FCC Plan Will Result in Freedom Of or From the Press?

macduffman writes "Kevin Martin, Chairman of the FCC, has fired a volley in the war against media moguls ... or is it in the war against freedom of the press? An article in the Editor and Publisher describes the plan to ban cross-ownership in the same market (i.e., owning a newspaper and a broadcast station in the same city). Several waivers exist for some current ownerships, but would not be passed on to new owners. The plan calls for public comment beginning in mid-November, and the FCC would vote on it a month later." This follows an unpopular 2003 decision by the FCC that was eventually invalidated by the courts. At issue is the speed at which this complex decision is being carried out: "Media consolidation opponents said Wednesday that the chairman may be moving too fast. Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., said that one month for the public to consider the rule is not enough time. 'If that's his intention, it's going to subvert the public interest,' he said. 'The FCC needs to learn a lesson here from what happened previously.'" Update: 10/19 17:58 GMT by Z :Rewritten for clarity.

Comments

Re:That is freedom OF

[MyLongNickName]

While I understand your position, I am always very skeptial when the gov't steps in to "fix" the media. While there is precedent for this type of behavior, my concern is that the law will be applied in an inequitable manor. Is "more minorities" a code word for more liberal points of view? If so, then we should not be having the government step in to enforce so called quotas.

Ban multiple owndership, period

[Fear the Clam]

I would like to see a ban on owning more than one newspaper or broadcast station at all. Imagine how interesting life would be if radio stations weren't all the same damn thing run out of a conglomerate office, running the same ads at the same time, and offering everything geared to the most popular, dumbest, lowest common denominator?

I know, I know, I'm talking about a time before everyone got merger fever, back when the American (and beyond) experience was very different from place to place. But now that the Internet can ensure that everyone can get the same experience (news, music, television) if they really want, wouldn't it be a interesting thing to ban the unified voice of corporate broadcasting?

This may be meaningless; we've gone 2 the web

[postbigbang]

There's so much propaganda and quid pro quo, that newspapers are barely believable. And with formula media content, most radio stations sound the same, and have little news content (save NPR & BBC).

So we don't care. Sir Rupert can put better money in his web properties. And Clear Channel and Emmis clearly suck in their radio markets. TV? Does it matter? The FCC hasn't reflected popular choice in years. Why should they start now??

Re:That is freedom OF

[dgatwood]

The problem is this: print is dying. A lot of what keeps print media and news radio and other niche services alive is the cross-promotion on other media outlets in the same market. Were it not for that, we'd have even fewer newspapers than the already vanishingly small number that we have today. At this point, I think web publishing is quickly emerging as a replacement for what the print media used to be, and there's only so much we should do to force the independence of what amounts to a dying medium.

Even as someone who generally supports laws to limit ownership of large numbers of media outlets in a single market, I find myself against the cross-ownership rules. That's not the right way to ensure freedom of the press. What we need are laws that undo the consolidation of the radio industry that we've already seen (and the continuation of the laws we have that protect TV from the same fate).. We need to:

• Limit the number of radio stations in a single market by any single entity to three sets of call letters (which might each include one FM and one AM station with the same call letters).
• Require that Clear Channel and Infinity Broadcasting (and any other conglomerates that violate the rule) divest themselves of those interests within 12 months after these laws go into effect or lose the licenses.
• Mandate local ownership by setting a maximum of 50% of the radio stations in a market that may be owned by any company or individual not headquartered within the station's reception range.

That is how you ensure freedom of the press---not by preventing one individual from being able to control a single stack of local media (a TV station, a radio station, and a newspaper), but by ensuring that for any given medium, there are multiple independent outlets through which different voices can be heard.

Re:Way to read the article

[dgatwood]

You need to clarify your comment a bit. I suspect you understand the issue, but your wording could confuse people into thinking that this rule is about something that it is not really about.

This is not about wanting to own an unlimited number of media outlets. Most people want limitations on that. This is about owning an arbitrary number of types of media outlets---that is, if you own any number of radio or TV stations in a given market, you cannot also own a newspaper. There really is not a good reason for that sort of limit, and I support tearing down that limitation. It really isn't important to have such a restriction for print anymore, as print really isn't that important anyway in the grand scheme of things.

At this point, all this law is really doing is A. preventing newspaper companies from easily diversifying into more viable media like radio and TV, and B. making it harder to sell off print properties, thus encouraging less profitable print properties to be shut down entirely. Thus, I think it would be a great idea to shoot it in the head. I've thought the law was a bit silly since I first learned about it a decade ago. While this might seem counterintuitive to those folks who remember print back in its heyday, killing this law off is likely to significantly increase freedom of the press by allowing print publishers to expand into TV and radio, thus helping to reduce the current radio duopoly that we are seeing between Clear Channel and Infinity.

The law made sense when print was king, but in this day and age, it is an anachronism that only serves to hasten print's demise.

Re:Way to read the article

[geeknado]

I agree with many of your points, although I'd suggest there're other ways to 'make it happen' beyond government control-- consider NPR as an example. NPR has a combination of grants, listener, and corporate contributions that make it viable...That said, it's not clearly beholden to anybody in particular, so you get an interesting mix of perspectives and coverage of events that most of our other media outlets ignore.

On the downside, NPR tends to be extremely esoteric, and thus mostly captures the attention of a subset of our culture that /desires/ depth in media. I don't think it's hard to make a case that that's not the majority right now. Now, he news is all about making money. That wasn't always the case...There was definitely a time where the TV news in particular was sort of like an art competition between outlets-- who could do the 'best' news, relative to the competition. There seemed to be a sort of honor in the whole thing that kept it going...That's long gone now, I'm afraid(and has been for most of my lifetime).

Re:That is freedom OF

[dgatwood]

If each conglomerate is limited to three FM stations in a market, you'd still have about 33 companies in any market instead of the average of 2 companies we have today in most major markets even if you didn't do anything more than that rule.

With regards to your second point, satellite channels should not be limited, as satellite bandwidth really isn't a highly constrained resource. The Washington Post would be irrelevant if this rule gets killed, so I'm not sure why you mentioned it.

As for needing more than a month, I doubt they'll get more than a few hundred comments nationwide, and that's a very generous estimate. Not that many people care who owns print media outlets, and that's really all that this proposed rulemaking affects.

Re:That is freedom OF

[dgatwood]

Why not one? Because there are a hundred and one usable frequencies in the FM band... fifty-one if you throw away all the first adjacents (which is commonly done on either side of higher power stations). If you really had fifty-one stations all competing independently, you'd have to have an extremely large market area to support anything approaching that level of competition effectively. Most stations would probably just shut down if you limited it to a single station per market.

Also, some markets are fairly large geographically. Limiting it to a single station in a market would likely mean that some areas of the population would not have any radio stations that are less than an hour away. Far from promoting local station ownership, that would actively discourage local station operations.

For example, take a look at the Tennessee TV market map. In particular, look at the Nashville, TN market. It's that light green area that covers roughly a third of the state. For TV, a limit of one station in a market that size is okay, as most TV stations are in significant metro areas (Nashville, Knoxville, Chattanooga, Memphis, Jackson, and the tri-cities area). For radio, though, it's insane. At last count, there were 406 radio stations in Tennessee, many of which are in smaller areas.

For example, my home town of 8,000 people had radio stations. The most significant grouping of independent stations was the Thunderbolt Broadcasting family of stations, which consisted of four FM and one AM. That didn't seem too far out. They had one country, one oldies, one adult contemporary, and one classic hits. Going much beyond that number of stations in a single market, however, would be too much. They were, IMHO, a really good example of what radio broadcasting should be. They had an AM talk/news station associated with it, they regularly covered local events (high school athletics, band supper, etc.), and pumped money back into the community, sponsoring college scholarships, etc. I don't want to see the desire to regulate radio conglomerates result in laws that hurt folks like Paul.