Does it concern you that a few massive corporations may take total control of our nation’s news sources? Are you worried that if this happens, diversity will disappear, profits will become much more important than people and reporting will suffer even greater censorship?
If so, you may be one of more than 2.3 million Americans voicing strong concern over the Federal Communication Commission’s recent decision to deregulate media ownership rules. It’s the “McDonaldization of American media,” warns FCC Commissioner Johnathan Adelstein. “It’s the same everywhere you go: Big Mac, fries and a Coke.” The FCC comprises five commissioners, two of whom are outspoken critics of the recent decision which reverses decades old laws. And it isn’t just a few lonely government administrators opposing greater corporate media power-members of Congress, songwriters and more than 2.3 million citizens are opposed to the FCC granting big business greater control of our country’s access to information.
With such a broad coalition of professional and trade unions, civil rights and religious organizations, and ordinary people, it’s a provocative story how the decision was handed down. So let’s first look at how the commissioners spend their time.
They travel-a lot. The Center for Public Integrity (www.publicintegrity.org) reports that the commissioners have taken nearly 2,500 trips in the last eight years-“most of it [paid for] from the telecommunications and broadcast industries the agency regulates.” They went 330 times to Las Vegas, 173 to New Orleans and 102 to New York. And they aren’t staying at Motel 6. Just from March to mid-June of this year, officials took 83 industry-funded trips at a cost of $84,334.
The center indicates that the nation’s wealthiest corporate media owners aren’tspending their money frivolously, either. Corporate media behemoths met with FCC officials more than 70 times to discuss the deregulation of ownership. As the controversial guidelines were being crafted earlier this year, the center reports, Rupert Murdoch (owner of News Corp., parent company of Fox) and Mel Karmazin (owner of Viacom, parent company of CBS and MTV) had many closed-door meetings with commissioners.
On Mar. 11, 18 different FCC officials met with Disney executives, who own ABC. And it also happened that on several occasions, lobbyists met together with officials from General Electric (owner of NBC), News Corp., Viacom, Disney, Cumulus, Hearst, Clear Channel and Radio One, all in closed-door sessions, lobbying the FCC together. FCC Chairman Michael Powell even said on CNBC that after Congress, the FCC is the most lobbied federal agency. “I do think that-that sometimes it gets out of hand,” Powell said.
So what is so interesting about all this? Conspiracies? Industry influencing public dialogue? A loss of public interest in government regulation? Yes, these are very important issues. As Prof. Robert McChesney of the University of Illinois said, what we see here shows “how incredibly corrupt this process has been at the FCC, where you have basically on one side of the table all this big money and powerful lobbyists and other side of the table you have virtually every person in the United States.”
And yet, there’s still hope. It hasn’t come from the FCC but the Third Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals. On Sept. 3 (a day before the controversial deregulation was supposed to take effect), the FCC decision was stayed because of “irreversible damage [it] might cause.” This comes soon after the House of Representatives voted 400-21 to roll back the first key provision of the regulations. According to Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., “It’s extremely rare to be able to reverse a regulatory decision that gives away the store to the big boys.”
And most recently, on Sept. 16, the Senate voted 55-40 on a rarely used mechanism called a resolution of disapproval, which seeks to revoke all of the new FCC rules. It now moves to the House of Representatives. Let’s hope they have the American people in mind this week.