From: Six Stringa (gtrplaya_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 2003-05-30 20:43:48
I've listened intently to newscasts on our local community jazz station
regarding the subject. Interesting to say the least.
Thanks.
>From: "Park, James R S" <jrspar_at_essex.ac.uk>
>To: <acid-jazz_at_ucsd.edu>
>Subject: [acid-jazz] Media diversity at risk (slightly off-topic)
>Date: Fri, 30 May 2003 08:57:34 +0100
>
>I hope this is of some interest to you all.
>
>
>James.
>
>
>Media Diversity at Risk
>
>By Marfuza Khan
>The Corporate Research Project
>May 29, 2003
>
>
>
>On June 2, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will vote on
>proposed changes to longstanding government rules on media ownership. It
>is widely believed that FCC chairman Michael Powell, and the two other
>Republican commissioners on the five-member Commission, will vote in
>favor of loosening government rules which limit the size and reach of
>the nation's largest broadcasting, newspaper and cable companies.
>
>The rule changes that will be considered by the Commission are part of a
>regular, congressionally mandated review initiated under the 1996
>Telecommunications Act. However, this is the first time the review will
>involve such drastic changes. Michael Powell has not made his full plan
>public, but it reportedly calls for the most extensive rewriting of the
>ownership rules in decades. As Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital
>Democracy points out, "The rationale for these policies is that they
>help provide for a diverse media marketplace of ideas, essential for a
>democracy. They have not been perfect. But these rules have helped
>constrain the power of the corporate media giants."
>
>According to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, only
>a third of all Americans realize that the public owns the airwaves, and
>about a tenth are aware that the FCC gives stations licenses for free.
>In 1997, broadcasters lobbied and received portions of the digital
>broadcast spectrum - worth, according to some estimates, upwards of $70
>billion - for free. The proposed rule changes would further increase
>media concentration and have a deleterious impact on independent
>production. At the same time, the changes are expected to result in the
>loss of local content in favor of homogenized national programming. That
>has been the experience in the radio market after the restrictions on
>ownership were eased with the passage of the 1996 telecommunications
>bill, which, for example, paved the way for Clear Channel Communications
>to expand from 40 stations to 1,225 and in the process exert
>unprecedented control over the industry.
>
>Michael Powell has rejected a request from two commissioners to delay
>the vote even though there is precedent for granting such a request.
>Michael J. Kopps, one of the two Democrats on the Commission who
>requested the extension, said that that the chairman was rushing to vote
>on proposals that could change the media landscape in ways not fully
>understood.
>
>The Proposed Rules and Their Relevance in the Age of Multi-Media
>The six key rules that are being considered for change are:
>
>1) The newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership ban that prohibits the
>combined ownership of a major newspaper and broadcast station in the
>same urban market;
>
>2) The national television station ownership cap that prohibits any one
>entity from owning TV stations covering more than 35% of the national
>audience;
>
>3) The dual network ownership rule that prohibits mergers among the four
>major television networks;
>
>4) The television/radio cross-ownership rule, which limits the number of
>stations that can be jointly owned in any one market;
>
>5) The local television duopoly rule that limits common ownership of
>television stations in the same market; and
>
>6) The local radio ownership rule that limits the number of radio
>stations any one entity can own in a single market.
>
>Commission chairman Michael Powell has said that today's ownership rules
>don't reflect the realities of the modern media marketplace. They are
>irrelevant in a multi-media landscape where consumers have choices among
>hundreds of cable channels, millions of websites and satellite radio.
>Powell's spiritual father is Mark Fowler, Ronald Reagan's first FCC
>chairman, who said that public interest rules for television were
>unnecessary, since TV was just another appliance, "a toaster with
>pictures." When asked in 2001 what he thought the term public interest
>meant in the FCC's mission, the current FCC chairman responded, "I have
>no idea...I try to make the best judgment that I can in ways that
>benefit consumers. Beyond that I don't know."
>
>A recent analysis by the Consumer Federation of America and Consumers
>Union, two of the nation's largest consumer advocacy organizations,
>debunks the notion favored by chairman Powell that a revolution has
>taken place in the media and communications market that renders the
>current rules irrelevant. The analysis uses FCC data that show that TV
>is the American public's dominant source (56 percent of survey
>respondents) of news and information, while newspapers are the second
>(23 percent) most important source. Cable and the Internet play a small
>role as a source of local news - 11 percent and six percent
>respectively. Internet users, however, use the websites of newspapers
>and TV stations as their primary source of information. Radio has almost
>disappeared as an independent source of news.
>
>Critics have also correctly pointed out that while there may be hundreds
>of channels, there is a paucity of choices. Five major corporations are
>the gatekeepers and decision makers for the programming choices of the
>vast majority of the American people. Right wing powerhouses are also
>expected to grow. The proposed takeover of DirecTV, the country's most
>powerful satellite service, by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation is the
>obvious example. Companies such as the Sinclair Broadcast Group, which
>reaches 24 percent of the national TV audience, has created repackaged
>"faux" local news - local broadcasting combined with prepackaged news -
>like Clear Channel in the radio market.
>
>The Persuasive Power of Media Corporations
>The major media companies have been engaged in the campaign to loosen
>government regulations for a number of years. As noted in a study by the
>Center for Public Integrity, media companies' strategies for winning
>friends and influencing people have included time-honored techniques
>such as lobbying, campaign contributions and taking politicians and
>their staff on junkets. They have often gone either first to the FCC or
>to Congress to achieve their agenda to end any federal limits on their
>size and power. Failing legislative or regulatory intervention, they
>have also launched a powerful attack of the rules in the courts, arguing
>that the rules violate their right to free speech and are no longer
>needed to ensure that consumers have access to competing sources of news
>and entertainment programming. The U.S. Court of Appeals court for the
>District of Columbia struck down FCC rules or demanded that they be
>rewritten three times between February and April this year.
>
>The media industry's political power is much greater compared to other
>industries. In his memoir, "You Say You Want a Revolution," former FCC
>chairman Reed Hundt comments, "The media industry does not mobilize
>great numbers of voters and it actually is not comprised of America's
>largest economically most important companies..." The media's
>significant and political clout comes from its near ubiquitous,
>pervasive power to completely alter the beliefs of Americans.
>Politicians are afraid to take on the news media directly for fear that
>they will simply disappear from the TV or radio airwaves and from news
>columns.
>
>Media Concentration & Democracy in the Marketplace of Ideas
>Five companies - Viacom (owner of CBS), Disney (ABC), News Corporation
>(Fox), General Electric (NBC) and AOL Time Warner - control about 75
>percent share of production of prime-time viewing. Research conducted by
>the Project for Excellence in Journalism finds that larger companies and
>network owned TV stations produce lower quality news shows than do
>smaller media companies. These five corporations are now on the verge of
>controlling the same number of television households as the big three
>broadcast networks did forty years ago. In the past, when three or four
>broadcast networks controlled so many households, the Commission
>protected the public's interest in competition and diversity of
>viewpoints by requiring independent production of programming.
>
>No such policy protects the American public today. Tom Wolzien, a Wall
>Street analyst terms this "programming oligopoly" and shows that it
>exists both in the distribution and production of programming. For
>example, NBC owns outright or holds a significant financial interest in
>one hundred percent of the new series on its schedule. The other
>networks are not far behind. Rather than compete fairly in the
>marketplace of ideas, the networks leveraged their control of the
>publicly owned airwaves to take over television program production,
>driving small businesses and creative entrepreneurs, many of whom were
>women and minorities, out of business.
>
>The biased coverage of the war against Iraq by the mainstream media,
>particularly by Fox, demonstrates the pitfalls of media concentration.
>Interestingly, Michael Powell makes the connection between the war and
>his agenda. He says that bigger media companies are needed more than
>ever because only they can cover the war the way the Iraq war was
>covered.
>
>The Big Five
>* Viacom - 2002 revenues $24.6 billion. Owns 39 broadcast television
>stations and 185 radio stations. Cable networks include MTV, Nickelodeon
>and BET. Other businesses include CBS, UPN, Paramount Pictures, Simon &
>Schuster and an 80.4 percent equity interest in Blockbuster Video.
>
>* News Corporation - 2002 total revenues $17 billion. Owns (80.6
>percent) the Fox Entertainment Group, which includes 20th Century Fox,
>Fox Television Stations, and Fox Cable (includes sports and movie
>channels, National Geographic Channel). Fox Television owns 60
>television stations and has 188 affiliates. News Corporation is the
>world's largest publisher of English-language newspapers, including the
>New York Post. Also owns HarperCollins Publishers.
>
>* AOL Time Warner - 2002 revenues $40.9 billion. Businesses owned
>include America Online, CNN, Time Warner Cable, Warner Bros. Pictures,
>Turner Networks (includes TBS Superstation) and HBO. The Warner Music
>Group's major record labels include Elektra and Atlantic. The publishing
>business conducted primarily through Time Inc. includes Time, People,
>Sports Illustrated, Fortune and Money. The Securities and Exchange
>Commission and the Department of Justice are conducting investigations
>into accounting and disclosure practices of the company.
>
>* General Electric - 2002 revenues $31.7 billion. NBC provides network
>television services to more than 220 affiliated stations, produces
>television programs, operates 28 television-broadcasting stations,
>operates four cable/satellite networks around the world, and has
>investment and programming activities in the Internet, multimedia and
>cable television. Also owns Telemundo, one of the two largest hispanic
>broadcasting networks.
>
>* Walt Disney - 2002 total revenues $25.3 billion. Operates the ABC
>Television Network, which has 226 primary affiliated stations. ABC Radio
>Networks provide programming to more than 4,600 affiliated radio
>stations. Radio Disney is carried on 51 stations, including 32 that are
>owned by the company. ABC Radio Networks also produce the ESPN Radio
>format, which is carried on more than 700 stations, including 215
>full-time (four of which are owned by the company), making it the
>largest radio sports network in the United States. Disney also owns 10
>television stations, 44 standard AM radio stations, and 18 FM radio
>stations.
>
>Conclusion
>As Virginia Riskin, President of the Writer's Guild of America, said in
>her remarks at one of the FCC hearings on the proposed rule changes in
>February, "The media are the modern-day American Town Square, the place
>where people from different backgrounds and points of view share their
>stories and the public learns about the world." Ensuring broadest
>participation at this modern American town square is an essential
>precondition for a pluralistic democracy to flourish. The First
>Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination
>of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the
>welfare of the public. As the Supreme Court has reiterated, "Assuring
>that the public has access to a multiplicity of information sources is a
>governmental purpose of the highest order, for it promotes values
>central to the First Amendment."
>
>
>
>
_________________________________________________________________
Add photos to your messages with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*.
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail