Who Owns the Media? Union Movement Demands More Diversity

by Tula Connell, Dec 12, 2006

For more than eight hours last night, 500 Nashville residents and others from at least six states joined country music legends in the second official Federal Communications Commission (FCC) hearing on proposed rules to change media ownership regulations—for the worse. 

The vast majority of the 170 who testified opposed the FCC’s effort to remove the last remaining curbs to media consolidation. FCC Chairman Kevin Martin has promised to hold four more hearings. The FCC held two previous hearings, the first in Milwaukee and one in Los Angeles in October, where more than 1,000 artists, writers, producers, directors, actors, small business owners and local citizens told all five FCC commissioners about the devastating impact of media consolidation.

On June 23, the FCC issued a “Notice of Proposed Rule Making,” the first step in changing media ownership regulations. Commissioner Michael Copps, one of two Democratic FCC members on the five-member commission, had this to say about the quiet FCC announcement:

This innocuous-looking document initiates the single most important public policy debate that the FCC will tackle this year. Don’t let its slimness fool you. It means that this Commission has begun to decide on behalf of the American people the future of our media. It means deciding whether or not to accelerate media concentration, step up the loss of local news and change forever the critical role independent newspapers perform for our country.

The FCC in 2003 wiped out decades-old limits on the number of local TV, radio and newspaper outlets a corporation could own, but a bipartisan majority in the Senate voted to overturn the rule changes with Congress eventually reaching a compromise—limiting the number of stations one company could own to 39 percent of the national audience.

Since then, growing media consolidation has resulted in increasing lack of diversity both in the content produced and those producing it. The media watchdog group Free Press recently released a groundbreaking study showing the shockingly low number of TV stations owned by people of color—with more than 96 percent of television stations under white ownership. Upon reading the report, Copps called the FCC’s failure to promote diversity in media a “national disgrace.”

Writing in the Vancouver Columbian, Washington State Labor Council (WSLC) President Rick Bender asks: “Who owns the media?”

The answer: fewer and fewer major corporations. And if the Federal Communications Commission gets its way, that trend will accelerate.

Is that a bad thing? Perhaps not, if you are a major shareholder of one of those corporations, or if you prefer nationally syndicated—and homogenized—news and entertainment.

On the other hand, media consolidation is a very bad thing if you like information provided independently and in some depth, or if you prefer local community news, or if you appreciate diversity of opinion and vigorous debate, or if—like me—you have a perspective that often runs counter to that of Corporate America.

As Bender points out:

[A]s recently as 1983, there were 50 companies that owned the majority of all U.S. news media. By 1990, this number had dwindled to fewer than two dozen. And now, thanks to major deregulation included in the 1996 Telecommunications Act, that number is now six.

Writing in the National Interest, Joergen Oerstroem Moeller and Terence Chong point out:

It is not so much that the mass media has failed to deliver choice but rather that it has succeeded in determining choice.

Further, media moguls do not confine themselves to commercial activities but increasingly get involved in politics, and because they control the communications outlets, write Moeller and Chong: “The politicians become dependent on those who control the networks.”

The media moguls with this control determine both who is going to get airtime and content of news coverage. That has always been so, yes, but the new factor is that very few alternatives are available, since it is enormously costly to operate a network and politicians often stonewall on granting licenses. The media moguls become dependent on the politicians for the right to build infrastructures and for licenses—with massive capital gains at stake.

The separation between those creating the news—the politicians—and those disseminating the news—the media moguls—begins to be blurred.

On Oct. 23, unions affiliated with the AFL-CIO Department of Professional Employees and the AFL-CIO submitted testimony to the FCC asserting that lifting ownership limits will mean increased consolidation, fewer sources of content, whether news, entertainment or music; less local content, less diversity of opinion and higher barriers to minority ownership.

The FCC’s decision on ownership rules will affect media across the spectrum. Here’s a sample of union statements and comments that unions of the AFL-CIO submitted to the FCC.

Newspapers and television: Newspaper and television markets are highly concentrated. The top three or four local broadcast TV stations have upward of 80 percent of local television market share in all but the largest urban areas. Most cities are one-newspaper towns; readers have a choice among daily newspapers in only a handful of metropolitan areas. Relaxation of TV and radio ownership limits over the past decade has accelerated the pace of media consolidation and concentration that, in turn, has facilitated a decline in both the quality and quantity of local news, information and entertainment programming.

As a result of concentration of ownership driving corporate owners to focus on ever higher profits, TV stations and newspapers devote fewer resources to newsgathering and in-depth investigation and analysis, as staff cuts further threaten serious newsgathering.—Comments by the Communications Workers of America (CWA),The Newspaper Guild-CWA and National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians-CWA.

Music: Because of mergers allowed during the signal-contour market definition era, in 104 markets there is now at least one radio company or organization that exceeds the local ownership cap.

• Relatively uncommon or “niche” formats like classical, jazz, folk, tejano and gospel are least common among station groups that are over the cap or exactly at the cap—even though those station groups have the most spectrum to spend on niche formats—while being much more common among station groups that are under the cap.
• These findings suggest that increasing the local ownership cap would have no demonstrable benefit for programming variety and would instead cause harm to programming variety by endangering the smaller station groups that currently supply most of the diversity that exists in traditional radio—Comments by the Future of Music Coalition and the American Federation of Musicians of the United States and Canada.

Television programming: “Since the repeal of the FCC financial interest and syndication rules, the networks have engaged in unprecedented vertical integration with movie studios and production companies. Due to this vertical integration, independent producers who traditionally created network programming have essentially been shut out of the primetime network equation. Accordingly, we think the FCC, as custodians of the public’s airwaves, should require that 25 percent of all primetime network programming hours be provided by true independent producers—not the networks. Producers who are stakeholders and risk takers, who are rewarded when their creative vision results in successful returns.”—Screen Actors union statement.

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