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<h1 class="txttitle">Former FCC Commissioner: Big Media Dumbs Down
Democracy</h1>
<p class="txtauthor">By Bill Moyers, Moyers & Company</p>
<p class="date">05 December 12</p>
<p> </p>
<p><img src="cid:part1.07050101.03010308@gmail.com" border="0">his
week, we're focusing on the Federal Communications Commission's
proposal to relax the rules that prevent one company from owning
radio stations, television stations and newspapers all in the same
city - a move activists say would hurt diversity and be a boon for
the Rupert Murdochs of the world.</p>
<p class="indent">It's déjà vu for Michael Copps, who served on the
commission from 2001-2011 and was acting chairman from January to
June 2009 - a tenure marked by his concern for diversity and
opposition to media consolidation. Copps is now the senior advisor
for media and democracy reform at <a
href="http://www.commoncause.org/site/pp.asp?c=dkLNK1MQIwG&b=8281551"
target="_blank">Common Cause</a>. He stopped by our office
Monday to share his concerns about the FCC's latest proposal.</p>
<p class="indent"><strong>Bill Moyers: After all the conversations
we've had over the years, why are we still talking about media
concentration today?</strong></p>
<p class="indent"><strong>Michael Copps:</strong> Because media
concentration is still very much a reality today. If you opened up
the papers last week, you'll see Rupert Murdoch is maybe thinking
about buying the Los Angeles Times or the Chicago Tribune. Every
time you have one of these consolidation transactions, they look
around for all of these wonderful economies and efficiencies that
they're supposed to harvest from becoming big conglomerates. The
first thing they think is, "How do we impress Wall Street now?
Where do we cut?" And the first place they cut is the newsroom.
We've had, across this country, hundreds of newsrooms shuttered,
thousands of reporters who are walking the streets in search of a
job, rather than walking the beats in search of stories. And the
consequence of that is, I think, a dramatically dumbed down civic
dialogue that is probably - and I don't think I'm exaggerating -
insufficient to sustain self-government as we would like to have
it.</p>
<p class="indent">There's this wonderful story about Bill Paley, who
I never knew, but -</p>
<p class="indent"><strong>Moyers: - founder and chairman of the
board of CBS -</strong></p>
<p class="indent"><strong>Copps:</strong> Right. Getting his news
folks together back in the '50s or '60s, whenever it was, and
saying, "I want you folks to go out and get the news. And don't
worry where the money's coming from. I got Jack Benny. He'll
provide the money and you go get the news." Can you imagine any of
the current CEOs of the media companies here, Les Moonves or
anybody like that, telling their news people, "You just go and get
the news and don't worry where the money's coming from"?</p>
<p class="indent"><strong>Moyers: The argument we hear in rebuttal
is "Well look, we don't have to worry about monopoly today, we
don't have to worry about cartels today, because we have the
Internet, which is the most democratic source of opinion,
expression and free speech that's available to us. You and
Moyers are outdated because of your concerns about broadcasting
and newspapers and all of this."</strong></p>
<p class="indent"><strong>Copps:</strong> I don't buy that argument
at all. The Internet has the potential for all of that. The
Internet has the potential for a new town square of democracy,
paved with broadband bricks. But it's very, very far from being
the reality. The reality is - and you don't have to really look
too closely - throughout history, we've seen every means of
communication go down this road toward more and more
consolidation. Wouldn't it be a tragedy if you took this potential
of this open and dynamic technology, capable of addressing just
about every problem that the country has - no problem that we have
doesn't have a broadband component to its solution somewhere along
the line - and let the biggest invention since the printing press
probably as communication goes, morph into a cable-ized Internet?
That's what I think is happening. Most of the news generated on
the Internet, is still coming from the newspaper newsroom, or the
TV newsroom. It's just there's so damn much less of it because of
the consolidation that we've been through, because of the
downsizing, and because of a government that has been absent
without leave from its public interest responsibilities for many,
many years - a better part of a generation now.</p>
<p class="indent"><strong>Moyers: You came to the commission
advocating more ownership, more diversity, more participation by
minorities and women - where does that stand now? Have they made
gains?</strong></p>
<p class="indent"><strong>Copps:</strong> It stands pretty much
where it stood when the new commissioner came through the door in
2009. We have pending before the commission dozens and dozens of
recommendations to incentivize minority and female ownership. It
can't right now be truly a race-conscious policy - I hope it will
be some day - because we don't have the legal justification, and
that's due to the FCC's not doing its homework. But they have
something called overcoming disadvantage, sort of like the <a
href="http://billmoyers.com/content/will-the-supreme-court-reaffirm-affirmative-action/"
target="_blank">University of Texas</a> and all that, where you
can take into consideration a number criteria, and one of those
would be minority status.</p>
<p class="indent">I wrote a piece on <a
href="http://m.benton.org/node/140512" target="_blank">Benton's
blog</a> that came out today, and I go back and quote from
Barack Obama in previous years. This is Barack Obama at an FCC
hearing, he submitted this statement, 2007, September 20th: "I
believe that the nation's media ownership rules remain necessary
and are critical to the public interest. We should be doing much
more to encourage diversity in the ownership of broadcast media,
promote the development of new media outlets for expression of
diverse viewpoints, and establish greater clarity in public
interest obligations of broadcasters occupying the nation's
spectrum." Seven months later, in February, he and Dick Durbin
wrote the commission: "The broadcast ownership rules directly
implicate core American values such as diversity, localism,
representation and a competitive marketplace of ideas." And listen
to this: "I object"- this is Obama, as candidate, October 22,
2007: "I object to the agency moving forward to allow greater
consolidation in the media market without first fully
understanding how that would <a
href="http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/110874-Obama_Calls_On_Martin_to_Slow_Down_on_Ownership_Review.php"
target="_blank">limit opportunities</a> for minority, small
business and women-owned firms."</p>
<p class="indent"><strong>Moyers: But, to the contrary, we hear
these reports that the man President Obama put on the commission
as the chairman is considering further relaxation of the rules
prohibiting concentration. How do you explain that?</strong></p>
<p class="indent"><strong>Copps:</strong> Well, first of all, they
definitely are considering it. Nobody has seen the document yet
except the commissioners, but in point of fact, they are going to
liberalize - that's the wrong term - they're going to loosen the
newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership [rules] and loosen the
constraints on radio and TV stations owning each other.</p>
<p class="indent">How do you explain that? I don't know if it's a
question of less interest than there should be in the media
issues, because people maybe deem them to be an older issue, and
let's talk about new media and wireless and spectrum and all of
that. And all of that is important, but here's my take. You know,
you really have to get people away from this idea of thinking old
media versus new media. We have in this country one media
ecosystem, and it is partly composed of traditional media -
newspapers, radio, television, cable. It's partly composed of new
media - broadband and the Internet. And it's going to stay that
way, for years yet. I mean there'll be evolution, but we're going
to have both of these things to contend with. And neither one of
them is operating, at either extreme, where they should. The
traditional media is a shell of its former self, as I talked about
before, really as hollowed out as Midwestern steel mill, a rust
belt steel mill. But the new media - there's wonderful
entrepreneurship and experimentation taking place in the new
media, but there's no business plan to support expensive
investigative journalism. How does a little website run by one or
two people, how does somebody say, "Well, you take off six or
eight months and go dig out this story in the state capital, would
you please?" Or, "Go look at this insurance company and how it's
operating," or the city council. You don't get that anymore. You
just wonder how many stories are going untold, how many of the
powerful are being held completely unaccountable for what they
did.</p>
<p class="indent">So the new media, for all the good things it has
done - and it has done a lot of cool things, with the instant
pictures and instant stories and the Arab Spring and all that
stuff, but it hasn't replaced what we've lost in traditional
media, from the standpoint of serious and sustained investigative
accountability, hold-the-powerful-accountable journalism. Until we
address both parts of that equation, we will not have a media
system that is worthy of the government.</p>
<p class="indent">You can go back to the beginnings of our country
and find the founding fathers were vitally interested in our news
and information ecosystem, or infrastructure, whatever they called
it. So important that they subsidized postal roads, subsidized
post offices. They said "Let all the newspapers in the country get
out. We've got this daring new experiment in self-government. We
don't know if it can work or not. Maybe it will, maybe it won't,
but the only way it will work is if citizens have information so
they can vote and be a part of self-government." Fast forward to
the beginning of the broadcast era. I think that was the same kind
of mentality then. We've got this public resource here. It can
help the news and information infrastructure, so if we're going to
license broadcasters to use this spectrum, we can expect them to
serve the public interest in return. I think broadcasters took
that seriously for a while, until they discovered, 20 or 30 years
later, that the FCC wasn't really serious about it in the first
place. Now that's all gone, from inattention, and also from the
fact that FCC, beginning in the late '70s and coming up with a
vengeance after Ronald Reagan, eviscerated all the public interest
guidelines that we used to have.</p>
<p class="indent"><strong>Moyers: On this particular decision now
under consideration, the relaxation of some rules prohibiting
further concentration, what can ordinary people do?</strong></p>
<p class="indent"><strong>Copps:</strong> Well, they can get
involved. It can become a grassroots movement. I spent 40 years in
Washington, working on policy with the belief that you can do some
good things from the top down, and I still believe that. But the
real systemic reforms and the substantive reforms in this country,
from abolition to women's rights and civil rights, and labor
rights and all that, came from the bottom up. And I think there's
enough frustration out there that it's possible to build on that
right now.</p>
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