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August 9, 1999

FCC Weakens Rules, to Delight of Broadcasters

In a major relaxation of broadcast ownership rules, the Federal Communications Commission has announced it will allow networks to own two TV stations in the same city.

Previously, the FCC limited a network or other company to one television station per city. Under the new regulations announced August 5, a company can own two television stations in the same city, so long the city has at least seven other separately owned stations.

The FCC’s move creates an opportunity for dominant broadcasters to further expand their market share, and will likely spark a flurry of station sales, a point confirmed by industry executives and observers. “It’s going to be a land rush to some degree,” commented one executive (New York Times, 8/6/99).

A land rush that is all but certain to be won by the biggest players in the increasingly concentrated broadcast industry. For example, since the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was passed, over 4,000 commercial radio stations have been sold, and there have been over 1,000 radio company mergers.

This decision stands in stark contrast to some of FCC Chair William Kennard’s own statements regarding ownership and diversity on the public airwaves. In a speech to the Radio-Television News Director Association annual convention last year (9/25/98), Kennard said:

One concern I have is concentration of ownership. What if four group owners owned every television station in every major market in ten years? Would this have an effect on the quality of news coverage for the country? Of course it would.

The new rules put forward by Kennard and the FCC last week open the door to the very type of media monopoly Kennard professed concern about less than a year ago. According to FAIR Program Director Janine Jackson, “there is no doubt that the FCC’s decision to weaken TV ownership regulations sends the message that diversity of ownership is not a principle worth defending.”

Media historian and scholar Bob McChesney, author of Rich Media, Poor Democracy, agrees:

The FCC’s loosening of the regulation of TV ownership rules will provide a financial windfall for a handful of billionaire station owners and media corporations; it will only encourage the ongoing corporate stranglehold on our media system, with its attendant commercial carpetbombing of our society.

Such policies, McChesney says,

logically emerge from a policy environment where one has to be a billion dollar corporation to participate, where there is no popular press coverage of the deliberations, where self-serving and bogus corporate PR is treated like scientific inquiry, and where the public is consigned to its couch, required to accept the dictates of an FCC in service to Wall Street as if these were the acts of God.

ACTION: Contact the FCC and its chair William Kennard. Let them know that the FCC’s obligations to the public include ensuring diversity on the airwaves. Diverse ownership is a key factor in democratic broadcasting. Ask them to consider a public comment period that would address the issue of ownership rules.

Federal Communications Commission

445 12th St. S.W.

Washington, DC 20554

1-888-225-5322 (1-888-CALL FCC)

Chairman William Kennard

E-mail: bkennard@fcc.gov

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