“Getting Media Right: A Call to Action” was hosted by the Columbia School of Journalism on December 2, 2010. It opened with an introduction by Bill Moyers and a clip from his 2003 show on media consolidation.
Then FCC Commissioner Copps addressed the session (the video is archived at the link above). He opened by thanking the Columbia School of Journalism and the “pathbreaking research of the New America Foundation.”
Copps pointed out that Reagan’s FCC Commission chief had called the television “a toaster with pictures” by which he meant to say that it did not need to be regulated. Most of our current problems can be traced back to the Reagan administration. As Copps has noted in an article in The Nation, Reagan’s FCC “went on to dismantle nearly every public-interest obligation on the books and to enable a tsunami of media consolidation. The results have been disastrous — reporters fired, newsrooms shuttered and our civic dialogue dumbed down to fact-free opinions and ideological bloviation.”
Copps noted that the urge to be a monopoly appears again with every new technology. In order to prevent the re-monopolization of the information industies, Copps proposed:
1) A real test of whether or not broadcasters are serving the public interest, once every four years. He noted that the current annual test is a slam dunk, an effortless excercise without any real meaning.
2) Licensed broadcasters must disclose information.
3) Advertisers must disclose where the money comes from. The Chamber of Commerce and other, virtually anonymous groups spent millions of dollars in the most recent election, spending that was made possible by a deeply unpopular Supreme Court decision.
Copps said that the FCC worries about product placement but should be even more concerned when groups try to buy election outcomes.
4) Copps expressed concern about the diversity of owners 5and programming topics in today’s broadcasters.
5) Community discovery: the absentee landlords and private equity firms that hold broadcast licenses should ask the communities they serve how well they’re doing. Copps said that this would be easily achieved with internet technology.
6) Copps said that the FCC should encourage local programming.
7) Disaster readiness: broadcasters should have staff at the station at all times, where possible, in case a local emergency requires the broadcast of lifesaving information.
Copps had other — in my opinion, more interesting — suggestions for the FCC too. The most important, in my opinion, is that the FCC should assert Title II authority to regulate the internet. This would undo the largest error of the Bush FCC and allow FCC Chairman Genachowski to directly assert authority over the internet instead of trying legal strategies so complex that law professor Susan Crawford compared them to ESPN’s trick billiards.
Copps said that the FCC must act as a true consumer protection agency.
He held out the carrot of government subsidy to go along with the stick of regulation. “Madison and Jefferson understood that the nation depended on informed citizens,” he said, noting that one of the largest expenditures of the new nation was a subsidy of newspaper deliveries.
Benkler
Professor Yochai Benkler of the Harvard Law School had the most interesting response.
He said that the internet — not broadcasters — are driving the news agenda. In addition, the broadcasters’ and newspapers’ eagerness to ask the Obama adminstration for permission to publish the Wikileaks story means that they will never break important news in the future. “The next Ellsberg will not risk his career and liberty to go to The New York Times. The whistleblower will publish on the internet and the media will report on it.”
“Every journalist should shudder at the rapidity with which Amazon shut down Wikileaks after a phone call from Senator Lieberman.”
Benkler said that people below 40 are already getting much of their news from online sources, and that online is the only category of news source that is growing, according to a Pew survey.
He said that Anderson Cooper of CNN has received a lot of credit for debunking the story that Obama’s trip to India cost $200 million but the true story was more complex. He said the story was first published in India, imported by right wing bloggers, and then amplified by Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. He noted that internet sits such as FactCheck, Media Matters, and Snopes responded to it first, and then the Wall Street Journal and CNN responded to it. “It is true that Cooper had a report, but the sources were already there on the internet. In the complex interaction between the traditional media and online news sources, especially nonprofits, the internet is setting the agenda.”
This implies that rather than trying to save the dying broadcast and print industries, which Copps is eager to do with subsidies, the FCC should make re-establishing the ability to regulate the internet its first priority.
Benkler derided some of Copps diversity proposals. “We cannot have the FCC managing gender roles or their depiction.”
Benkler said that since DSL is inadequate for streaming video, the internet will soon be a cable monopoly, and “a monopoly must be regulated.”
Other responders
Barbara Cochran of the Univesrity of Missouri School of Journalism represented the broadcast industry and largely opposed regulation but supported subsidies.
She claimed that local news is the most profitable segment of network programming.
Dave Burstein of DSL Prime asked the FCC to have regular press conferences but Copps said that he was not sure that any journalists would attend them.
Tags: government, media
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