Archive for November, 2007
Friday, November 9th, 2007 by jtorres
As Kevin Martin, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, brings his charade of a public hearing to Seattle this Friday, there are two questions that he should be forced this answer.
The first is if he thinks media consolidation is harmful to minority ownership?
The second is whether he has already written his new ownership rules?
The answer to question one is obvious. Of course media consolidation is harmful to minority ownership. There is no disputing that. The evidence shows that as markets become more concentrated, minority ownership declines. But the chairman seems to be pretending that minority ownership and media consolidation are completely separate issues.
If the chairman issues new rules as soon as next week – with a vote before Christmas – which many believe he will do, then there is no possible way that he could have reviewed all the public comments still coming in or have carefully examined the econometric research conducted in reply to the commission’s slanted ownership studies.
Don’t let Kevin Martin’s boyish looks fool you. He knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s moving full-speed ahead, treating the American public as props in the spectacle he has carefully orchestrated. And he’s betting that this time you’re not paying attention.
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Thursday, November 8th, 2007 by jstearns
A few weeks ago Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) uncovered that FCC Chairman Kevin Martin was rushing forward with a secret plan to gut media ownership rules. Since then, Chairman Martin has ignored repeated requests and warnings from senators on both sides of the aisle calling on him to slow down, address the dismal state of female and minority ownership, and listen to the public.
Today, at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing, members indicated that they wouldn’t take it anymore. Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) and Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) announced plans to introduce legislation that would halt the Federal Communications Commission’s rush to gut longstanding media ownership rules.
 You Spoke Out and Congress Responded
New Legislation Would Force FCC to Listen to the Public |
“We believe localism and diversity of media ownership is vital in a democracy,” Senator Dorgan said. “Our bill recognizes the importance of a wide range of media owners and local content, and requires a process that does not rush past those concerns to open the gates for even more consolidation of media ownership. We believe there is value to local ownership in the media.”
“Communities count on getting their local news from their locally owned television stations and weekly and daily newspapers,” Senator Lott said. “They know locally owned means they’re invested in their communities and care about their well-being. If the FCC won’t do their job to keep East and West Coast media conglomerates from pushing out these local voices, then there is a role for the Congress to play.”
The bipartisan “Media Ownership Act of 2007″ is co-sponsored by Sens. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), John Kerry (D-Mass.), Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.).
The bill directs the FCC to conduct a separate proceeding on localism and create an independent minority and female ownership task force before moving forward with any changes to media ownership limits. The bill would also give the public a 90-day comment period on any proposed rules.
“We are thrilled to see members from both sides of the aisle stand up for the public. This critical legislation will restore fairness and transparency in what has become a corrupt process at the FCC,” said Ben Scott, policy director at Free Press. “In the rush to gut media ownership rules, the Commission has ignored the American people, neglected the media diversity crisis, and buried evidence that consolidation harms local communities. The Media Ownership Act would hold the FCC accountable for listening to the public and ensuring that the public airwaves reflect America’s diverse local communities.”
News of this bill comes just one day before the final FCC hearing on media ownership in Seattle. At other public hearings, in Chicago, Tampa, Portland, Harrisburg, Nashville, and Los Angeles, thousands of concerned citizens expressed their opposition to any rule changes that would let Big Media companies swallow up more local outlets. At the last hearing in Washington, Chairman Martin admitted that he could only think of one person not affiliated with a media company who had testified in favor of media consolidation in any of these hearings.
This bill is an important reminder from Congress that the FCC must answer to the public, not corporate interests.
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Thursday, November 8th, 2007 by caaron
Media Minutes, the weekly five-minute podcast produced by Free Press has a 30-minute special edition on Pacifica Radio’s weekly program, Sprouts Radio from the Grassroots.
The program, Stopping Big Media at the FCC, puts you in the middle of the raucous media ownership rally that was held in Washington on Halloween and then takes you inside the hearing room. Communications professor and co-founder of Free Press, Robert W. McChesney, places the rally in historical context.
In Stopping Big Media at the FCC, you’ll hear Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-N.Y.) talk about the need to leave a democratic system of media distribution for our children and grandchildren. Community organizer and hip-hop activist Rev. Lennox Yearwood fires up the crowd and warns the audience, “If they control our media, they control our message.”
University of Maryland student Christian Melendez takes us through how he became a media reform activist. Hip-hop activist Rosa Clemente describes turning on the radio one day to hear New York’s Hot 97 FM playing the racist “Tsunami Song.”
Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, and Rev. James Coleman of the Missionary Baptist Ministers Conference of Washington connected the First Amendment and the struggle for civil rights. Cheryl Leanza of the United Church of Christ talked about what media consolidation means for social justice movements. And Carrie Biggs-Adams of the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians union shares her view the rally, describing the Prometheus Radio Project cheerleaders and Code Pink’s colorful outfits and songs.
Inside the hearing, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin claims that the ownership proceedings have been transparent and open, and Commissioners Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein forcefully disagree with him. And then we hear panelist after panelist hammer at Martin and the FCC about the detrimental effects of media consolidation on their local media.
Former NPR host Bob Edwards spoke on behalf of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists about how media consolidation has negatively impacted journalism. The Rev. Jesse Jackson, founder of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, said media ownership is a civil rights issue. Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women testified to the numerous public interest benefits to increasing women’s and minority ownership and S. Derek Turner of Free Press used the commission’s own data to prove that cross-ownership is bad news for local news.
To listen to Stopping Big Media at the FCC, click here. (Audio 29:01)
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Thursday, November 8th, 2007 by caaron
UNITY: Journalists of Color, which represents more than 10,000 journalists, recently sent a letter to FCC Chairman Kevin Martin calling for the creation of an independent minority ownership task force.
UNITY is a coalition of the Asian American Journalists Association, Native American Journalists Association, National Association of Black Journalists and National Association of Hispanic Journalists. They should be commended for taking such a principled stand.
But the simple truth is that too few journalists are speaking out against the harmful affects of media consolidation on their newsrooms and on news coverage.
Working journalists have been a major causality of media consolidation, as thousands have lost their jobs in recent years while their bosses continue to show more loyalty to Wall Street than their own newsroom employees or the American public who they claim to serve.
Journalists are on the front lines trying to make sure the public is kept informed about the world around them. But too many journalists are receiving their pink slips or are being forced to cover Britney and OJ — as lobbyists for their corporate owners quietly canvass the halls of Congress.
It is critical for journalists to fight to make sure the issue of media consolidation is being covered. You’re fighting for more than your job. You are fighting for our democracy.
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Monday, November 5th, 2007 by caaron
Twenty-one national civil rights groups added their voices to the growing chorus calling on the Federal Communications Commission to deal with its shameful history of failing to address the crisis in minority broadcast ownership.
In a Nov. 1 letter, groups including the National Hispanic Media Coalition, Urban League, National Council of La Raza, Rainbow PUSH and the League of United Latin American Citizens, called on FCC chairman Kevin Martin to create an independent minority ownership task force before moving forward with any new media ownership rules.
Media consolidation threatens the future of minority ownership. Studies conducted by Free Press have found that the FCC has never conducted an accurate count on the number of minority and female owners. How can the FCC move forward with issuing new rules when it does not know their impact on minority ownership?
Those same studies showed that minority owners are less likely to be found in more concentrated markets. But Chairman Martin doesn’t seem to care. He’s pushing forward with his plans to issue new rules by Dec. 18 that will result in greater consolidation, further placing the future of minority ownership in jeopardy.
The full text of the letter is below:
The Honorable Kevin J. Martin
Chairman
Federal Communications Commission
445 12th Street, SW
Washington, DC 20554
Dear Chairman Martin:
We are writing to call on the Federal Communications Commission to address the issue of minority ownership. Assembled together here as leaders of minority communities speaking with one voice, we request the creation of an independent task force to conduct a specific inquiry into the impact of market concentration on female and minority ownership before moving forward with issuing any new ownership rules for broadcast media. On its face, the Commission’s movement toward eliminating media ownership limits appears to severely undercut its statutory and moral obligation to promote minority ownership of broadcast stations. The failure of the FCC to even acknowledge this contradiction is deeply troubling, and this letter is intended to highlight the problem and propose a course of action.
We appreciate that you are open to the idea of creating a task force to thoroughly study the policy goal of promoting minority ownership of broadcast stations. But we are alarmed by recent reports indicating that you will not wait until the work of such a task force is completed before issuing new rules that may permit further media consolidation. This is not acceptable. An uninformed rush to eliminate ownership limits may set back the expansion of minority ownership by a generation and leave us little recourse.
The Commission already labors under a credibility deficit on this issue. Minority ownership is in crisis precisely because the FCC has long neglected to consider the issue as a critical public policy goal. The frustration is not limited to our community. The U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals admonished the FCC for failing to address the issue of minority ownership. The available evidence indicates cause for deep concern. According to the best available independent research—which, unfortunately, has never been duplicated by the Commission—women and minorities own broadcast stations at roughly one-tenth the level of their representation in the population. This statistic should have set off alarm bells long ago. We simply cannot understand how this is not a top priority for your agency.
Yet for many years, the FCC has failed in its responsibility to examine or address the impact of market consolidation on communities of color and broadcasters of color. The Commission has never even managed to conduct an accurate count of its own data on the race and gender characteristics of licensees to determine the true number of women and minority owners. Economists hired this year by the Commission to study the problem were unable to do so because the data provided to them was unusable. They wrote: “The data currently being collected by the FCC is extremely crude and subject to a large enough degree of measurement error to render it essentially useless for any serious analysis.” Without this information, it is impossible to have an adequate understanding of how different policies governing media ownership in general would impact minority ownership specifically.
We call upon the FCC to elevate its commitment to the promotion of minority ownership. The Commission should create a task force on the issue which would, at the very least, conduct the simple steps that the agency has inexplicably failed to accomplish to date. First, the task force should ensure that an accurate accounting of the FCC’s data is conducted on the actual number of minority and female broadcast station owners. Second, the task force should perform an analysis on this accurate data set to determine the likely impact of policies which permit further media consolidation, policies which tighten ownership limits, and policies which may offer incentives for expanding minority ownership. Only when the work of this task force is completed should the FCC move forward with any changes to the rules governing media ownership. Only when it is well armed with the facts and analysis provided by this task force can the Commission expect to determine the appropriate policies which will further the goal of increasing minority broadcast ownership.
The legacy of race and gender discrimination in the broadcast industry is a disgraceful reality in America today. It is not a problem that will be solved quickly or easily. But we must take the first step by truly understanding the nature and scope of our present crisis. History will not excuse ignorance as a justification for policies that further depress the level of minority ownership. We ask that the Commission take adequate steps to ensure that it makes the right choices to reach a long overdue justice on the issue of minority ownership in the broadcast media.
Most sincerely,
Rainbow PUSH
National Hispanic Media Coalition
National Council of La Raza
Asian American Justice Center
Hip Hop Caucus
National Congress of Black Women
Native Public Media
National Institute for Latino Policy
Urban League
Industry Ears
League of United Latin American Citizens
Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund
National Association of Hispanic Journalists
Independent Spanish Broadcasters Association
Black Leadership Forum
Cuban American National Council
Latino Literacy Now
National Association of Hispanic Publications
National Association of Latino Independent Producers
Latino Gerontological Center
National Coalition on Black Civic Participation
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Friday, November 2nd, 2007 by caaron
On late Friday afternoon, Chairman Kevin Martin announced the last so-called public hearing on media ownership for just one week from today — next Friday in Seattle.
This is another slap in the face to the American public. Chairman Martin’s determination to ignore millions of concerned citizens, Congress and simple fairness is outrageous.
It is now crystal clear that Chairman Martin could care less about what happens to our local media. This whole process has been a charade.
As Commissioners Adelstein and Copps said in a joint statement: “A hearing with only five days notice is no nirvana for Seattle and the Pacific Northwest. This smells like mean spirit.”
Congress needs to stop Martin: Send them a message now.
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Friday, November 2nd, 2007 by jstearns
It was an inspiring sight. Outside Federal Communications Commission headquarters more than a hundred and fifty people were chanting for better media. Inside, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin squirmed every time the room erupted around calls to stop consolidation. It was Halloween at the FCC – and the trick was definitely on them.
Rallying on the Steps of the FCC
Citizens — some of whom had shown up at 4 a.m. to get in line for a chance to speak — crowded the sidewalk of the FCC for a Halloween-morning rally against media consolidation. Elected officials, civil rights and labor leaders, consumer and media reform advocates, activists and even a squad of cheerleaders all came out to urge the federal agency to stop any rule changes that could create more media consolidation.
 Commissioner Adelstein Speaks to the Crowd |
Chairman Martin announced the Halloween hearing just a week beforehand and scheduled it during the day when most people couldn’t attend. This was just the most recent in a long line of barriers the FCC has thrown up to deter public involvement in media policymaking. In response, public interest and civil rights groups pulled together to organize a rally where the public’s voice couldn’t be ignored.
“We are gravely concerned that Chairman Martin would try to secretly move on such a critical issue with such a short timetable,” said Josh Silver, executive director of Free Press, which coordinates the StopBigMedia.com Coalition. “The public is being shut out of the process so that Martin can move forward with his Big Media giveaway.”
 The FCC Cheerleaders |
This sentiment was echoed by FCC Commissioners Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein in a joint statement about the hearing: “Neither we nor the public received any confirmation that the hearing would occur until … just 5 business days before the event. This is unacceptable and unfair to the public.”
Wednesday’s rally was reminiscent of the outcry that erupted in 2003 – the last time the FCC tried to push through sweeping media ownership rule changes. People came representing a broad spectrum of issues from civil rights and women’s rights to labor and hip-hop.
“We have a media diversity crisis — too few, own too much, at the expense of too many,” said Rev. Jesse Jackson, president and founder of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition.
 Rally for a Better Media |
Kim Gandy, president of NOW, said: “Despite the fact that together we represent two-thirds of the country, women and people of color are woefully under-represented in media ownership. Massive consolidation and market concentration is one of the key factors keeping this vital population from access to the public airwaves.”
Members of the local faith community also turned out to call on the FCC to stop Big Media. “God has supplied the airwaves as a gift to all humankind,” said Rev. James Coleman, president of the missionary Baptist Ministers Conference of Washington, D.C. “He requires of us to be good stewards over the airwaves and ensure that media reflects in a balanced fashion the views, opinions and ethnic values of all segments of society.”
 Rev. Jesse Jackson |
Bombshell Study Destroys Argument for Consolidation
As the rally wrapped up, the crowd filed inside to take their message directly to the commissioners. The FCC’s public hearing room was packed, and person after person spoke up against media consolidation. Of the dozens of people who spoke at the hearing, all but four challenged the FCC’s rush toward relaxing media ownership rules. The public testimony was complemented by a powerful list of panelists.
Martin, Copps and Adelstein closely questioned S. Derek Turner, research director of Free Press, after his testimony — which used the FCC’s own data to show that allowing one company to own both the major daily newspaper and broadcast outlets in the same market diminishes local news coverage.
Martin has called for the removal of a longstanding ban on “newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership.” But Turner’s research refutes claims that consolidation creates more news. Copps called Turner’s findings “a bombshell.”
 Rev. Lennox Yearwood |
The hearing in Washington was the last of six official public hearings on localism originally proposed by former FCC Chairman Michael Powell in 2003. Hundreds of people attended, despite the fact that the hearing wasn’t announced until the night of Oct. 24 and neither the Washington Post nor any of the local TV affiliates of the major networks covered the event in advance.
“Sadly, in the wake of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, the number of good broadcasters is diminishing, and the number of mediocre broadcasters is increasing,” said Andrew Jay Schwartzman, president and CEO of Media Access Project. “The intensity of public concern about this is something the Commission should not and cannot ignore. Despite obvious attempts to minimize public attendance at events such as this, thousands of Americans have shown up to tell you how much they care.”
The broad coalition that defeated efforts to gut media ownership rules in 2003 showed that they’re dedication to the issue hasn’t diminished over the past four years. “There is no question that the consolidation of media outlets has led to a coarsening of television content,” testified Dan Isset of the Parents Television Council. “Clearly, owners with ties to a community are in a much better position to determine the public interest of those they serve and whose airwaves they are allowed to broadcast upon. When local programming decisions are prohibited by a remote corporate parent, the public interest is not served.”
 Inside the Hearing |
As in the recent ownership hearing in Chicago, the FCC’s shameful lack of attention to female and minority ownership and media justice took center stage. The disgracefully low level of media ownership by women and people of color was raised by numerous panelists, who criticized the Commission for failing to address this crucial issue before changing any media ownership rules. Lisa Fager Bediako, president of Industry Ears, said that “women of color, people of color are treated as if they are invisible, unimportant, a last thought” by the media.
“We believe that media diversity is a civil rights issue,” said Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. “As consolidation grows, localism suffers and diversity dwindles. Local ownership of broadcast outlets means better coverage for the communities they serve. Yet even in our nation’s capital, it is difficult to find newspaper, television and radio content that accurately showcases the breadth and diversity of our unique version of the American experience.”
 Rosa Clemente |
Over but not Done
While this was the last of the FCC’s localism hearings, it won’t be the last of localism. The day after the rally and hearing, the Senate Commerce Committee announced that they were holding a hearing on localism and media ownership on Nov. 8. Responding to the flawed process at the FCC, Sens. Trent Lott (R-Miss.), Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), and Daniel Innoye (D-Hawaii) are increasing the pressure on Martin to serve the public interest, not rush another massive giveaway to Big Media.
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Friday, November 2nd, 2007 by caaron
Don’t miss tonight’s episode of Bill Moyers Journal — which looks at the FCC’s rush to gut media ownership rules and what that means for the already shamefully low number of women and minority media owners.
The show features footage from September’s impassioned media ownership hearing in Chicago at Rainbow PUSH headquarters. It will include interviews with FCC Commissioners Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein, Senators Trent Lott and Byron Dorgan, WVON-AM’s Melody Spann-Cooper, and many more.
You can watch a short preview of the show here.
Or click here to find out when it’s airing near you.
Comment below and let us know what you thought of the show.
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