Print
There is one critical issue that neither candidates nor the media have said one word about. It does not even appear in either party’s platform. Yet how the next President chooses to address that issue will have a profound impact on the kind of society America becomes.
Much has been written about the importance of the Supreme Court. There is no question that the next President will probably appoint a justice or two who could make the current Gang of Four into a majority, or could diminish their impact on the Court. But there is another appointment the President WILL make that will also have a large impact–the Chair of the FCC. For the first time in eight years, if Barack Obama wins the Presidency the Democrats will have a majority on the FCC. If John McCain wins expect him to continue the present alignment.
Commissioner Appointments
More disturbing is that the two Democrats Adelstein and Copps have been perpetual problems for the Republican majority. The last time the FCC proposed to change media ownership rules, the two arranged what came to be called the Magical Mystery Tour to solicit public input. It is possible that a Republican President would finally figure out a way to get rid of one or both of these two.
This potential change in the FCC will impact how your Internet service is delivered, what rights you have as an Internet user, whether what is termed “electronic freedom” is protected or lost. It will determine your cell phone rates and what kind of cell phone service you get. Whether finally we get what is termed ala carte satellite and cable service instead of having to buy those stupid packages that give us dozens of stations we don’t even watch.
But there are some even bigger issues looming. That the media have not covered them is no surprise since the media rarely cover issues that reflect on them, but that the candidates have ignored media issue is a travesty. It has become a cliche to say we are a media-based society, but the candidates in their party platform apparently don’t get it.
Of all the issues looming before the FCC that this election will decide, two are especially crucial. The first is media concentration and ownership. The second is politicization of the media.
It has been several years since the FCC proposed to loosen rules on media ownership only to be beaten back by a huge public outcry that united everyone from the NRA to NOW. In the end the Courts put a stop to things with some help from a rarely-unified Congress. Unfortunately, like many ideas coming from big business this one refuses to die.
Martin Hearings on Media Ownership
A year ago, the FCC again tried to loosen rules on media ownership. Lead by Chair Kevin Martin this proposal advocated to eliminating a rule that bars companies from owning both a newspaper and a television or radio station in the same city. As with the first attempt at consolidation, the Commission gave little public notice. The press gave less. In fact my guess is most of you reading this do not remember the event.
Among those testifying were the Reverend Jesse Jackson and veteran newscaster Bib Edwards. Before the hearing Jackson spoke to a rally outside the FCC:
When we’re discussing the networks, where are the networks? As we’re discussing the networks, where are the networks? By denying us access to the networks, they make our case. They’re blocking us out. People cannot respond, because people do not know. I must say before the next speaker, as I traveled around the world just before the Iraq war, two million people marched in Britain, a million-plus marched in France, almost a half-million in Australia. Why did so few people march in America? Because the media owners supported the war and dumbed down the—we caught onto the war issue late, because information came late. That’s why this meeting has global ramifications for justice at home and peace abroad. So let’s keep marching.
In an interview with Amy Goodman, Copps and Adelstein weighed in. Adelstein told her:
People that gave witness to the fact that localism, coverage of local issues, is diminished as media giants get larger and larger. As they consolidate, they don’t cover what’s happening in local communities. They don’t live in the local community. They don’t serve local communities as well. So that was the message of this hearing. It’s about localism.
Copps added:
One of the really bombshell things that came out of the meeting yesterday was research that was presented by Free Press that just knocks the traces out from under the Martin argument and the previous FCC argument that newspaper/broadcast ownership isn’t so bad after all. It shows, this research, conclusively that if you combine newspapers and broadcast in a market, any size market, that the coverage of local news in that market is going to be diminished.
As Copps noted, since the first attempt at media consolidation, research has continued to show it is a bad idea.
Pitching a Shut Out
Ben Bagdikian, the nation’s expert on media concentration has been following the trend for over two decades. The following chart illustrates the trend he has found over the years in the number of corporations that control America’s media:
Graph Courtesy of Media Reform Information Center
Note the final number: five. Five corporations now control a majority of the media in this country, down from 50 two decades ago. Executives sitting in five suites decide what you will see and hear–and what you don’t. Little wonder that even on cable and satellite systems with several hundred options to choose from that the sources of real information as opposed to education have all but dried up. Even more ominously all of us have noticed how those voices sound and look as if they might be clones of each other.
The FCC Studies Media Concentration
Back in 2004, the FCC decided it might be a good idea if they studied the impact of their proposed media concentration rules. What they found was so controversial that the study was never officially released. The study showed:
Our study suggests that locally-owned television broadcast stations air more local news than network-operated and non-locally owned stations, even adjusting for the number of stations owned by the corporate parent.
The study found that local ownership added five minutes of local news and three minutes of on-location local news. With the average local newscast averaging ten minutes of advertising that means having local ownership increased local news by seven and a half minutes out of 20–a huge difference.
Local News in Your Community
If you want to know who controls the media in your community, The Center for Public Integrity has a web site where you can type in your zip code and it will tell you. Here is what I found for my zip code: there are fourteen television stations and 35 radio stations. The ownership patterns are sobering: Clear Channel controls six radio stations or 1/5 of the total, Disney controls 4, and Milestone (another media conglomerate) controls 2, which means a third of the radio outlets are controlled by big media companies. CBS controls 4 of the fourteen television stations.
I happen to live on the edge of a major metropolitan market, but in many small and medium-sized towns the situation can be much worse. Look up your own community to see the impact of media concentration. What you need to remember about this as you look up your home town is that the Republican-controlled FCC is promising to allow more concentration.
The Importance of Localism
Localism is not merely an information issue it is a cultural issue. Just as the look of local communities is become increasingly the same no matter where you live because of the dominance of chain retailers and their obnoxious and monotonous architecture, more insidious is that the diversity of cultures and ideas that came from these communities is in danger from a concentrated media.
This raises fear of an America where whole towns can be figuratively wiped out at the stroke of a pen and the exchange of a check. Commissioner Adelstein once stated that unlike French fries or ketchup, the mass media has viewpoints attached to it. Control of the media affects the vibrancy of what the Supreme Court in the Red Lion decision called the “uninhibited marketplace of ideas.” It affects the very health of our democracy. In Red Lion the Court went on to say:
It is the right of the public to receive suitable access to social, political, esthetic, moral, and other ideas and experiences which is crucial here. That right may not constitutionally be abridged either by Congress or by the FCC.
Control of local markets by national conglomerates gives local citizens little information about their own community. In a way, many towns have become as if they are ghost towns with only tumbleweeds howling through them and their vibrant down towns boarded up. Along with the loss of local voices comes the loss of venerable institutions like the broadcasts of the local sports teams, local personalities dishing out tips on canning this year’s tomato crop, and that lifeblood of many rural communities, the recitation of the current commodity prices. In a sense, media concentration not only make people anonymous, they also make their communities anonymous.
Concentration Also Silences Diversity
If the silencing of local voices is one dimension of media concentration, the silencing of diversity is another. Few African Americans can remember the days when this nation supported and respected an influential African American press whose words were taken seriously by the person sitting in the Oval Office. The withering away of that African American press is these days of media concentration is nothing less than an American tragedy.
The names of editors of influential African American newspapers once were household words not only to black but white Americans. Now I doubt anyone can name an influential African American newspaper or editor.
As for the media African American participation is a travesty. According to Stopbigmedia.com:
Racial and ethnic minorities make up 34 percent of the U.S. population Yet they only own 7.7 percent of full-power radio stations
3.15 percent of television stations.
The loss of these voices that once enriched our cultural dialogue means America is on its way to becoming a monoculture and anyone who knows as much as a fifth grader can tell you what eventually happens to monocultures.
It is ironic that had Barack Obama been running for President two or three decades ago, African American newspapers and editors would have insured that the Ayers and Wright stories would have received the criticism they deserve. In fact John McCain himself would have been leery about putting these stories at the center of his campaign for fear of antagonizing these editors.
Media Politicization–Faux News
The other major media issue is politicization. The most notorious example of this is Faux News, run by former GOP dirty trickster Roger Ailes and owned by Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul even those in the media hold with a mixture of fear and contempt. From the start Ailes made it very clear that Faux News would have a distinct rightward slant.
In Matt Bai’s recent New York Times Magazine story on Barack Obama, Obama remarked:
I am convinced that if there were no Fox News, I might be two or three points higher in the polls. If I were watching Fox News, I wouldn’t vote for me, right? Because the way I’m portrayed 24/7 is as a freak! I am the latte-sipping, New York Times-reading, Volvo-driving, no-gun-owning, effete, politically correct, arrogant liberal. Who wants somebody like that?
By now Americans either love or hate Faux, with wingnuts cheering every barbed comment by Sean Hannity and company while moderates and liberals wonder how they get away with it. There seems little question Faux has contributed to the Era of Bad feelings by stoking the fires of hatred between left and right. What is less known is how Faux has molded the brains of those who depend on it for “information.”
How Fox Molds Minds
Perhaps one of the most sobering studies comes from the Program of International Policy (PIP) which researched viewing and listening habits and compared them with views of the Iraq War. The study focused on three statements that had been exposed as either false or exaggerated: that Saddam Hussein was a major Al Qaeda supporter, that Iraq had deployable or had deployed weapons of mass destruction and that most of the world supported America’s invasion.
The study found only 23% of those who relied on National Public Radio or Public Broadcasting for information about public affairs believed one or more of the propositions as compared with 80% of those who watched Fox News. Even more interesting is that 54% of Republican Fox viewers held misperceptions versus 32% of Republicans who mainly received news from PBS or NPR. In essence, Fox plays a role in reinforcing the Republican Party line.
The PIP study is bolstered by an even more unsettling media polarization reflecting the Era of Bad Feelings. A 2004 Pew Research Center study observed,”
Political polarization is increasingly reflected in the public’s news viewing habits.
The Pew study pointed out that a beneficiary of this polarization has been Fox News, which, not surprisingly has been attracting an increasing number of those who describe themselves as Republicans and conservatives. According to Pew,
Fox ranks as the most trusted news source among Republicans but is among the least trusted by Democrats.
The study points out,
Republicans have become more distrustful of virtually all major media outlets over the past four years.
Molding a Generation
Faux represents the first real-life example of the fears voiced in distopian novels such as 1984 that some day people’s minds will be brainwashed en masse. Faux has existed long enough that the results of those studies have replicated themselves over and over again.
We now have a generation that will only believe Sean Hannity while discounting all other information. Hannity literally shapes their views of reality so that even when he might not voice an opinion about an issue he has injected attitudes in his viewers that impact how they see that issue.
More alarming is how Hannity and company have molded people’s attitudes. Their in-you-face, confrontational, take-no-prisoners style is emulated by his viewers who bring it to city council meetings, school board discussions and even neighborhood relations. If you are a “liberal” and happen to live next to a Hannity disciple your chance of striking up a friendship are next to nothing and your life may be made miserable.
The hatred aroused by Faux and other media commentators of the raucous right has literally turned some American neighborhoods into American versions of Baghdad where Shiite and Sunni no longer cooperate but instead see their mission as a holy cause bent on driving out those who hold different ideas.
The Fairness Doctrine
Most Americans no longer remember the Fairness Doctrine, but once it governed media discussions, insisting that a reporter or network had to present all sides of a story. Back in 1927 when Congress first passed the Radio Act, Representative Luther Johnson stated the problem in a way that still resonates:
American thought and American politics will be largely at the mercy of those who operate these stations, for publicity is the most powerful weapon that can be wielded in a republic. And when such a weapon is placed in the hands of one person, or a single selfish group is permitted to either tacitly or otherwise acquire ownership or dominate these broadcasting stations throughout the country, then woe be to those who dare to differ with them. It will be impossible to compete with them in reaching the ears of the American people.
The most definitive statement of the meaning of the doctrine came from the Supreme Court in the famous Red Lion decision:
It is the purpose of the First Amendment to preserve an uninhibited marketplace of ideas in which truth will ultimately prevail, rather than to countenance monopolization of that market, whether it be by the government itself or a private licensee. It is the right of the public to receive suitable access to social, political, esthetic, moral and other ideas and experiences which is crucial here. That right may not constitutionally be abridged either by Congress or by the FCC.
Repealed during the Reagan Administration, the Fairness Doctrine has become as dim a memory as media fairness and what used to be termed objectivity.
The Disappearance of Journalism
If American minds are being molded by the likes of Sean Hannity even as you read this, the second insidious implication of a politicized media is the disappearance of journalism. It is not just that journalists feel they no longer need to be objective but that they no longer need to practice basic journalistic ethics such as using primary sources, having several sources confirm the first, and even elementary fact-checking.
When I wrote for the New York Times Magazine they required me to send them a full photocopy of the entire source from which I had quoted. Their meticulous fact checkers wanted to be sure that both the quote was right and that is was not taken out of context. Reputable publishers used to require similar diligence.
But these days it is not just that no one fact checks, no one cares. It would be one thing if the people doing this were fringe publishers, but we are talking about what used to be some of the most respected names in American publishing. Now they frequently have become no better than media whores.
Why Is This Important?
If you couple media concentration with the decline in American public education discussed in the previous “Election Neglection” essay in yields an ominous scenario. People with an inferior education find it more difficult to analyze what they see and hear. People who only see and hear what five executives want them to see and hear find that education is of little use to them because they have no other sources of information.
The end result is an electorate that steps into the voting booth as if blindfolded, for the problems with education make it difficult for them to analyze the candidate’s statements and the media concentration shuts them out from alternative voices that might help them to better understand those statements. We are fast approaching a point where those of us entering the voting booth might as well throw a dart at the ballot.
This is not the democracy our founders had in mind. So when you make your decision about who to vote for in national, state and local races think about which of them will help to reverse this trend and bring back our democracy. The future of the next generation literally depends on it.
Print Posted by: liberalamerican
