Congressman Cooper’s Remarks to the FCC

Posted by Freddie on December 14, 2006 under Uncategorized |

Congressman Jim “Coop” Cooper gave remarks immediately prior to the second panel at Monday’s FCC hearing. We’re grateful to his office for doing their best to impress upon constituents how important this event was, and we’re just as grateful for his eloquent remarks.

Welcome to Nashville, and thanks for listening closely to our unique creative community. Please work hard to keep our community strong. I am particularly grateful to Commissioner Tate for arranging this special hearing.

I’d like to focus my few minutes on media cross-ownership. In my opinion, one of the very few ways that Nashville has not improved in recent decades is in the variety and quality of our news reporting and editorial opinion. We used to have several locally-owned, prize-winning newspapers and television stations; now there are none. Nashville is not alone, but I think we are suffering as a result. You may accept this decline as inevitable; I do not.

Look below the corporate level to the working conditions of today’s journalist. More local reporters admit to me that they’ve been told to find stories that please big advertisers. They are also afraid to run stories that might upset advertisers. Some reporters and cameramen ask me about welfare programs for their own families because they make so little money. There are fewer regular news beats. Reporters are not allowed to stick to any beat long enough to become expert. I urge you to listen to working reporters and protect them from retribution when they testify.

Let me be clear. I am not blaming reporters. I am blaming their bosses. Why is so little money trickling down to fund the core business of journalism? I know that shareholders have high financial expectations, but surely they also know that democracy works best with an informed electorate. Our better mass media used to be pitched at the 11th grade level — it is now at the 8th grade level — do we want it to fall to the 5th grade level or below? As more Americans than ever finish high school and college, why are we pitching our news to such a low common denominator? Only America’s enemies can be pleased with such deterioration.

I do not believe that media economics requires lower quality journalism. Today’s USA Today reports how Brian Williams got a fabulous viewer response when NBC found a single advertiser to sponsor the evening news, freeing up a precious six minutes of air time. Today’s New York Times reports how the Washington Post Co. successfully diversified into Kaplan, a test preparation company, in order to improve its profit margins while maintaining good quality. There are ways to keep our standards high. Don’t give up the fight.

The elephant in the room is our dominant daily newspaper, the Tennessean, which has been trying for years to control Channel 5 television. Gannett would love your permission to allow the swap so that it could reach more eyeballs with fewer reporters and less content. This is what they call synergy. If you give them permission, will Gannett promise to try to win Pulitzer prizes or launch more investigations? Will it even promise to maintain current staffing or pay levels? You couldn’t enforce such an agreement if it did. The Tennessean’s cash flow margins are already over 50%, the envy of almost any business, but Gannett wants them to be higher. Is allowing the Tennessean to control Channel 5 in the public interest? I don’t think so.

Your job would be simple if competition in media as measured by Herfindahl indexes or DOJ merger guidelines were correlated with journalistic quality. In my experience, sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn’t. I do believe that any further concentration and cross-ownership would be harmful. I suggest that new measures and incentives need to be developed so that conglomerates can be coaxed to produce better journalism and a more informed public.

Having served on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, I have some idea of the seductive power of media companies whose selfish appetites, in my opinion, can never be satisfied, no matter how much you feed them. I urge you to resist their siren call. The renowned historian David McCullough gave Nashville parents the following advice last year, “No matter how little television you watch, watch less.”

Do you want your children to grow up in a world where they can’t tell infotainment from news? Do you realize that affirmation media is the Orwellian opposite of news because it massages your existing prejudices without disturbing you with facts? When your children ask why this happened on your watch, will it be enough to answer, “It’s OK, dear, the company’s stock went up.” And now that you have relaxed foreign media ownership rules, will it be enough to say that Nashville’s decline enriched executives in Adelaide, Munich or Beijing?

In the past few months, nine U.S. Senators and 38 of my House colleagues have urged this Commission to be extremely careful about relaxing your media ownership rules. As we move toward the 110th Congress, I think these numbers will grow. We look forward to working with you to encourage better journalism.

Commissioners, thank you again for coming to Music City.