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of media angels
Songsters protesting consolidation of ownership
By Jeff Bercovici
Pedestrians in Washington D.C. were treated to an unusual sight on Friday: A group of people, led by a choir of angels, singing hymns outside Federal Communications Commission headquarters. The singers were members of a coalition of activist groups participating in Media Democracy Week. They were in Washington to protest what they see as the agency’s soft stance on media ownership consolidation. Seeta Peña Gangadharan is a producer for MediaChannel.org, a New York-based media watchdog group, and one of the organizers of Media Democracy Week. She spoke yesterday with Media Life about what’s wrong with big media and why we should be keeping an eye on what the FCC is up to.
Why were people dressed as angels singing in front of FCC headquarters on Friday?
In 1998, FCC chairman Michael Powell, who was then a mere commissioner, gave a speech to the American Bar Association in which he talked about divining the public interest. In it, he says something like, "I waited all night for the angel of public interest to come to me, I waited and waited and waited, but she never appeared."
By the end of the speech, it becomes clear that he has no interest whatsoever in trying to grasp what the public interest is, or what the public really wants and what the role of a government agency is in that process.
So, responding to that, before any of this current deregulatory wave was announced, several organizers, activists from different backgrounds, got together and said, we need to act on this.
This is a really ridiculous quote, and we can fight back by being equally as embarrassing to the FCC and to Michael Powell.
We decided on a combination of street theater, or parody, or satire, as well as a program of speakers that would more seriously address the issues.
You have to have humor in the situation. It's already kind of an absurd, surreal situation.
I think in launching a public campaign against as complex an issue as media ownership and as complex an agency as the FCC, you do really have to take the time to have fun with it, because it’s a dense topic.
Most people don’t understand it, you know?
What, specifically, has the FCC done under Michael Powell that you think people should be aware of or concerned about?
There have probably been four rulings since beginning of the year -- four different major issues that have come to our attention.
The first is this appellate ruling lifting the ban on cross ownership and asking the FCC to reconsider or rewrite the law setting an audience cap.
We feel that this is detrimental to a healthy, democratic media system and that it will basically pave the way for more mergers, more acquisitions, much to the detriment of local production and a vibrant media, whether it’s news or entertainment, for communities throughout the United States.
The second ruling -- a bill, actually -- is the broadband last-mile bill.
That's gone through the House, where, basically, conservatives are pushing to make it easier on Baby Bells to continue their monopoly on the last mile, which means that other ISPs won't be able to compete easily. It portends more of a walled-garden situation, which is bad.
Then there's the recommendation that the FTC divest its media merger review power to the Department of Justice.
Again the implication is that media mergers will receive less scrutiny, which is not what they need right now.
They need more scrutiny because it's a really delicate time with converging media. You wouldn't want to make hasty decisions. You're not talking about products -- you're talking about people and democracy.
And the fourth issue?
The cable ruling.
Broadband internet services will be classified as information services rather than common carriers, implying that cable companies will be able to pick and choose what gets carried on their lines.
Again it’s the walled-garden idea -- less choice for consumers.
There's one more issue that gets washed away in all of these discussions because civil rights groups have been quite quiet on it, and that's the requirement that the FCC rewrite its Equal Employment Opportunity Commission requirements.
In that case, the companies filed suit, saying that the reporting process is too burdensome, and the FCC is trying to relax that.
In actuality, diversity in terms of minorities and women, particularly at the decision-making level, is dismal.
There needs to be greater scrutiny, or greater commitment, particularly on the part of industry, to diversity its staff, its newsrooms, its decision-making boards.
Is media conglomeration always a bad thing?
Is media consolidation always bad?
That’s of course a really loaded question.
There are big media companies, in Europe and all over the world, that emerged from the state-controlled model, and to a certain extent they are better because they took in social cost.
They valued things, whether it’s local production or a standard of journalism, that market demands in the United States cannot meet.
If you take the example of the internet, the reason why it proliferated so rapidly and so extensively throughout the United States, unlike in any other country, is because it privileged small business enterprises over large oligopolies.
Now you have bigger companies -- AOL Time Warner et cetera -- trying to colonize all the good work that the smaller guys did.
It's a different stage in industrial development, but it's not a good one. It's not good for business, and it's certainly not good for the small guy.
What do you say to the anti-regulatory argument that the profusion of new channels of media made possible by satellite TV, digital cable and the internet makes old ownership restrictions obsolete?
I think the same thing could be said about neo-liberal market ideology: It’s obsolete.
What you find with this stage of development in the market is that competition is thwarted, that the quality of media goes down, that the consumer has less choice, that the consumer has to pay higher prices.
The other problem with the argument is it makes the simple assumption that abundance means a plurality of outlets and a diversity of viewpoints, and I think you can cite several cases where that's not actually happening.
For example, advertisers in the radio industry have less choice. Clear Channel has a dominant position in the market, and they can choose who advertises on their networks to the exclusion of smaller advertisers, local advertisers, et cetera.
March 26, 2002 © 2002 Media Life
-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.
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