Rants & Raves

Wow, has it been 3 months already? The war in Iraq started, “finished,” and now President Bush is running around like a chicken with its head cut off, trying to patch up the world with one giant Band-Aid. I can’t keep count of how many Democrats are running in the 2004 Primary, and from what I’ve seen so far (which isn’t much, mind you) tells me that Dubya is going to win another term in office. I mean, Al Sharpton? The man has very low, if any, respect in many places, and I for one would never vote for him. He can’t ride on the fact that he’s a black candidate if people are tired of hearing him ramble incoherently on television.

But that’s not what my topic is for today. This time, I’m going to talk about a freedom of speech issue.

On Monday, June 2, 2003, the FCC is going to vote on whether the media should be deregulated. In a nutshell, this means that the rules about how many media outlets (radio, newspaper, TV stations, etc) a company can own will change if the FCC votes in favor of deregulation. I was listening to the Brian Lehrer show on National Public Radio (click on Copps and Robbers in May 2003) and had to turn it off because I was so pissed at what the guest was saying. First, there was a guest who opposed it, Michael Copps, an FCC commissioner, and he gave the same arguments I would have given as to why he opposed this measure. If you have one company controlling many outlets, you only have one voice telling you what it wants you to hear. Any reason why we haven’t heard much about this issue until very recently? I’ll give you three guesses, and the first two don’t count. This has already happened with radio, where ClearChannel Entertainment owns 1,200 radio stations in America. Another FCC commissioner, I think it was Michael Powell, said that that is true, but there are 61,000 stations from which to choose. I did the math: that’s 2% of all radio stations, or 24 stations in each state. Now when you think that in New York City, there is no country music station anymore, and all the other commercial stations pretty much sound the same, it would seem that CCE would have it’s fingers in the major cities. I don’t know that to be true, but a company like that would be really stupid not to capitalize on the big metropolitan cities.

Then, on this show, there was a guest who favored the deregulation, Adam Thierer, Director of Telecommunications at the Cato Institute. It was obvious that NPR opposes deregulation, and I felt kind of sorry for the guy since he had to defend himself to the host (a guest host, not Brian Lehrer himself) and the audience. That didn’t seem fair. However, I really couldn’t stand his arguments. He said that even with deregulation in radio, there are many more stations to listen to. Great, but if you’re a New Yorker who wants country music, you need to go to another city to listen to it on the radio. He said there’s the Internet and live streaming radio. Great, if you happen to be near a computer at the time, and if you have an older computer, like I have at work, it can’t support much of what’s out there. Also if you have the Internet through a phone line, you have to pay for the service. He said there’s satellite radio. Great, if you’re willing to shell out money every month to subscribe, and that can get very expensive. His argument, as well as the argument of the FCC chairman with the radio statistics, is that there are so many TV stations in the country that each station is seen by a smaller percentage of people. Add the statistic that 80% of Americans have some type of cable, and that percentage goes down even further. So smaller stations may go out of business.

If one company own more than a few stations, there’s a chance that said company would make a profit. OK, that’s a valid argument, but if said company were AOL Time Warner, does it really need the money all that badly? The reason why it’s losing money right now is that Steve Case made some bad choices (sometimes merging is not the answer) and the company is $24 billion in debt. I realize that Microsoft kind of edged them out of the Internet picture some, but a) they just won a settlement in a civil antitrust case against Bill Gates’ company, and b) now they want to turn around and do somewhat of the same thing with media. OK, let me stop with this vein of thought before I really go into a subtopic where I don’t have all the facts.

Going back to this radio program (I listen because I was tired of listening to the same commercial radio station due to deregulation,) the guest host played a commercial from the group MoveOn.org (I had a little trouble getting to the site at first, so be patient). I have belonged to this group since they helped organize the anti-war protest on February 15th. While I couldn’t donate money to produce this commercial, I have donated money in the past to help their causes, and I’m glad that they raised enough money to do this. You know that the people who donate to this really want their money to do something important because this money is not tax-deductible (it’s used to promote political views.) Anyway, the commercial, which was only used on this program as a news aide, said that Rupert Murdoch would benefit greatly from deregulation because he can add more media outlets to the many he has already. The argument given against this was that Murdoch came into this country and built up a media empire with his own money by violating FCC rules at the time. He added something different from the “Big 3″ (ABC, NBC, CBS) to the airwaves, and came up with a viable corporation. Did I miss something? Didn’t this guest, the one who favors deregulation, just prove my point? Murdoch was another voice. He didn’t let anyone buy him out. The fact that he wants to buy up everything else now just means that he’s greedy. I had to turn off the radio soon after that because I thought his arguments were ridiculous and found myself screaming at the radio. Gotta keep the blood pressure down and all.

Which brings me to my next point. Even though I don’t go out of my way to listen to the news, I do pride myself on knowing something about what’s going on in the world. I’m tired of the sensationalistic news shows on network television, a trend which is spreading to cable news shows like CNN and the like, I guess because they need viewers, so they have to stoop to the lowest common denominator. I listen to NPR and watch the BBC, so if I’m getting sensationalism, at least I’m getting a different kind of it. I pay for this by donating money to the radio station and getting digital cable so I can watch the BBC World News on BBC America. I would love it if I could get some of that programming on free radio/TV, but that would mean the government or a private company, a group of a few, would have a say in what goes on, and that’s the whole point of getting donations from the public. The public, a group of millions, gets to choose what it wants to hear, read or watch. NPR successfully got away from government subsidies, and by the very fact that it’s still on the air, seems to be doing well without them. I do get tidbits from other news outlets, however, and I didn’t really hear much about the FCC vote until a couple of weeks ago. You can’t tell me that the FCC was thinking about this for only a couple of weeks. No, it’s just that the media, the media that’s supposed to have many voices, seemed to have a gag order placed on it about this subject. Then all of a sudden, the public knows about it because someone found out and made a fuss. Funny how the group that’s supposed to monitor the media for the public’s good is the group that’s keeping away information from the same public.