Intent on finishing what it has started over the years, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) last week voted 4 - 0 to review the few remaining regulations that restrict media cross-ownership. The FCC has spent several years dismantling the rules that prevented, say, local newspaper monopolies from owning local television and radio stations.
The entertainment industry needs these regulations relaxed, it says, in order to grow and stay competitive with upstarts like the Internet, and cable and satellite television.
Those opposed to loosening the regulations, mostly independent media producers and consumer advocates, say the result will be more of the same: two or three enormous corporate conglomerates in control of what we listen to, watch, and read.
Although the FCC is charged with “regulating interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable,” presumably in the public interest, most observers agree that the net result will be continued mergers between giants in the entertainment industry.
The regulations under review are long-standing rules “designed to promote diverse ownership of media outlets and encourage an open marketplace for ideas,” Mark Cooper, research director of the Consumer Federation of America, told the Associated Press.
Two specific regulations—one limiting ownership of television stations that reach more than 35 percent of American households, and the other prohibiting one company from owning more than one television station in the same market—were rejected earlier this year by the courts.
The FCC has been easing media ownership regulations since the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which removed most restrictions on radio station ownership and a 1999 ruling that allows one company to own two television stations in a single market. As a result, Clear Channel Communications owns 46 percent of the FM radio market. Its closest competitor, Disney, owns 34 percent of the same market. A whopping 80 percent of the Minneapolis - Saint Paul radio market is in the hands of two companies.
The problem with media cross-ownership is obvious to Reed Hundt, former FCC chair: “It is generally understood that the rise of media monopolies led to a shift in editorial content, city by city, to a far-less confrontational, far-less controversial, far-less skeptical and challenging press.” Hundt made those comments during a panel discussion sponsored by the Columbia University Journalism School two years ago. Ironically, or maybe not, the panel discussion took place on the same day that the America Online and Time Warner merger was approved.
The entertainment industry claims that cross-ownership of media properties actually increases the diversity of available voices. “We as a company have acquired more and more TV stations around the country,” said Arthur Siskind, group general counsel of News Corporation, Ltd. “But we have introduced local and national news where news programs never existed before because of our ability to subsidize those programs,” Siskind concluded at the panel discussion. The FCC granted Rupert Murdoch‘s News Corporation, Ltd. a permanent cross-ownership waiver in 1993 and in 2000, News Corporation, Ltd. petitioned the FCC for another waiver which would allow it to own multiple newspapers and television stations in New York City.
The vitality of democracy depends upon independent and diverse media voices. That, I think, is indisputable. What remains in question is whether or not consolidation of media property ownership—and even consolidation of mainstream media properties themselves—threatens the range of diversity of available voices. My intuition says yes, consolidation—by definition—reduces diversity, but I suspect we may be asking the wrong question.
How much diversity of viewpoints between CBS, ABC, NBC, FOX, or CNN do you find now? Isn’t it a qualitative, rather than quantitative, question? Using ownership as the sole criteria, Viacom, Disney, General Electric, News Corporation, Ltd., and AOL Time Warner are, at least for the moment, separate entities. If, in one gargantuan group grope, they all merged, would we really notice? Flip the channels. I don’t have Tivo or cable, because it’s all the same.
Maybe ownership—and by extension, maybe even consolidation—isn’t the problem.
If, on the other hand, some sort of media meteor struck the earth tomorrow and all the corporate media entities were shattered, each individual shard would, like a lizard’s tail, replicate its missing parts. That seems to me to be representative of a very deep problem, but maybe the problem isn’t with them at all. Maybe the problem is with us. Maybe to get better we have to do better. More on that later.
Additional resources
- ”The global media giants: the nine firms that dominate the world” by Robert W. McChesney
- ”The 50, 26, 20… corporations that own our media” by Ben Bagdikian
- ”2020 Hindsight” by Mark Crispin Miller
- ”The media borg wants you” Salon article series
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