There is one appointment Barack Obama has yet to make that has all but escaped the attention of the media and virtually all the blogs. Yet it ranks as one of the more important positions in his administration, for that person will determine the shape of our democracy for the next four years. The position is head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
Democracy or Mediacracy?
If the future of the American economy is hanging in the balance, the future of what the Supreme Court in the Red Lion decision termed “the marketplace of ideas”: also is at stake. The next FCC commissioner and new Democratic commission majority will decide the fate of information in our democratic society.
Free and open access to information is as critical to the democratic process as the air we breathe is to our lives. If the information we receive is polluted by bias, by lack of diversity, by a squelching of the values of fairness, truth and objectivity, then our democracy will succumb to that foul atmosphere producing the equivalent of those monsters and deformed creatures who populate the contaminated atmospheres of science fiction movies and novels.
Red Lion
The Red Lion decision still ranks as one of the most important in Supreme Court history. As we enter into this new millennium it is instructive to recall that decision as we ponder the future of the American media. There is something about great cases that periodically calls forth from the bench some memorable language and Red Lion is no exception.
The case began when the Reverend Billy James Hargis, the Jerry Falwell of his day, accused the author of a book on Barry Goldwater of being a Communist. The author sued under the Fairness Doctrine and the Court found in his favor. In its decision the Court said the Fairness Doctrine serves to
Enhance rather than abridge the freedoms of speech and press protected by the First Amendment.
It also noted:
When a personal attack has been made on a figure involved in a public issue {the Doctrine requires that} the individual attacked himself be offered an opportunity to respond.
But the most memorable and important part of the decision came with the phrase “the marketplace of ideas.”
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.
This past summer in a little-noticed move, a group of six organizations including the American Academy of Pediatrics filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court that asked that it retain Red Lion. Part of that brief quoted the decision:
[T]he people as a whole retain their interest in free speech by radio and their collective right to have the medium function consistently with the ends and purposes of the First Amendment. It is the right of the viewers and listeners, not the right of the broadcasters, which is paramount.
The New Playing Field
What the Academy and others worried about is that there has been a growing movement to essentially toss out all federal regulation of the media in the light of the growth of the Internet. As the Academy pointed out in a footnote in the brief, that argument holds that the increasing use of the Net and the growth of alternative outlets such as blogs, YouTube, and podcasting have so diversified the media that there no longer is a need for Red Lion or any government oversight.
Turning Red Lion upside down, these advocates argue that the market has become so diverse that that in and of itself is enough to insure the Court’s “marketplace of ideas.” Unfortunately, there are some misguided souls who are part of the netroots who support that position because they are afraid that were the FCC to become more involved in policing the Internet it would impinge on what some term “net neutrality.”
You will hear a great deal about Red Lion, “net neutrality” and the role of the FCC in the Internet over the coming years. In short, just as the incoming administration will redefine the economic marketplace in light of the current recession, it also will redefine the media marketplace in light of the growth of the Internet. That will lay the foundation for the American media for the foreseeable future.
At the center of that redefinition lie several key issues that will need to be resolved by the FCC.
Media Ownership
The first is media ownership. There has been a great written about the growing concentration of the American media, some of it quite scary. As usual, a graph tells the story.
Graph Courtesy of Media Reform Information Center
Ben Bagdikian, who deserves a lion’s share of the credit for publicizing this issue (pun intended) pointed out in 2004:
Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch’s News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, and Viacom (formerly CBS) — now control most of the media industry in the U.S.
Current FCC Commissioner Michael Copps has commented on the changes this concentration has wrought in the American media marketplace:
The largest company owned less than 75 stations before deregulation. Today one company, Clear Channel, owns more than 1,200 stations…The number of radio station owners has decreased by an incredible 34 percent since 1996. The number of minority owners has dropped by a shocking, and nationally embarrassing, 14 percent…In our hearings around the country, Commissioner Adelstein and I have talked to many capable young musicians and creative artists who are simply unable to secure air time in the new consolidated radio environment. Real news radio is dying outside the largest cities, and viewpoint diversity has given way to a constant drumbeat of one-sided talk shows. [The Source for this is no longer accessible on the Net]
What has been especially disturbing have been moves on the part of the Republican FCC under George Bush to relax the rules on media ownership so that a single company could control multiple media outlets in a city. In 2003 the FCC proposed liberalizing the rules included increasing the 35% limit for TV ownership to 45%, meaning a single company could control almost half of all broadcasting stations and, more important, two companies could control 90%. It also raised the caps on how many local stations could be controlled by a single company and widened the ability of companies to engage in cross-media ownership within a single market. Fortunately the FCC was thwarted by both Congress and the Courts, but the measure is being kept alive by the media conglomerates who stand to benefit from it.
A corollary to this issue concerns the diversity of media ownership. Reclaim the Media observes:
According to a study by the nonprofit, nonpartisan group Free Press, people of color own just three percent of all local TV stations and eight percent of all local radio stations, even though they make up 35 percent of the U.S. population. In another study, we find that women comprise 51 percent of the entire U.S. population, but only own approximately five percent of all full power broadcast stations.
The most depressing aspect of these figures is that ownership by people of color has declined as the media have become more concentrated. A study by FreePress.net found:
From October 2006 to October 2007 the number of minority-owned full power commercial TV stations decreased by 8.5 percent, from 47 to 43 stations, or from 3.45 percent to 3.15 percent of all stations.
From October 2006 to October 2007 the number of African American-owned full power commercial TV stations decreased by nearly 60 percent, from 19 to 8, or from 1.4 percent to 0.6 percent of all stations.
In a sense this decline in media ownership by people of color under the Bush Administration is yet another example of the racism that again rose its ugly head in this country over the past eight years. All Americans should hope that Barack Obama will reverse this trend–which cannot get much worse.
The new FCC Commissioner will have to decide whether to allow this media concentration to continue or to move towards diversifying the market. The question is will we be Rupurt Murdoch’s America or the nation envisioned by the founders?
Media Fairness
Red Lion came about because of what was then known as the Fairness Doctrine. Adopted as an FCC rule in 1949, the Fairness Doctrine contained two key provisions. As if to argue that the Internet is not the diverse environment many hold it to be, I was unable after an hour and a half of searching to find the primary source. That is a travesty! Instead, I quote one of the best online pieces on the doctrine by Steve Rendall:
The Fairness Doctrine had two basic elements: It required broadcasters to devote some of their airtime to discussing controversial matters of public interest, and to air contrasting views regarding those matters. Stations were given wide latitude as to how to provide contrasting views: It could be done through news segments, public affairs shows or editorials.
The doctrine was repealed by an FCC staffed with Reagan appointees. The result has been a media landscape inundated with the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and Ann Coulter.
Recently there has been talk about bringing back the Fairness Doctrine in some form. Rendell states the case about as well as anyone:
What has not changed since 1987 is that over-the-air broadcasting remains the most powerful force affecting public opinion, especially on local issues; as public trustees, broadcasters ought to be insuring that they inform the public, not inflame them. That’s why we need a Fairness Doctrine. It’s not a universal solution. It’s not a substitute for reform or for diversity of ownership. It’s simply a mechanism to address the most extreme kinds of broadcast abuse.
A month ago in an interview on Faux News New York Senator Charles Schumer stated:
I think we should all be fair and balanced, don’t you? The very same people who don’t want the Fairness Doctrine want the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] to limit pornography on the air. I am for that… But you can’t say government hands off in one area to a commercial enterprise but you are allowed to intervene in another. That’s not consistent.
This past June a spokesman for Barack Obama took a slightly different view:
Sen. Obama does not support reimposing the Fairness Doctrine on broadcasters. He considers this debate to be a distraction from the conversation we should be having about opening up the airwaves and modern communications to as many diverse viewpoints as possible. That is why Sen. Obama supports media-ownership caps, network neutrality, public broadcasting, as well as increasing minority ownership of broadcasting and print outlets.
This seems to indicate an Obama FCC Chair nominee will not touch the fairness issue, but it is clear that the media have gotten out of control. What Obama’s spokesperson and others against bringing back the doctrine fail to acknowledge is that we live in a changed media environment in which digital trickery is becoming commonplace.
The 2004 Presidential election featured a glaring example of political media manipulation-an altered photograph supposedly showing John Kerry standing next to Jane Fonda at an anti-Vietnam War rally. The fake attracted so much attention that Ken Light, one of the photographers whose photos were stolen to make the image, felt compelled to write an editorial condemning the act. He said the digital trickery:
It tells us more about the troublesome combination of Photoshop and the Internet than it does about the prospective Democratic candidate for president. Who could have predicted that my Ethical Problems in Photography presentation would be showing young journalists how National Geographic moved one of the Egyptian pyramids to make it fit on a cover better, or the way colleges seeking a more diverse image edit African American faces into sports crowds that look too white?
It is one thing when a Rush Limbaugh plays games with the truth, but digital trickery takes this to another level. That is why we need a return of something like the Fairness Doctrine. As I wrote in Strange Death:
In this world it becomes easy for people to dismiss all sources or trust only those that share their prejudices. Economic justice can become an illusion, educational equity becomes useless except for those knowledgeable about the magician’s tricks, and voting freedom becomes as valid as throwing darts at a ballot. Figuring out whether the playing field is level becomes the equivalent of floating weightlessly in space where up and down, left and right, lose meaning.
Net Neutrality
There may be no volatile issue on the net than net neutrality. Pushed by both internet service providers (ISPs) and content providers such as blogs, in its most basic form net neutrality says that there should be no restrictions on what flows through the “pipe.” Right away, of course, you can see there is a basic conflict between this and the Fairness Doctrine. In fact in its simplest terms, net neutrality is about whether fairness should also apply in the ether.
Those who favor net neutrality raise the specter of “big brother” controlling net content. Others raise the more practical issue of how it would be enforced in this world where a server can be anywhere. Recently when I went to download a popular spyware program I found that some shady characters had appropriated the name of the program and set up shop in the Caribbean, far away from any lawsuit by the real spyware providers. What is more Google gives that site a higher page rank than the real one, further contributing to the confusion.
Google is my argument against net neutrality. Search engines now control your access to Internet content whether you like it or not. I was not happy, for example, to find plagiarized versions of my Glass-Steagall piece appearing on Google and Google refusing to police them unless I hired a team of lawyers.
Take a controversial issue such as the Fairness Doctrine. Most people will go to a search engine for information on it. Page rankings–for which none of the search engines will reveal their secret formulas–determine which pieces of information you will see first. What we do know about page rankings is that they are quantity-driven, not quality driven, so you may have to scroll down through as many as ten pages of sources to find a decent one.
When what amounts to crap and even misleading and flat-out false information appears with a higher page ranking than decent sources, it totally pollutes the basic definition of information. In this new environment information is anything Google says it is.
Predictably Google has been accused of having a liberal bias. In a 2006 article on the blog American Thinker, Noel and Marc Sheppard charged:
Five months ago, the Internet’s top search engine Google was accused of banning conservative websites from its news crawl. Last week, the e—behemoth offered to purchase YouTube, the preeminent provider of videos over the Web that has recently been implicated in censorship of its own. With their pending merger, serious questions arise about the future of the most powerful telecommunications medium on the landscape, and who if anyone is trying to control its content.
Accusing the media of liberal bias is nothing new in conservative circles, but the number of blogs accusing Google of conservative bias does raise questions for me.
More troubling is Google’s mixing of advertising and content, so each search is accompanied by paid ads on the right side that try to seduce you into acessing those sites. In essence if you can pay for it, you can influence people’s access to information.
Clearly just as with digital manipulation, the FCC will have to deal with the power of search engines. I have no answers for this, but I must admit that the power of Google scares not only me but many others as well.
Obama in the Hot Seat
The issues facing the new FCC Chair are difficult and volatile. They will call for a personality that has knowledge of this new playing field and the intelligence to navigate its minefields. Most of all, it will call for someone with values, a moral compass to guife them through these stormy issues.
In the 2003 hearings over media concentration Commissioner Kenneth Adelstein stated what was at stake:
Without a diverse, independent media, citizen access to information crumbles, along with political and social participation. For the sake of our democracy, we should encourage the widest possible dissemination of free expression through the public airwaves.
In the FCC seal shown above, the American eagle appears to be walking a tightrope between two communications towers. That tightrope has become even more difficult to walk in this new era of digital manipulation and Internet search engines. Let us hope that the eagle does not fall.
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