FCC defies public will
Opponents vow to fight media deregulation in Congress and the courts

By Camille T. Taiara

The Federal Communications Commission June 2 approved a new regulatory scheme proposed by FCC chair Michael Powell that drastically scales back restrictions on corporate domination of newspapers and broadcast outlets.

The action ignored what's been characterized as the greatest public outcry against media consolidation in the agency's history and is likely to trigger aggressive efforts using Congress and the courts to mitigate the damage.

"You're going to see the unleashing of a corporate feeding frenzy that could completely reshape the media landscape in our country," the Nation's Washington, D.C., correspondent, John Nichols, told us. Nichols sits on the board of the advocacy group Free Press and coauthored Our Media, Not Theirs: The Democratic Struggle Against Corporate Media with renowned media critic Robert McChesney.

Among the many changes approved on a party-line, 3-2 vote by the Republican-controlled FCC were the elimination of cross-ownership restrictions in large cities that prevented any one company from owning a TV station and a newspaper or radio station, and the allowing of broadcast companies to reach up to 45 percent of the national audience, as opposed to 35 percent, the previous limit.

The rule changes were supported by a campaign that the Center for Public Integrity and other watchdog groups say was orchestrated by corporate giants like Viacom (which owns CBS), ABC, NBC, Hearst Corp. (which owns the San Francisco Chronicle), and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. (which owns Fox).

The proposal saw little mainstream media coverage until pressure from activists became too strong to ignore. Media activists and public interest groups succeeded in creating a broad coalition against deregulation, in which progressives with the Media Access Project, the Center for Digital Democracy, and other groups were eventually joined by larger, liberal organizations such as MoveOn.org and the National Organization for Women, as well as conservative groups like the National Rifle Association and the Parents Television Council.

"The FCC received comments from nearly 750,000 people," reads a statement released by dissenting FCC commissioner Michael Copps on the day of the vote. "More than 99 percent opposed allowing more consolidation." On May 30, the last business day prior to the vote, the FCC was inundated with so many calls that its phone lines crashed.

"The most exciting thing that's happened over the last six months is that media has become a political issue in America [for the first time]," Nichols said. "If these coalitions continue to make a lot of noise, they have the potential not merely to reverse these rule changes – which is important – but also to open up a real dialogue in this country about media ownership."

More than 150 members of Congress spoke out against the secretive process by which Powell crafted the new regulatory scheme, and they called for the agency to delay its vote so as to give the public a chance to review the plan, according to Copps. Powell only shared his plan with the FCC commissioners three weeks prior to the vote and refused to make it public.

The Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, which oversees the FCC, asked all five FCC commissioners to justify their decision at a special hearing June 4. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-California), who is on the committee, finally joined Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) and Sen. Fritz Hollings (D-South Carolina) in cosponsoring a bill to return the national television ownership cap to 35 percent.

If Congress doesn't stop the new rules, the courts might. Challenges are expected from public advocacy groups and smaller media outlets at risk of getting hurt by corporate giants. Opponents will likely attack the secretive way the rule changes came about and the negative impacts that media consolidation has on diversity, localism, and competition – objectives the FCC was created to protect.

"The people who actually want a democracy, both from the left and right, have said there's something wrong with allowing a few companies to have so much power," Nichols said. Indeed, even some corporate media bigwigs have spoken out against the deregulation drive – including Vivendi Universal Entertainment chair and CEO Barry Diller and AOL Time Warner majority shareholder Ted Turner.

"If these rules had been in place in 1970, it would have been virtually impossible for me to start Turner Broadcasting or, 10 years later, to launch CNN," Turner wrote in a May 30 article in the Washington Post. "Large media corporations ... kill local programming because it's expensive, and they push national programming because it's cheap – even if it runs counter to local interests and community values."

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