FCC’s Media Diversity Blunder
Posted April 16th, 2008 by Megan Tady
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) just released a report highlighting something we’ve known for a long time: Women and people of color own a tiny fraction of broadcast stations across the country — and the Federal Communications Commission isn’t doing anything about it.
FCC Chairman Kevin Martin ignored repeated calls from civil rights leaders and his fellow commissioners to create an independent task force on female and minority media ownership before allowing any further consolidation.
Instead, he rushed through a vote last December to eliminate the longstanding ban on “newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership,” which prohibits one company from owning both a major daily newspaper and a broadcast station in almost every market in this country.
The FCC has failed to even conduct an accurate count of how many radio and TV stations are owned by women and people of color. The GAO could only say media ownership by these groups “appears limited” because the FCC lacks any “comprehensive data” on the gender, race or ethnicity of broadcast station owners.
Although the FCC is supposed to collect this data, the information is not always reliable. The GAO discovered that the data is imperiled by three weaknesses: filing exemptions, poor data quality standards, and problems with data storage and retrieval.
The GAO’s findings came as no surprise to StopBigMedia.com. Independent reports done by Free Press — Out of the Picture and Off the Dial – detailed the sorry state of media diversity in the United States. Stunningly, they found that women own 5 percent of full-power TV stations and 6 percent of radio stations. People of color own just 3 percent of TV stations and 7.7 percent of radio stations.
Yet the FCC continues to shirk its responsibility– both by consolidating media, and then by refusing to accurately collect the data that reflects consolidation’s effects. The GAO recommends that the FCC take steps to make its gender, race and ethnicity ownership data more accurate and complete.
But we want more than reliable data on who’s being left out; we need to roll back media consolidation altogether. The first step is reversing the FCC’s vote last December. Urge your senators to support the “resolution of disapproval” that would nullify the FCC’s decision.
