Former FCC Commissioner: Big Media Dumbs Down Democracy
By Bill Moyers, Moyers & Company
05 December 12
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.
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 Common Cause
<http://www.commoncause.org/site/pp.asp?c=dkLNK1MQIwG&b=8281551>. He
stopped by our office Monday to share his concerns about the FCC's
latest proposal.
*Bill Moyers: After all the conversations we've had over the years, why
are we still talking about media concentration today?*
*Michael Copps:* 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.
There's this wonderful story about Bill Paley, who I never knew, but -
*Moyers: - founder and chairman of the board of CBS -*
*Copps:* 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"?
*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."*
*Copps:* 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.
*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?*
*Copps:* 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 University of Texas
<http://billmoyers.com/content/will-the-supreme-court-reaffirm-affirmative-action/>
and all that, where you can take into consideration a number criteria,
and one of those would be minority status.
I wrote a piece on Benton's blog <http://m.benton.org/node/140512> 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 limit opportunities
<http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/110874-Obama_Calls_On_Martin_to_Slow_Down_on_Ownership_Review.php>
for minority, small business and women-owned firms."
*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?*
*Copps:* 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.
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.
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.
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.
*Moyers: On this particular decision now under consideration, the
relaxation of some rules prohibiting further concentration, what can
ordinary people do?*
*Copps:* 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.
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