The marriage of Comcast and NBC is bad news for consumers. But Washington and Wall Street have already bought into the idea that it's a done deal. That's why Americans need to speak out now and stop the mega-merger!
This is a guest blog from Arron Wings, a charter member of Iowans for Better Local TV.
You might have seen some of the coverage the national press gave to recent floods in Iowa. It was a dramatic event that frequently brought comparisons to Hurricane Katrina. Eighty-three of Iowa’s 99 counties have been declared disaster areas and some of the worst damage was done in Cedar Rapids, where it is estimated that up to one-fifth of the population was displaced by the damage.
Before the flood waters had receded in many areas, Sue Toma, the executive director of the Iowa Broadcasters Association, sent a letter to Chairman Kevin Martin of the Federal Communications Commission extolling the performance of the broadcast stations in Iowa. She said that because broadcasters had responded so well during the crisis, the FCC did not need to strengthen localism requirements. She called the broadcasters’ performance their “finest hour” and said, “I can’t help but note that the Iowa floods come at a time when well-meaning but misguided activists are questioning broadcasters’ commitment to localism.”
It is true that many of the broadcast stations performed admirably and spent long portions of the day providing live coverage without commercials. One of the Cedar Rapids stations, KCRG-TV 9, was particularly admirable in that it remained (with permission) in an evacuation area, functioned with back-up electricity, and at least once moved their set outside because it became quite warm in the building with no air-conditioning. The news staff spent long hours in front of the cameras and provided a great service to the community. The other “local” station, KGAN-TV 2, owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group, performed similarly, but with few local employees; they needed to bring in additional crews from other areas to provide the coverage.
But to argue that an admirable response to a crisis negates the need for localism is to miss the point.
Community Service Not Just for Times of Crisis
Local broadcasters should show the minimal level of service to the community that is required of them at all times — not just during a crisis. In exchange for the use of our public airwaves, broadcasters are required to operate their stations in the public interest. Despite this requirement, it appears that broadcasters can choose to provide any or no service to the community. They may choose, as these Iowa broadcasters did, to provide good local disaster coverage. But there is practically no enforcement for them to provide similar community service the other 51 weeks of the year.
In December, the FCC passed new rules that require broadcasters to air more local programming. To obtain a license renewal, the broadcaster’s main station would have to be located within the city of the broadcaster’s license. Additionally, the station would have to adopt community advisory boards, demonstrate local content, and staff the station during all broadcast hours. Broadcasters have been fighting these rules since the FCC’s announcement.
Holding Media Accountable
Another aspect of localism is accountability. How does a community that feels it is not being served by a broadcast company redress that situation? Currently, there is almost no redress. Back in December 2005, my local group, Iowans for Better Local TV, filed a petition to deny the renewal of the license of KGAN-TV 2, the Sinclair-owned station mentioned above.
Thirty months later, the FCC has taken no action on our petition. It was not that long ago that broadcast licenses were only good for 36 months. Now, in this era of license periods of eight years and “postcard renewals,” there appears to be no meaningful accountability by a broadcaster to the community they serve.
So yes, the “Flood of 2008,” as it is now being called, could possibly have been the Iowa Broadcasters’ “finest hour.” But more localism would require them to act in the public interest at other times as well.
Thanks to you, last month the Senate passed a critical bill that is the first step to stopping the FCC from letting Big Media get even bigger. Now the House must do the same.
Today we’re launching a “100 Co-sponsors in 100 Days” drive. It’s an all-out effort to get 100 House members to sign-on to the Resolution of Disapproval (H.J. Res. 79), which overturns the FCC’s giveaway to conglomerates. With your help this can happen before summer’s end.
By taking action, you’ll help unleash targeted pressure to make the resolution a “must-pass” item on the House agenda by the end of the summer. What does 100 members of Congress get us? It establishes a foundation of support in Congress, it shines a spotlight on media consolidation, and it sends a message to Big Media lobbyists that the people won’t stand for any more junk media. Success will mean a vote for more diverse voices and perspectives on the airwaves, and more locally owned media. Here’s how we’ll do it:
mobilize supporters and activists in targeted districts around the country, and giving them the resources they need for success;
flood local Congressional offices with phone calls, faxes, e-mails, and in-person visits while members are home during the recess;
gain greater press coverage on the media ownership fight in the House and where local lawmakers stand; and
organize local events to increase public and political awareness of the veto resolution and its monumental importance.
With your support, we will work with communities across the country and take your message up to Capitol Hill, confronting the Big Media lobbyists on their turf.
Together we helped thousands of people raise their voices and shout “ENOUGH!” to media consolidation. And Congress is finally getting the message. Now we need to harness this growing energy and focus it on the House of Representatives to win final passage of the FCC veto, and keep Big Media from gobbling up more local newspapers and television stations.
We’re counting on you to make this effort a success.
When Sami Kubo, an 18-year-old filmmaker in Seattle, testified at the FCC hearing on media ownership last November, she wanted to tell the commissioners “something that only a young person could tell them.” Kubo told the panel that the FCC cannot further consolidate media ownership, and that young people in particular are being hurt by Big Media.
But young people don’t want others speaking for them, so I won’t do that here. Instead, watch the great new documentary produced by teen filmmakers Sami Muilenburg and Brooke Noel, which features Kubo’s testimony. The short film, “A Generation of Consolidation” explores the impact that media consolidation has on youth as both media consumers and media makers.
Kudos to Reel Grrls, a Seattle-based non-profit media literacy and filmmaking program for teenage girls, which produced the film. Not only does the documentary speak to our disastrous U.S. media system, it highlights youth to tell the story.
The mainstream media’s latest pseudo-news obsession was exposed on Monday night’s episode of “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” when host Stewart mocked the media for its role in spreading false and often ridiculous rumors about Sen. Barack Obama. Stewart shows clips from several network news anchors repeating Internet rumors as fact or real news. Watch the clip.
While this is just a humorous video ridiculing the mainstream media’s version of journalism, his guest later during the program highlighted the seriousness of the problems with American news coverage.
Lara Logan, CBS Chief Foreign Correspondent, talked about the challenges of convincing networks to broadcast in-depth coverage of what is really going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. “If I were to watch the news you hear in the United States, I would just blow my brains out because it would just drive me nuts,” she said in response to a question about whether she watches U.S. news.
Logan says Americans are not getting the full story from the media, and that her stories have to compete for air time against Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. She said that we shouldn’t have to choose between coverage on Iraq or Afghanistan, but instead the media should be covering both wars. Watch the clip.
Stewart’s segment reminds us of all the ways the mainstream media has failed the public this year. In April, the New York Times exposed a secret – and likely illegal — Pentagon plan to spread favorable views of the war by recruiting and planting military analysts in the nation’s news media. With only a few exceptions, the media have ignored this important story, and in some cases continued to use its influence to spread propaganda through the airwaves. Learn more at http://www.freepress.net/pentagon_propaganda.
We can make a difference to stop the media from spreading misinformation, rumors and government and corporate propaganda. Take action to demand better journalism.
We’ve done a lot of research to show that media consolidation has resulted in a dearth of female ownership of media. But this gender exclusion extends far beyond who owns the news, and affects who is sought after as credible sources for news stories. And it certainly isn’t women.
This week, Jennifer Pozner of Women in Media & News followed up a session at this year’s NCMR titled, “There Is No Media Justice Without Women: Strategies for Feminist Social Justice Media Activism,” with a blog post aptly lamenting the hush of female voices as experts, pundits and sources in the media. She wrote: “Too many news outlets — not only corporate media, but some of our progressive and independent publications as well — still marginalize women as sources and experts in their stories, as decision-makers on the mastheads and as commentators on the op-ed pages. This is especially true for women of color, whose opinions are largely invisible in the pundit class.”
Pozner goes on to debunk all the lame excuses news outlets use to keep women’s voices out of the media. But as she points out, there’s one reason for the lack of female representation that can’t be discredited – media consolidation. Unfortunately, when only a handful of mostly male-run corporations own all of the media, diverse viewpoints don’t rise to the top. A 2005 study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that news outlets rely on men as sources twice as often as women.
The National Organization of Women has also been instrumental in fighting for diversity in the media. In a press release after the Senate victory to roll back FCC media consolidation rules, NOW said, “If we are to create a media environment that covers issues important to women, that treats women with respect, promotes their voices and opinions and portrays them as three-dimensional human beings, we must have more women at the very top calling the shots. The same goes for people of color and other traditionally disenfranchised groups.”
The Feminist Peace Network blog this week piggybacked on Pozner’s writing, calling for gender justice in media to become “an integral part of the media reform agenda.” The blog quoted a handful of the women who attended NCMR, including Andi Zeisler, cofounder and editorial director of Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture, who said, “A media that both reflects and prioritizes the lives and voices of women—all women—is crucial not only to the development of a well-informed populace, but to the development of a new generation of thinkers and leaders inspired to make media that’s open-minded, democratic, and challenging.”
If we could, we’d stick their photos up in a national “Nauseam.” They’re the media corporations, CEOs and politicians who top this year’s “Media Hall of Shame,” and their antics over the past year make us sick.
We unveiled the top contenders of the Hall of Shame on June 7 in Minneapolis during the National Conference for Media Reform.
Media giants Viacom, AT&T, Comcast and Verizon elbowed each other for the top spot as Worst Corporation. It was difficult to choose, considering each company was the best of the worst America has to offer in media, democracy and our right to free speech. Watch the video and find out who took the prize:
But our Hall of Shame doesn’t end there. This year we handed out an award for the worst Shill or Astrotruf — organizations and individuals that will say or do anything for money. From a Telecom-funded organization masquerading as a citizen’s group to Telecom-funded politicians who bad-mouth Net Neutrality, we had our work cut out for us deciding the winner of this category. Watch the video to see who we chose:
And finally we passed out a medal for the “Worst of the Worst” people who threaten our press and democracy. There are so many rotten apples, we could have just spun a wheel to determine this winner. But then again, we think we really did pick the worst of them all. Watch the video to find out:
Comcast is already infamous for playing favorites with Internet content, but the multimedia giant’s discriminatory practices extend to far more than the Web.
Comcast’s holdings are vast, and include broadcast cable and radio stations across the country. While the corporation is constantly in the limelight for its crimes against Internet users, Comcast also rejects advertisers and news anchors who don’t reflect their views.
This week, Comcast refused to air ads that criticize Rep. Chris Carney (D-Pa) for supporting a bill that increases President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping powers on the American public, and grants amnesty to the communications companies who bowed to the administration. The ads were created by the Blue America PAC, who submitted the ads to media outlets in Carney’s district; other outlets accepted the advertisement.
So just why would Comcast, always eager for advertising dollars, reject this ad? Perhaps you remember that Comcast – also a phone company — played a role in the Bush administration’s illegal spying program. And the ads also emphasize that Comcast was a major donor to Carney in a “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” fashion so typical of Big Media largesse in Washington.
What’s most disconcerting about Comcast’s ad blackout is that it underscores the behemoth’s wide reaching power to determine what Americans read, watch, and see. Media consolidation has become so extreme, a company can now have its fingers in every cookie jar – TV, radio, Internet, telecommunications – and no one is shutting the lid. The repercussions of such extensive media ownership are incredibly dangerous — Comcast can literally stifle dissent and political discourse.
And just as Comcast ignores finger-pointing ads, it also snubs journalists who fall out of step with the company’s lax expectations of its reporters – which of course means asking tough questions and adhering to high standards of journalism. Last month, longtime TV newsman Barry Nolan was fired by Comcast after he objected publicly to a journalism award handed to Bill O’Reilly. “I got fired from my job on a news and information network for reporting demonstrably true things in a room full of news people,” Nolan wrote in a ThinkProgress blog post.
We won a historic victory last month, with the Senate coming out overwhelmingly against more media consolidation. The growing media reform movement is becoming a formidable opponent to corporations trying to take and keep control of the public airwaves and local newspapers.
But to win this battle, we have to remain sharp, focused and unified – which is exactly what we’re doing at the National Conference for Media Reform in Minneapolis this coming weekend. There are over 75 sessions at the conference, and many of them focus on the problem of a consolidated media system. We’ll be strategizing, sharing and connecting on how to roll back Big Media’s market grab and stake our own claim to local news and information.
Here’s a peak at some of the sessions:
Silvia Rivera of RadioArte, Ivan Roman of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, Andrew Jay Schwartzman of Media Access Project, and Frannie Wellings of the office of Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) will discuss the media ownership fight, and how activists can keep up the pressure to prevent further consolidation.
Knowing the adversary is half the fight, and that’s why one workshop will delve into the inner workings of the FCC and how to hold broadcasters accountable to their public interest obligations.
Media corporations’ greedy fingers have extended beyond news and into the entertainment industry, where consolidation has meant less creative control for writers and producers. Patric M. Verrone of the Writers Guild of America, West, Bree Walker of KTLK-AM, and Michael Winship of the Writers Guild of America, East will review the recent Writers Guild strike and how to counteract the consolidation that has made movies more formulaic than a summer “blockbuster.”
The casualties of consolidation are immense, and communities of color in particular have paid the price for a media system that doesn’t include diverse viewpoints. How and why do people of color continue to be marginalized by mainstream media coverage? Panelists Juan Gonzalez of New York Daily News, Kristal Brent Zook of Hofstra University, Rosa A. Clemente of R.E.A.C.Hip Hop, Syndicated Columnist George Curry, Keith Kamisugi of Equal Justice Society, and Laura Waterman-Wittstock of Migizi Communications will discuss the current state and future of diversity in the media and its impact on society.
And while we work to change the current media system, we can also continue developing alternative, independently owned news outlets that cover the stories the mainstream still won’t touch. Davey D of Hard Knock Radio, Arianna Huffington of Huffington Post, Greg Watkins of AllHipHop.com, and Lizz Winstead of Air America Radio and The Daily Show will share lessons on how to create successful independent media outlets that reach the masses.
The list goes on, with sessions as hard-hitting, diverse and courageous as we hope the mainstream media will become.
