By Camille T. Taiara

As this issue hits the streets July 21, media democracy advocates from far and wide are heading to Monterey for the Federal Communications Commission's only West Coast hearing on localism that evening.

The hearing gives the public a chance to address just how well, or badly, our broadcast stations are serving the public interest. Given the media's critical role in informing citizens in a democracy – and FCC chair Michael Powell's campaign to further relax media ownership caps – the hearing represents a rare and important opportunity.

We asked several media experts what message they'd like to communicate to the FCC as part of our research into the issue (see "Invasion of the Media Snatchers," 7/14/04.) Here is some of what they had to say.

To Ben Bagdikian, former dean of UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism and one of the nation's foremost media critics, meaningful reform would begin with a return to some of the guidelines that were abandoned 25 to 30 years ago, including the requirement that local stations "devote a certain number of minutes a day to strictly local news [and] permit access to representative groups within the community," he said. "At least it makes local TV stations reflect the fact that they're located in a specific city for a reason."

Bagdikian would also like to see a return to the Fairness Doctrine, which required that persons or groups who were seriously criticized by a station be given airtime to respond. He said that would restrict, say, right-wing talk shows' ability to trash people while simultaneously denying them the right to respond in a similar public forum.

Finally, he'd like to see the FCC make low-power FM radio legally possible, even in urban centers, and reopen its radio and TV licensing practices to real competition by requiring that broadcasters demonstrate they'll provide needed services to the communities in which they operate that aren't being provided elsewhere.

"The public owns those frequencies – something that people forget," Bagdikian said.

John Silver, managing director of Free Press, a media reform advocacy group, said that so far, the nationwide movement for media reform has "just managed to keep in place the status quo – and that status quo is slowly destroying our democracy."

He'd like to see more proactive steps and points to efforts to break up previously authorized media monopolies and to place limits on advertising (in terms of both the amount of time dedicated to commercials and the kinds of advertising targeting especially vulnerable populations like children).

Other recommendations from Free Press include requiring that regulatory processes actively engage the public, obliging broadcasters to provide free airtime to all political candidates, keeping corporate media policies out of global trade agreements, and preventing the big media conglomerates from exerting control over cable and broadband – the distribution networks for the Internet and digital broadcasting.

KALW-FM general manager Nicole Sawaya joins Silver in demanding that the FCC reinvest a healthy percentage of the money it collects from commercial operators into a public broadcasting trust fund and that it enact regulations to protect those funds from political pressure.

"I think people are ready for a rebellion against the dictatorship of the FCC majority," Bagdikian said. But the issue certainly hasn't received the attention it deserves in the local media – for obvious reasons. "It required mailings by public groups to notify people that it was going on."

E-mail Camille T. Taiara at camille@sfbg.com.