Over the protests of hundreds of thousands of Americans, a range of public interest advocacy groups and two dissenting Democratic commissioners, the FCC on June 2 voted to repeal or weaken some of the few remaining checks on the dominance of big media companies. Attention now moves to Congress, as a number of lawmakers attempt to roll back at least some of the changes, some of which now appear to be more drastic than previously reported.
For instance, most media outlets have reported that under the FCC’s new rules, a single company can now own TV stations that reach 45 percent of U.S. households, up from 35 percent. Because of a little-reported loophole, however, a single company could actually reach far more people– in theory, as much as 90 percent of U.S. viewers (New York Times, 5/13/03).
The loophole, known as the “UHF discount,” exists because of a 1980s regulation that requires the FCC to count every two viewers of a UHF station (TV channels 14 and above) as one viewer As explained by the New York Times’ Stephen Labaton (5/13/03), one of the few journalists to report on the “discount,” the provision was passed at a time when people relied on broadcast TV “and had to use special equipment like antennas that resembled rabbit ears to pick up UHF stations. Today, about 85 percent of viewers use paid services from cable and satellite providers, rendering the distinction between VHF and UHF largely a relic.”
The commission also eliminated, in all but the smallest markets, the ban on cross-ownership of newspapers and broadcast outlets, meaning that communities that are already “one-paper towns” (and that’s most communities in the country) could now see one company own that paper plus the top TV station, too. Local TV ownership rules were weakened as well, so that one company may own as many as three stations in the largest markets, and two in many smaller markets.
Critics– including FAIR– contended that the changes will decrease diversity and localism in media, but the FCC’s Republican majority made little effort to address such concerns. FCC chair Michael Powell dismissed as “garbage” the idea that the public was insufficiently informed about the decisions, despite the fact that a February poll showed that some 70 percent of the public knew “nothing at all” about them.
The FCC received an estimated 750,000 comments from the public, which, according to Commissioner Michael Copps, ran “99.9 percent” opposed. Yet Powell claims that a “silent majority” of Americans support the deregulation that, in the words of Sen. Ron Wyden (D.-Ore.), “rings the dinner bell for conglomerates to make a meal out of media outlets.”
The FCC’s actions also met criticism from both parties in Congress. Senators Ernest Hollings (D.-S.C.) and Ted Stevens (R.-Alaska) are cosponsoring a bill (S.1046) to return the TV ownership cap to 35 percent, and Sen. Byron Dorgan (D.-N.D.) hopes to add an amendment that would undo the new rules on cross-ownership of newspapers and broadcast outlets. The Commerce Committee, chaired by John McCain, will decide whether to support the Hollings-Stevens bill on June 19.
In the House, Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has gone further, proposing the “Protect Diversity in Media Act” (H.R. 2462), which would rescind all of the new rules made by the FCC, and prohibit the Commission from conducting any more of the biennial reviews of broadcast media ownership rules that were mandated under the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
Corporate broadcast media outlets lobbied hard for the recent deregulation, but did a poor job of informing the public about it. Research by FAIR showed only a tiny handful of TV stories, most of them in the week preceding the FCC’s vote (Media Advisory, 5/30/03). As the battle moves to Congress, media will have another chance to cover these issues so vital to democracy.
ACTION: Please contact media outlets, including the nightly network newscasts, to encourage them to cover the ongoing efforts to reverse the FCC’s rule changes.
ABC World News Tonight
Phone: 212-456-4040
PeterJennings@abcnews.com
CBS Evening News
Phone: 212-975-3691
evening@cbsnews.com
NBC Nightly News
Phone: 212-664-4971
nightly@nbc.com
CONTACT CONGRESS: Write to your representatives in support of the Hollings-Stevens bill and Sanders’s “Protect Diversity in Media Act.”
To write to the Senate about the Hollings-Stevens bill, you can use the web form that Common Cause has set up to make the process easier: http://causenet.commoncause.org/afr/issues/alert/?alertid=2555996&type=CO
To write to Congress about the Sanders Act, you can look up your representative and their contact info on Congress’s own web page:http://www.house.gov/
