Who'll Unplug Big Media? Stay
Tuned
by Robert W. McChesney and John
Nichols
The Nation magazine, May 30, 2008
On a Thursday in mid-May, the Senate did
something that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. Led
by Democrat Byron Dorgan, the senators-Democrats and Republicans,
liberals and conservatives-gave Rupert Murdoch and his fellow
media moguls the sort of slap that masters of the universe don't
expect from mere mortals on Capitol Hill. With a voice vote that
confirmed the near-unanimous sentiment of senators who had heard
from hundreds of thousands of Americans demanding that they act,
the legislators moved to nullify an FCC attempt to permit a radical
form of media consolidation: a rule change designed to permit
one corporation to own daily and weekly newspapers as well as
television and radio stations in the same local market. The removal
of the historic bar to newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership has
long been a top priority of Big Media. They want to dramatically
increase revenues by buying up major media properties in American
cities, shutting down competing newsrooms and creating a one-size-fits-all
local discourse that's great for the bottom line but lousy for
the communities they are supposed to serve and a nightmare for
democracy.
That's just some of the good news at a
time when the media policy debate has been redefined by the emergence
of a muscular grassroots reform movement. Bush Administration
schemes to use federal dollars to subsidize friendly journalists
and illegally push its propaganda as legitimate news have been
exposed and halted, with the House approving a defense appropriations
amendment that outlaws any "concerted effort to propagandize"
by the Pentagon. Public broadcasting, community broadcasting and
cable access channels have withstood assault from corporate interlopers,
fundamentalist censors and the GOP Congressional allies they share
in common. And against a full-frontal attack from two industries,
telephone and cable-whose entire business model is based on lobbying
Congress and regulators to get monopoly privileges-a grassroots
movement has preserved network neutrality, the first amendment
of the digital epoch, which holds that Internet service providers
shall not censor or discriminate against particular websites or
services. So successful has this challenge to the telecom lobbies
been that the House may soon endorse the Internet Freedom Preservation
Act.
But while the picture has improved, especially
compared with just a few years ago, the news is not nearly good
enough. The Senate's resolution of disapproval did not reverse
the FCC's cross-ownership rule change. It merely began a pushback
that still requires a House vote-and even if it passes Congress,
it will then encounter a veto by George W. Bush. Likewise, while
public and community media have been spared from the executioner,
they still face deep-seated funding and competitive disadvantages
that require structural reforms, not Band-Aids.
The media reform movement must prepare
now to promote a wide range of structural reforms-to talk of changing
media for the better rather than merely preventing it from getting
worse. "Media reform" has become a catch-all phrase
to describe the broad goals of a movement that says consolidated
ownership of broadcast and cable media, chain ownership of newspapers,
and telephone and cable-company colonization of the Internet pose
a threat not just to the culture of the Republic but to democracy
itself. The movement that became a force to be reckoned with during
the Bush years had to fight defensive actions with the purpose
of preventing more consolidation, more homogenization and more
manipulation of information by elites. Now, however, we must require
corporations that reap immense profits from the people's airwaves
to meet high public-service standards, dust off rusty but still
functional antitrust laws to break up TV and radio conglomerates,
address over-the-top commercialization of our culture and establish
a heterogeneous and accountable noncommercial media sector. In
sum, we need to establish rules and structures designed to create
a cultural environment that will enlighten, empower and energize
citizens so they can realize the full promise of an American experiment
that has, since its founding, relied on freedom of the press to
rest authority in the people.
Despite all the revelations exposing government
assaults on a free press, too many media outlets continue to tell
the politically and economically powerful, "Lie to me!"
Five years into a war made possible by the persistent refusal
of the major media to distinguish fact from Bush Administration
spin, we learned this spring about the Pentagon's PR machine's
multimillion-dollar propaganda campaign that seeded willing broadcast
and cable news programs with "expert" generals who parroted
the White House line right up to the point at which the fraud
was exposed. Even after the New York Times broke the story, the
networks still chose to cover their shame rather than expose a
war that has gone far worse than most Americans know.
Recently we have seen an acceleration
of the collapse of journalistic standards. Veteran reporters like
Walter Cronkite are appalled by the mergermania that has swept
the industry, diluting standards, dumbing down the news and gutting
newsrooms. Rapid consolidation, evidenced most recently by the
breakup of the once-venerable Knight-Ridder newspapers, the sale
of the Tribune Company and its media properties and the swallowing
of the Wall Street Journal by Murdoch's News Corp continues the
steady replacement of civic and democratic values by commercial
and entertainment priorities. But responsible journalists have
less and less to say about newsroom agendas these days. The calls
are being made by consultants and bean counters, who increasingly
rely on official sources and talking-head pundits rather than
newsgathering or serious debate.
The crisis is widespread, and it affects
not just our policies but the politics that might improve them.
There are two critical issues on which a free press must be skeptical
of official statements, challenging to the powerful and rigorous
in the search for truth. One of them is war-and in the case of
the post-9/11 wars, our media have failed us miserably. (Even
former White House press secretary Scott McClellan now acknowledges
that the media were "complicit enablers" in the run-up
to the Iraq invasion). The other issue is elections, when voters
rely on media to provide them with what candidates, parties and
interest groups often will not: a serious focus on issues that
matter and on the responses of candidates to those issues. Instead,
when the Democratic race was reaching its penultimate stage, the
dominant story was a ridiculously overplayed discussion about
Barack Obama's former minister. Before the critical Pennsylvania
primary, studies show, the provocative Rev. Jeremiah Wright got
more coverage than Obama's rival for the nomination, Hillary Clinton.
And forget about issues-the most covered policy debate of the
period, a ginned-up argument about whether to slash gas taxes
for the summer, garnered only one-sixth as much attention as Wright.
Viable democracy cannot survive, let alone
flourish, with such debased journalistic standards. Despite some
remarkable recent victories by grassroots activists, our media
still fail the most critical tests of a free press. This is an
impasse that cannot last for long, and in all likelihood the outcome
of the 2008 presidential election will go a long way toward determining
which side, the corporate owners or the public, will win the battle
for the media. The stakes could not be higher.
The next President will make two important
decisions. The first will be whether to accept media reform legislation
or veto it. There is little doubt that Congress has shifted dramatically
as a result of popular pressure. Corporate lobbyists who used
to worry only about battling one another for the largest slice
of the pie know the game has changed. The 2008 elections will
almost certainly increase support in both houses and from both
parties for media reform.
Second, the next President will appoint
a new FCC chair who will command a majority of the commission's
five members. This is a critical choice. The right majority would
embrace the values and ideals of the thousands of media critics,
independent media producers and democracy activists who will gather
June 6-8 in Minneapolis for the fourth National Conference for
Media Reform. Dissident commissioners Michael Copps and Jonathan
Adelstein, who have battled the FCC's pro-Big Media majority on
issues ranging from media ownership to net neutrality and corporate
manipulation of the news over the past four years, will both address
the conference. If Copps, the senior of the two, is named chair,
this savvy Washington veteran is prepared to turn the agency into
what it was intended to be by Copps's hero, Franklin Roosevelt:
a muscular defender of the public interest with the research capacity
and the authority to assure that the airwaves and broadband spectrum,
which are owned by the people, actually respond to popular demand
for diversity, competition and local control. After years of battling
to block rule changes pushed by corporate lobbyists, Copps has
called for a New American Media Contract, saying, "I'm sick
of playing defense." In these pages on April 7, he urged
that we "reinvigorate the license-renewal process" by
returning to standards set during Roosevelt's presidency, when
"renewals were required every three years, and a station's
public-interest record was subject to FCC judgment."
Don't look for a President John McCain
to hand Copps the chairmanship. There is a clear difference between
McCain and Obama when it comes to what the candidates say about
media issues, and an even clearer difference in their records.
Although many GOP voters, and some back-benchers in Congress,
are supportive of media reform, the commanding heights of the
party are a wholly owned subsidiary of the media giants. On the
surface McCain may appear to be a complex figure who straddles
the fence. In the increasingly distant past he occasionally tossed
out a soundbite recognizing citizen concerns. But in recent years
he has invariably championed the corporate lobbies. McCain's free-market
rhetoric about government-created and indirectly subsidized media
monopolies is increasingly recognized for what it is: propaganda
to advance the policy objectives of massive corporations.
More than a decade ago McCain voted against
the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which gave the green light
to media consolidation. He also loudly opposed the efforts of
commercial broadcasters to quash low-power noncommercial FM broadcasting
in 2000. Progressives applauded in both cases. But as chair of
the all-important Senate Commerce Committee, which was responsible
for implementation of the Telecom Act, the Arizona senator resisted
numerous opportunities to mitigate its worst excesses. The hallmarks
of McCain's "leadership" have been: (1) a failure to
promote the public interest; (2) hypocritical pro-consumer rhetoric
that hides pro-business action; (3) a fundamental misunderstanding
of technology and economics; and (4) troubling, at times scandalous,
loyalty to particular special interests.
While most of the attention to February's
New York Times investigation of McCain's relationship with Vicki
Iseman focused on speculation about romantic entanglement, shockingly
little attention was paid to the revelation that in 1999 McCain
had, as Commerce Committee chair, pressured the FCC to issue a
critical TV station license to Paxson Communications, for whom
Iseman was lobbying. McCain's approach was so aggressive and so
out of bounds even for corporate-cozy Washington that then-FCC
chair William Kennard complained about the senator's attempted
intervention. Paxson's executives and lobbyists contributed more
than $20,000 to McCain's 2000 presidential campaign, and its CEO
lent McCain the company's jet at least four times for campaign
travel. The senator's symbiotic relationship with Paxson and telecom
giants like AT&T is rarely mentioned on the Straight Talk
Express.
Also unmentioned is the crucial role McCain
played in shaping the Bush-era FCC. It was McCain who personally
and aggressively promoted Michael Powell to serve as FCC chair,
and who defended Powell's attempts in 2003 to rewrite media ownership
rules according to a script written by industry lobbyists. While
other senators objected to those rule changes after more than
2 million Americans communicated their opposition, McCain sought
to preserve them. And he remains joined at the hip with Powell,
who unabashedly thinks the job of government is to promote the
interests of the largest communication firms. In May Powell represented
the McCain campaign on a panel discussion at the annual conference
of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association.
It is unlikely that McCain would reappoint
the disgraced Powell as chair. But it is reasonably certain he
would appoint someone who shares Powell's deafness to the pleadings
of public interest. The senator's 2006 vote against maintaining
net neutrality suggests that his commitment to the business objectives
of AT&T outweigh any commitment to the public interest. Straight-talk
soundbites notwithstanding, McCain will be a reactionary force
on media issues across the board.
Barack Obama is different. Obama's campaign
has produced the most comprehensive, public-interest-oriented
media agenda ever advanced by a major presidential candidate.
Like Hillary Clinton, the Illinois senator has been an outspoken
defender of net neutrality. The Obama camp's position paper on
media issues echoes Copps when it says that as President, he "would
encourage diversity in the ownership of broadcast media, promote
the development of new media outlets for expression of diverse
viewpoints, and clarify the public interest obligations of broadcasters
who occupy the nation's spectrum." In a recent speech Obama
called for strengthened antitrust enforcement, specifically warning
against media consolidation. An Obama presidency would, he and
his supporters say, use all the tools of government to promote
greater coverage of local issues and better responsiveness by
broadcasters to the communities they serve. Like Copps, Obama
favors investment to connect remote and disenfranchised communities
to the Internet and to make public broadcasting a more robust
voice in the national discourse.
While a President Obama would almost certainly
be different from a President McCain on media issues, the extent
of the difference remains open to debate. Would Obama actually
make Copps or someone like him FCC chair? Would Obama move immediately
and effectively to break the stranglehold of media lobbyists?
That is by no means certain. While his stated policies are encouraging,
competing forces are struggling to influence the candidate. Industry
money is going to Obama in anticipation of his victory. He is
a self-styled party centrist, and in recent Democratic Party history,
"centrism" has usually meant putting the demands of
moneyed interests ahead of those of rank-and-file citizens. The
good news is that many of Obama's younger advisers are products
of the media reform movement or have been influenced by it. The
bad news is that others, like Clinton-era FCC chair Kennard, have
records of compromising with the telecom industry. So while some
Big Media will be betting on McCain, they won't give up easily
on Obama.
What Obama's candidacy offers, then, is
an opening and-if we dare employ an overused word from this campaign
season-a measure of hope. The proper response to that opening
is not celebration but vigilance and determination. Obama's positions,
while sometimes vague, do allow us to imagine securing increased
funding for public and community broadcasting, a broadband build-out
that allows all Americans to realize the promise of the Internet,
and a new approach to the licensing and regulation of the people's
airwaves that respects the public interest more than Rupert Murdoch's
bottom line. We can anticipate the development of creative policies
to promote and protect viable independent journalism and local
media. The right President will make achieving all these ends
easier. The right Congress will make the task easier still. But
above all, we will need the right media reform movement-one that
is aggressive in its demands regardless of who sits in the White
House, savvy in its approach to the FCC and Congressional committees,
bipartisan and determined to build broad coalitions, and focused
not just on playing defense but on shaping popular media for the
twenty-first century.
Robert McChesney is research professor
in the Institute of Communications Research and the Graduate School
of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois.
John Nichols writes about politics for
The Nation magazine as its Washington correspondent.
Robert
McChesney page
Home Page