostly declining to take its case to the American people.”
 |
Even industry lobbyists such as the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) is afraid to engage the overwhelming public opposition to cross-ownership.
NAA President and CEO John F. Sturm (pictured right) told Fitzgerald that the association “will not participate in the unofficial hearings that have taken place that I think are nothing but unstructured pep rallies, [and concern] issues that have nothing to do with cross-ownership.”
So much for the democratic process. Reading between the lines, you can discern Sturm’s age-old approach to making policy: “Screw public input; we’ll get this done in quiet consultation with Washington bureaucrats.”
Fitzgerald writes:
“Newspapers cannot on the one hand argue that their special place in democracy and liberty of expression entitles them to be free of government-imposed regulations like the cross-ownership ban — and on the other hand, refuse to mix it up by arguing their case in any arena more public than the file cabinets of the FCC.”
Fitzgerald adds:
“As important as debating the issue, is covering it. Newspapers and network television shamed themselves three years ago by telling the public little or nothing about media rule change that were in the works. It wasn’t a failure of journalism, so much as a willful dereliction of duty to democracy.”
The industry seems to believe that policies can be written without the public’s informed consent. Fitzgerald concludes that that approach failed in 2003, “and I’m betting it won’t work this time around, either.”
