The FCC's Gift to Corporate Media

Just in time for Christmas, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman, Kevin Martin, tied the bow on a nice, big shiny present for corporate media.
Despite bipartisan opposition from the Senate Commerce Committee, and despite their warning that they would "move legislation to revoke the rule and nullify the vote" if the FCC voted to "relax" ownership restrictions in the 20 largest U.S. media markets, Martin and two other Republican members (with the two Democrats on the five member commission voting against) ignored opposition and voted 3-2 for the change in ownership rules.
So, why would Martin and friends do this in the face of such obvious disagreement? One need look no further than the White House for the answer. Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez wrote to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) on December 4, saying the Bush Administration rejected any effort to delay the vote "or any attempt to delay or overturn these revised (FCC) rules by legislative means. The administration has long supported modernization of media ownership regulations to more accurately reflect the changing media landscape."
Of course, by "modernization" read "consolidation." And consolidation means one thing: A louder corporate voice shilling for its view of reality at the expense of local voices covering essential stories, such as local zoning issues, environment concerns or labor disputes.
Gutierrez' letter also says that "the FCC has crafted changes that appropriately take into account the myriad of news and information outlets that exist today." But this is a mirage. The number of media outlets isn't an indicator of media diversity. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) analyzed this very issue. In a letter to Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA), Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, the GAO found, for example, that

"in Wilkes Barre/Scranton, we identified eight television stations. However, one owner of two stations participated in an agreement with a third station and the remaining four television stations participated in two separate agreements—each agreement covering two stations. Thus, while there are eight television stations and seven owners in Wilkes Barre/Scranton, there are three loose commercial groupings in the market. This example suggests that the number of independently owned media outlets in a given market is not always a good indicator of how many independently produced local news or other programs are available in a market."

The report also found (drawing its data from Free Press after stating that the federal government has, itself, no reliable statistics on the matter) that woman and minority-owned full-power television and radio stations were limited to 5% and 3% respectively (for television) and 6% and 8% for radio stations.
As FCC member Michael Copps noted, "racial and ethnic minorities make up 33 percent of our population but they own a scant 3 percent of all full-power commercial TV stations. And that number is plummeting."
And these are just ethnic minorities--the report doesn't determine what percentage can be assigned to reflect political/social minority viewpoints.

The long and short of it is that Martin engaged in the appearance of openness in listening to public concerns regarding this continued drive toward media consolidation. He cited the number of public hearings the commission held to gather citizens' input. Yet despite that public input, he and his colleagues went ahead and voted for continued consolidation.
As the NY Times has it,

"opponents of the ban say in the past decade there has been an explosion of news outlets thanks to cable television and the Internet and that such restrictions are no longer necessary. Ban supporters say there may be additional outlets, but there has been no corresponding increase in news gatherers and producers, especially at the local level."

And that's really what this comes down to. We live in an increasingly unstable and insecure world. This we know. But we do not know, without a great deal of independent effort, how and by whom decisions that affect us are made by a behind-the-scenes, small, and much-too-powerful elite. This shouldn't be the case in a democracy. And such decisions are simply not properly or throughly reported sufficiently by media. And why should they be? They're wholly owned subsidiaries of, yes, corporations.