Diane
COMMENT The Silence of the Lambs WHO SPEAKS FOR JOURNALISM BEFORE THE FCC? Jan/Feb 2003 © Marcellus Hall
In October, when New Times Inc. and Village Voice Media agreed to a journalistic double homicide killing off alternative papers in L.A. and Cleveland to give each other monopolies in those cities the U.S. press hardly raised an eyebrow. It took the Justice Department to sound the alarm. Justice has mounted what looks like a serious antitrust investigation. When editorial voices are snuffed out, a staff member for one of those papers told the Los Angeles Times, “it’s not good for the democratic process. Nobody can argue that the problem with American journalism is that it has too many voices.”
We agree. Now, will someone please deliver that message to the Federal Communications Commission? And is it too much to ask the press to be the messenger?
The FCC is not involved in anything so simple and unsophisticated as bumping off a couple of weeklies. It is laying the groundwork for startling changes in the rules of media ownership that will encourage media monopoly and thus filter more and more American journalism through a smaller and smaller number of media corporations. Since a corporation’s culture shapes the quality and range of its journalism, the danger in reducing ownership to a few leviathans seems clear.
Media concentration is hardly new, but if these changes go through, it will accelerate dramatically. Companies will buy and trade to gain commercial dominance in major markets. Citizens could suddenly find that their local newspaper and TV stations, along with their dominant local Web sites, all have the same owner. That owner could also control more than one national TV network, including broadcast news operations, as well as most of what goes through the cable wire. What might appear to be multiple sources of information could all flow through the same corporate culture, subject to its limits in terms of journalistic vision and citizenship.
Under antiregulator Michael Powell, the FCC is considering relaxing several rules. They include cross-ownership bans on newspapers and TV stations in the same market, for example, and on broadcast and cable TV in the same market, as well as caps on the percentage of households a TV network can reach. Powell ordered up a series of studies with the stated purpose of weighing the relevancy of current ownership rules in a world that includes new sources of news and information cable and the Web. He portrays the studies as an effort to understand the new environment.
His critics see them as a setup, since, in the words of Broadcasting & Cable magazine, they paint “a generally rosy picture of broadcast consolidation in the past six years a strong hint that more deregulation is on the way.” The public comment period culminates with a public hearing in February.
The media companies have an agenda: the fewer commercial shackles the better. But the journalists who work for those companies ought to look beyond the commercial perspective. Where are the journalistic organizations and leaders who could illuminate these issues? In a discussion that will affect everything journalists care about, where is the voice of the journalists?