Archive for April, 2007
Saturday, April 28th, 2007 by Jen Howard
The cover story of Tampa’s premiere alternative weekly, Creative Loafing, warns of the dangers of media consolidation — noting how thoroughly local giant Media General has been able to dominate the Tampa market.
With holdings that include the local NBC affiliate, WFLA-TV 8, the daily Tampa Tribune, Spanish-language weekly Centro Mi Diario and online hub TBO.com — Media General controls many of Tampa Bay’s most popular sources of news and information.
The FCC is hosting its fourth hearing on media ownership rules in Tampa partly because of Media General’s “convergence project,” which has combined the operations of its TV station, newspaper and online hub under one roof.
While Media General is touting convergence as the way to “deliver stronger local journalism” — the evidence suggests it’s doing the opposite.
Convergence presents reporters with an inherent conflict when writing about the other outlets owned by their parent company. And with recent staff cuts and reporters doing double and triple duty pushing stories across multiple platforms, Media General’s convergence has meant that fewer viewpoints and less news and information are dominating more of Tampa’s outlets.
Yet Media General still wants the FCC to get rid of ownership rules that have reined in its ability to further converge and consolidate Tampa’s media market. In filings with the FCC, it claimed that Tampa’s local Web sites provide viable competition to its TV station and newspaper — to the point where local ownership rules are no longer necessary.
A study by Free Press refutes Media General’s argument. Analyzing Web sites listed in Media General’s filing, Free Press found that local, independent Web sites do not produce enough original news or content to be considered competition to the Tampa giant. Among the stories studied:
- Only 11.4 percent contained original reporting of any kind — and the bulk of these were concert and restaurant reviews.
- Only 3 percent of the stories contained original reporting on “hard” news topics such as crime, education and local government or politics.
- Nearly half of the stories were not locally focused.
- Over 70 percent of the stories were “soft” news or entertainment stories.
The Free Press study also found that Tampa residents still overwhelmingly rely on traditional media outlets — like the Tribune and WFLA-TV — for their news and information. The average number of unique monthly visitors to the Web sites of the two major Tampa-area newspapers is nearly 90 times as large as those who visit Tampa’s independent Web sites.
Media General has millions of dollars, full-time staff, and the exclusive use of our public airwaves to dominate the local market. Without those kind of resources, local independent Web sites simply cannot compete or provide the diversity of viewpoints and information we need.
Whether it’s online or over-the-air, the bottom line is that the majority of our news and information is still produced by a few corporations.
Media General is sure to turn out their supporters and shills at the Tampa hearing — so it’s vital that public opposition to Big Media is heard.
If you live in the Tampa area, come to the FCC hearing.
Can’t make it? Tell the FCC to protect local, independent and diverse media.
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Friday, April 20th, 2007 by Jen Howard
“When it comes to the fate of the people’s airwaves — your airwaves — no voices should be as important as yours,” writes FCC Commissioner Michael Copps in an op-ed in today’s St. Petersburg Times.
Copps — an outspoken opponent of media consolidation — will join the four other FCC commissioners in Tampa, Fla., for the fourth official FCC hearing on media ownership. Urging Florida residents to come testify about the local impact of consolidation, Copps stressed the need for “more than an inside-the-Beltway discussion.”
>>>Map and directions to the Tampa hearing
“We need your input and the input of as many of our fellow citizens as we can elicit,” he writes. “I believe we have the best chance in our generation to settle this issue of who will control our media and for what purposes. But it will take a lot of us, working together, to make it happen.”
As a St. Petersburg-area high school graduate, Copps recalls a “vibrant media” with “locally originated programs, hometown talent, and good coverage of public issues and political campaigns.” He returns to Tampa on April 30 to “measure how much of that vibrancy remains.”
A broad coalition of national and local groups is urging the public to attend the hearing and tell the FCC how well their media has served — or failed to serve — their communities. To help local residents prepare their testimony and learn more about media issues, the groups have sponsored a series of training workshops.
>>>Get information about workshops
“We need to know whether the good folks of the town where I once lived feel they are being well-served by the media,” writes Commissioner Copps.
If you are in the Tampa Bay area, come out on April 30 and make your voice heard.
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Thursday, April 19th, 2007 by Tim Karr
Wally Bowen of Asheville’s Mountain Area Information Network today makes a strong case that Imus and other mainstream “shock jocks” are the ugly byproducts of a conglomerate-ruled broadcasting system that has failed to foster diversity in local media.
Radio and TV broadcasters have been given free access to public airwaves valued at more than $500 billion, he writes in today’s Asheville Citizen Times. In return for free licenses, broadcasters are required to demonstrate to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and their broadcast community that they are fulfilling stated public interest obligations.
But the FCC has done the opposite by allowing fewer and fewer companies to control more and more licenses.
“This is like the Division of Motor Vehicles removing speed and vehicle-size limits on our highways, while allowing a handful of trucking companies to own most of the vehicle licenses. It’s only a matter of time until a spectacular accident occurs,” writes Bowen, who also founded Asheville’s low-power FM station WPVN.
As we have said before, the Imus “accident” points to this systemic problem in our media: Most of our TV and radio stations are owned by giant corporate conglomerates. A tiny percentage of licensed stations are owned by people of color or women. This imbalance spawns mainstream media that don’t represent the views of most Americans — and make huge profits off the public airwaves.
In fact, Free Press did a little snooping and found that none of the more than 60 stations that aired “Imus In The Morning” at the time of its cancelation were owned by minorities. Stations that aired his talk show were more likely to be owned by large group owners — companies that own stations in multiple markets or own more than three stations in a single market.
“Wall Street and Madison Avenue require a highly-centralized media system in order to aggregate audiences for advertisers,” Bowen adds. “While this system is hugely profitable for Wall Street, its bankruptcy for our democracy and common culture is self-evident.”
Unlike local owners, national conglomerates are less likely to be responsive to the complaints of individual local listeners. The national owners are often hundreds of miles away, and likely have never even set foot in the communities where they control the airwaves.
And when you lose touch with your listeners and abuse your license to their airwaves, you’re more likely to crash.
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Friday, April 13th, 2007 by Tim Karr
The controversy over Don Imus’ racist remarks goes far beyond one bigoted commentator. But getting rid of Imus won’t fix the media problem.
While the recent remarks by Don Imus are deeply objectionable, StopBigMedia.com does not have a formal position on whether he should have been fired or retained. Our mission is to deal with government policies that shape the media system.
About the Imus issue, media scholar and Free Press co-founder Robert McChesney wrote:
Imus still is a free person. He can start a blog or, in all likelihood, find another media company willing to employ him. He has as many free speech rights as you or me. If someone suggests the government should remove his free speech rights, I will be the first to defend him.
But that does not mean Imus has a First Amendment right to a national radio or TV program, any more than you and I have a right to demand we get a national program on a TV network or radio network. When it comes to freedom of the press, the right and responsibility for what is produced, published and broadcast rests with the institution. MSNBC and CBS hold that First Amendment privilege, for the most part. The government cannot and should not force MSNBC or CBS to hire or fire a specific person. And if you feel strongly that MSNBC and CBS should retain Imus, or hire someone else to provide his style of humor, you should tell them.
It’s clear to McChesney and others that this is not a fight over the First Amendment. We are rather concerned with the government policies that establish the media system. We believe that this incident points to a systemic problem in our media: Most of our TV and radio stations are owned by giant corporate conglomerates. They don’t represent the views of most Americans — and they make huge profits off the public airwaves.
What Imus said is just the tip of the iceberg. Scores of other TV and radio hosts regularly make racist and sexist comments. The best way to stop this race to the bottom is to change who’s sitting at the top — and making the decisions about who’s behind the mic.
Right now, less than 10% of radio and television stations are owned by people of color or women. And, according to one industry study, only 2.5% of radio stations have a person of color in the role of general manager, and only 4.4% have a racial or ethnic minority in the role of news director. The percentage of women in these jobs isn’t much higher. No wonder shock jocks like Imus have been able to keep their jobs for so long.
But instead of addressing this national disgrace, the Federal Communications Commission is actually trying to let the largest companies buy up even more stations!
According to McChesney:
Women of color, like those Rutgers basketball players, own almost nothing. The FCC has refused to follow its congressional mandate to advance minority media ownership; indeed, we have been going in the wrong direction for a good decade. This is not the only reason we end up with someone like Imus broadcast coast to coast, but it is a factor. It is one we can and must change.
One of the best ways to get new voices on television and radio is by addressing the lack of diversity in media ownership. Promoting diverse media ownership and protecting freedom of speech are not mutually exclusive or contradictory. In fact, we can and must aggressively fight for both.
If you agree, work with the StopBigMedia.com Coalition to demand media ownership that better reflects the diversity that makes our nation great.
>> Tell the FCC: We Need More Diversity in the Media
>> Tell Your Friends to Join in This Action
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Wednesday, April 11th, 2007 by Tim Karr
Just in time for the FCC Tampa hearing, conglomerate Media General, which owns both the Tampa Tribune and WFLA Channel 8, has cut 70 newspaper staff from its payroll.
According to an Associated Press report, the cost-cutting measures include consolidation and outsourcing of certain “unspecified operations” and combining sections of the paper.
Media General’s ownership of the Tribune and WFLA was grandfathered under the 1975 cross-ownership ban, which prohibits a company from owning a daily newspaper and a television station or a radio station in the same market.
The Virginia-based conglomerate has put its Tampa newspaper in the same building with its television station and online operation, “the better to exchange stories and, ostensibly, resources.”
This inbred relationship between newsrooms has degraded both coverage and staffing. Spokespeople for the media giant like to sugar coat these sorts of cost cutting efforts with terms like “convergence” and “synergy.” In reality they translate to mean layoffs and cheapened news.
In 2003, WFLA was chastised in national media for its outrageous practice of charging guests $2,500 to appear with the program’s hosts on its news magazine show, “Daytime.” But the Tribune took a “kinder and gentler” approach to the story, rushing in to defend “Daytime” as an “advertiser-driven talk show” with “no journalism elements.”
The news conglomerate chose to ignore standing FCC statutes that prohibit such on-air shilling without disclosure — as evidenced by its decision in October 2006 to air a “video news release” (a prepackage corporate press release dressed up to look like local news) prepared by the American College of Physicians.
One Tribune TV critic reported that editors “forced him to lay off criticism of WFLA for nearly a year prior to the opening of the News Center [which is the name for the building that houses the Tribune and WFLA news operations], supposedly to avoid ill will between the staffs.”
Examples of the Media General’s approach to “convergence” in Tampa make a solid case for retaining the newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership rule that prevents these types of abuses from occurring elsewhere.
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Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007 by Jen Howard
Members of the StopBigMedia.com Coalition say that the recent the sale of the Tribune Co. to real estate mogul Sam Zell should not be not be approved without an agreement to follow existing media ownership rules.
Current FCC rules prohibit cross-ownership of a radio or television station and newspaper in the same market — the new Tribune owner would have to sell off the cross-owned stations or newspapers. The present Tribune owners were able to bypass the media ownership rules through special backroom deals with the FCC.
When the cross-ownership ban was passed in 1975, the FCC “grandfathered” the Tribune’s ownership of the Chicago Tribune and WGN-TV and WGN radio in Chicago. In 2000, the FCC granted a special temporary waiver that allowed the Tribune to own both a major daily newspaper and a TV station in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Hartford, Conn., Los Angeles and New York.
But the temporary waiver is set to expire soon — and the grandfather protections don’t apply to any new Tribune Co. owners.
“Tribune is betting that it can get the FCC to bend its rules,” said Andrew Jay Schwartzman, president of Media Access Project. “It was wrong the first time, and now there is an even higher obstacle to obtaining regulatory relief. The fact that there are willing buyers like Eli Broad and Ron Burkle who would break up the newspaper/TV combinations makes it especially hard to justify a special FCC waiver.”
In June 2006, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin initiated a review of the ownership rules — with the clear intention of allowing Big Media to swallow up more local outlets.
At all three official media ownership hearings, the overwhelming majority of people have testified in opposition to lifting the cross-ownership ban or relaxing any of the existing media ownership rules. And the fourth hearing in Tampa on April 30 promises to be more of the same.
Allowing Tribune to continue its cross-ownership under Zell would not only violate federal rules, it would fly in the face of the millions who have demanded less consolidation and more independent, local and diverse media.
Josh Silver, executive director of Free Press says:
“The new Tribune Co. needs to follow the rules. Bigger isn’t always better, and cross-owning conglomerates like Tribune have been a disaster for the localism, diversity and competition the FCC is supposed to protect. The media giants have been manipulating the system for too long. It’s time to end the backroom deals and stop special waivers.”
Update: In a recent Chicago Tribune article, Zell is quoted as saying that he “does not expect FCC regulations prohibiting cross-ownership of newspapers and broadcasting stations in the same communities to pose an obstacle because he expects those rules to disappear.”
Not so fast Mr. Zell.
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