Bizarro FCC Public Hearing?

Posted by Mary Mancini on December 10, 2006 under Uncategorized |

We’re not sure which public hearing Nashville-resident and FCC Commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate will be attending tomorrow, but we’re going to the one at Belmont University to discuss proposed rule changes for media consolidation.

In a guest editorial in today’s Tennessean, Commissioner Tate says that it would be “hard to think of a more appropriate location than Music City, USA to discuss issues concerning the broadcast media, especially as they relate to radio and the music industry,” and she hopes that “while my colleagues and I are in Nashville, we will have the opportunity to discuss other issues important to this creative community, such as digital rights management, media literacy and piracy.”

She makes it a point to say that the discussion will not be limited to music but will also “consider the effects of the digital age on the broadcast media” television in particular and that she and her colleagues are in Nashville “to listen to your thoughts regarding the future of music, the future of video, the effects of the digital age, the Internet and the possibility of other new and innovative technologies.”

What she glaringly leaves out of her editorial is that this hearing, one of only six official public hearings, was set up specifically to address a draft proposal - called a Further Notice of Proposed Rule Making - issued by FCC Chairman Kevin Martin in which he proposes rules to let a handful of giant media corporations swallow up more local television channels, radio stations and newspapers in a single market. These rule changes were first announced in 2003 but were rolled back due to an unprecendented 3 million-strong outcry from the American people.

Chairman Martin is especially interested in changing the rule on “newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership,” which prevents companies from owning a television or radio station and the major daily newspaper in the same area, as well as the rule governing local ownership caps that limit a company from owning more than one television station in most markets. (They can own two in larger markets as long as there are at least eight other competitors.)

Even the official press release from the FCC states that “The purpose of the hearing is to fully involve the public in the process of the 2006 Quadrennial Broadcast Media Ownership Review that the Commission is currently conducting. This hearing is the second in a series of media ownership hearings the Commission intends to hold across the country.”

Commissioner Tate does us a disservice by misrepresenting tomorrow’s public hearing as a forum to exchange ideas about new and emerging broadcast technologies when what is truly at stake is the cornerstone of our liberal democracy - the marketplace of ideas.

Limits on media consolidation have been a historically effective defense against the concentration of economic power that can and will, when left unchecked, restrict the free flow of discourse and ideas. It is also a much-needed and critical part of balancing the public service responsibility of the media with their private profit purpose.