From: Mustafa Akgul (akgul@Bilkent.EDU.TR)
Date: Sat 24 May 2003 - 21:59:49 EEST
May 2003
Media Monopoly vs. Democracy
By John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney
(For a more complete discussion please see... McChesney on Media Monopoly...
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=21&ItemID=3623 -
for a whole site on related issues and what you can do... please see
www.mediareform.net)
"A popular Government without popular information of the means of
acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy or perhaps both.
Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be
their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge
gives."
--James Madison
"If anyone said we were in the radio business, it wouldn't be someone
from our company. We're not in the business of providing news and
information. We're not in the business of providing well-researched
music. We're simply in the business of selling our customers products."
--Clear Channel CEO Lowry Mays
On June 2 the Federal Communications Commission will take sides in the
great American debate between James Madison and Lowry Mays, when it
decides whether to relax the remaining limitations on media ownership.
If the rules are maintained, the democratic value of media diversity
wins. If greater consolidation is allowed, the media moguls will win --
and they will celebrate by launching a buying frenzy destined to reshape
the American media landscape.
The choice is that stark.
Media industry analysts are in universal agreement that the dropping of
barriers to monopolies will unleash a massive wave of media
consolidation in the United States. Locally owned newspapers, television
and radio stations will be unable to resist the pressure to sell to
multinational conglomerates such as Clear Channel and News Corp. What
remains of variety in local news coverage and entertainment will be
replaced by canned reports from a single newsroom. At the national
level, networks will merge. And in a few short years we will see a
dramatic reshaping of the media system that will be great for a few big
corporations but terrible for democratic discourse and cultural
diversity.
As the votes approach, the Bush administration and corporate lobbyists
are pulling out all the stops in order to secure a victory for these big
corporations. FCC Chairman Michael Powell and the two other Republicans
who make up the commission's majority are determined to make the
changes, despite widespread and unprecedented opposition in Congress,
among the general public and, in a rare split, from the two minority
members of the FCC. The strategy of Powell, the White House, and the
corporate media lobbyists is to ram through the changes as quickly and
quietly as possible; this is payback time for some of Bush's major
financial and political supporters.
The behind-closed-doors strategy has been aided by a major media that
does a miserable job of covering itself. This momentous decision has
earned perhaps 1/1,000th the media attention of California mother Laci
Peterson's tragic demise. If it had received better coverage in recent
weeks, the public might know more or learn that, once upon a time, media
policy was made in the public interest.
Two hundred years ago, the founders recognized that the development of a
free press was critical to the success of their experiment. The debate
over the shape and form of that press was central to the public debate.
Among the founders who gave the matter the most attention were James
Madison and Thomas Jefferson (along with the inevitable Thomas Paine).
Madison and Jefferson understood that a free press was mandatory. They
also understood that an independent press would not blossom without
public policies supporting its growth.
In the 1790s Congress implemented a number of media initiatives.
Copyright laws were adopted, printing subsidies were issued and
newspapers and periodicals received postage discounts. These policies
were no doubt influenced by the self-interest of commercial concerns at
the time, but they were also genuinely justified based on the importance
of a free press to democracy.
The policies worked. Within a generation, the United States had the
highest literacy rate on the globe, and a range of media unique in the
world.
These policies have persisted. Our largest media firms today are all
based on government granted and enforced privileges -- such as monopoly
rights to TV and radio frequencies, monopoly cable TV and satellite TV
franchises, and copyright -- and subsidies such as the second class
mailing permit.
But as media have become an agency for generating extraordinary profits,
the political clout of the largest media firms has grown and they have
effectively taken over media policy. The public knows little or nothing
about it. Issues of democracy and self-government have ceased to play a
central role in the debate, except for PR gestures, and the real fight
is no longer about how to build and sustain democracy but rather how to
balloon profits. Because of corporations' excessive influence, media
policy has hit its nadir.
So the degree of difficulty for activists in the short term is
inordinately high. Powell and the Republican majority on the FCC have
boycotted 10 public hearings on media ownership since February, claiming
they have no need to hear any more from regular people. Meanwhile they
meet regularly with corporate CEOs and lobbyists. (Perhaps the business
groups Powell speaks to will prove helpful to the U.S. Senate campaign
he is rumored to be preparing.)
And what do these companies say? That the recent increase in media
channels through multi-channel television and the Internet has
eliminated the need for ownership regulation of broadcast media. They
assert that scarcity of the airwaves -- a historic motivation for
government regulation -- is no longer a relevant issue. This is a bogus
claim. If the Internet and digital technologies were indeed eliminating
scarcity, TV channels would be losing value because of all the new
competition. The fact is that licenses to TV and radio channels still
confer extraordinary monopoly market power. That is why their value
continues to shoot up -- and why the legal justification for media
regulation holds up.
Some in Congress understand this. In the 1996 Telecommunications Act,
Congress advised the FCC to make changes only when market conditions had
changed. It is clear that market conditions have not changed
sufficiently to justify the elimination of media ownership rules. But if
the FCC lets the giant firms get even larger they will, regardless of
how open the broadcast spectrum becomes, have the power to ward off any
new threats of competition.
The good news is that a diverse coalition is fighting back. Musicians,
journalists, consumer groups, religious organizations, civic
organizations and labor oppose the relaxation (or elimination) of
ownership limits. Even the National Rifle Association and conservative
columnist William Safire have joined the chorus of concern. The recorded
public feedback on the topic has the foes of deregulation outnumbering
the proponents by a margin of more than 20-1.
If the campaign to block this rewrite of the rules continues to
mushroom, Chairman Powell might delay the June 2 vote. Even if Powell
ignores the public pressure, mounting concerns in Congress could lead to
a reversal of the worst changes.
Whatever happens, activist groups are robustly re-entering the crucial
media policy debate and adding fresh voices to an issue that has long
been the secretive and well-guarded domain of self-interested
corporations and business trade associations. They defenders of the
public interest have arrived just in time. Perhaps unwittingly, Powell
and his corporate cronies have created a crucial historical moment.
Either the FCC will uphold the commitment to diverse ownership and
expression that has been at the heart of this democratic experiment from
the days of Madison and Jefferson, or it will surrender that experiment
to Lowry Mays and the media moguls.
John Nichols, Washington correspondent for The Nation, and University of
Illinois professor Robert W. McChesney are the co-authors of Our Media,
Not Theirs: The Democratic Struggle Against Corporate Media (Seven
Stories). They are co-founders of Free Press, a media reform network
that collects information about media activism, including efforts to
block the FCC rule changes, at www.mediareform.net.
