Plugging-in the Public Interest

Ford Foundation

This article was originally printed in Ford Reports, No. 2, 2007. Reprinted by permission.

In 2003, the Federal Communications Commission was preparing to loosen rules on media ownership nationally and in local markets. The FCC plan would have expanded the maximum reach of a given broadcaster from 35 percent of the national audience to 45 percent, while also raising the number of television stations a company could own in a single market and eliminating restrictions on cross-ownership of local newspapers and broadcast properties. The plan was consistent with the deregulatory agenda the agency had pursued for two decades.

This time, however, the plan for deregulation failed. On Capitol Hill, and at the FCC's offices in Washington, DC, phones began ringing. Fax lines buzzed. Mail arrived in enormous piles. After two decades of largely unimpeded mass media deregulation, ordinary citizens were suddenly weighing in on the issue. Indeed, by the end of 2003, more than two million Americans had contacted the FCC to comment on then-Chairman Michael Powell's sweeping deregulation plan. At one point, the FCC's Internet servers buckled under the strain of public comment.

“It was a lightning bolt,” says Ben Scott of the media reform group Free Press, who was working as an aide on Capitol Hill at the time. “We were accustomed to getting maybe ten calls a day from constituents on a variety of issues,” he recalls. “Then suddenly we got 200 calls in an afternoon on one issue — and everyone was saying the same thing.”

Citizen comments on the plan, both to the FCC and to members of Congress, were overwhelmingly negative. The FCC voted three to two to proceed with the plan, but Congress and the courts blocked full implementation. The previous rules on local ownership were kept in place. Only the cap on national ownership of broadcast media was raised — to 39 percent instead of 45 percent.

Individuals and groups across the ideological spectrum, from MoveOn.org to the National Rifle Association, had contributed to what was viewed as a singular victory over media deregulation. “It was driven by the handful of people on the left and on the right who actively seek to participate in self-government,” says Andrew Schwartzman, president of the Media Access Project. “They understand how important mass media is in affecting public policy.”

Established public interest groups such as Common Cause and Consumers Union were joined in the campaign by newer, media-centric groups, including Free Press, the Media Access Project and the Center for Digital Democracy. These groups have made a mission of reminding political leaders, the press, and public that the media have unique privileges that carry corresponding responsibilities to help sustain democracy and civil society.

A Democratic Vision

Throughout American history, democracy's champions have shared a common vision of public media as sufficiently robust, independent, and diverse to create a thriving marketplace for what the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. called a “free trade in ideas.”

That vision has been tested in recent decades, as the media landscape has grown in complexity. The advent of cable, satellite, and digital technologies, have created new industries and revolutionized old ones. At the same time, deregulation has led giant media corporations to seek greater scale and integration, acquiring vast amounts of content and the varied distribution channels needed to market that content. In seeking to free itself from the obligations of regulation, the industry has pursued what former New York Times columnist William Safire called “a power grab engineered by a seemingly unstoppable lobby.”

In fact, the media industry spent more than $1.5 billion between 1998 and 2006 on lobbying members of Congress in both parties. In the race for profits and strategic advantage, many believe the public obligations of private media interests — including broadcasters who rely on access to airwaves owned by the public — have been cast aside.

Yet in 2003, the “unstoppable lobby” was, for a time, stopped. Whether the defeat of industry-backed deregulation represents a turning point or merely a speed bump on the road to further conglomeration is not yet clear. In the long run, perhaps nothing will be more decisive than the success or failure of activists in building a media democracy movement capable of rallying the public behind a pluralistic vision that encompasses diverse ownership and access for independent voices.

Media Consolidation

Between 1940 and 1990, more than 250 newspapers closed. Hundreds more — including top twenty papers like The Boston Globe and Los Angeles Times — were acquired by conglomerates based in other cities. Today, fewer than 300 of the nation's 1,500 daily newspapers are independently owned; 80 percent are controlled by one of the dominant chains, such as Gannett or the Tribune Company.

Yet while independent print media has endured a long decline, the effects of consolidation in broadcasting have been perhaps more pronounced. In the past two decades, companies such as General Electric, News Corporation, Disney, Viacom, and Time Warner have secured ownership of everything from the biggest movie studios to all the major broadcast networks. Along the way, they've acquired numerous newspapers, magazines, book publishers, major Internet properties, and satellite and cable assets. From 1995 through 2003, the top 10 owners of television stations increased their holdings from 104 stations producing $5.9 billion in annual revenue to 299 stations producing $11.8 billion in revenue.

Cable television expansion was once the basis of a passionate argument in favor of broadcast deregulation, under the theory that cable stations would represent stiff competition for over-the-air networks. The threat no longer exists. Today, about 90 percent of the top fifty cable channels are owned by the same dominant companies that own the broadcast networks.

The concentration of power has reached such density that even CNN founder Ted Turner and Barry Diller, head of Interactive Corp., the media and Internet conglomerate that includes the Home Shopping Network and the USA cable network, have publicly questioned the wisdom of allowing so much media power to accumulate in so few hands.

One consequence of consolidation has been a diminution of local news. The FCC's own research suggests that locally owned television stations run nearly 5 1/2 minutes more news per half hour than stations owned by conglomerates. After a five-year study of 172 news programs, the Project for Excellence in Journalism concluded that stations owned by large media companies ran more syndicated content and more often trimmed the local angle.

“That's not surprising,” Turner wrote in a 2004 essay in Washington Monthly. “Local coverage is expensive, and thus will tend to be a casualty in the quest for short-term earnings.”

Perhaps no segment of the media is more illustrative of the price of consolidation than radio. In 1995, Clear Channel Communications was already a large company, owner of forty-three radio stations and sixteen television stations. But after restrictions on radio ownership were lifted in 1996, allowing a single broadcaster to control up to eight stations in a local market while eliminating the cap on station ownership nationally, Clear Channel grew exceptionally. The company now owns more than 1,200 radio stations and is a leading concert promoter, exercising enormous control over the distribution of popular music.

In seeking economies of scale, Clear Channel boosts profits by squeezing localism off the airwaves. “If anyone says we are in the radio business, it wouldn't be someone from our company,” Clear Channel Chairman Lowry Mays told Fortune magazine in 2003. “We're not in the business of providing news and information. We're not in the business of providing well-researched music. We're simply in the business of selling our customers' products.”

In radio, as elsewhere, size implies force. In response to a political comment made in March 2003 by the lead singer of the Dixie Chicks, the forty-two stations of Cumulus Media denied airtime to the country music trio for a month.

“For the media to have a single-minded emphasis on the bottom line is dangerous for democracy,” wrote University of Pennsylvania law professor C. Edwin Baker, one of the country's leading authorities on mass media. “Dispersed ownership also reduces the danger of inordinate, potentially demagogic power in the public sphere.”

Media diversity, in both ownership and point of view, is a venerable theme in American political discourse. “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,” wrote then U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black in 1945.

In recent decades, however, many of the “diverse and antagonistic” sources of broadcast and print media have been consumed by larger sources, leading to greater homogenization and a worrisome decline in localism and diversity. In 2006 alone, there were $114.6 billion worth of media and entertainment mergers and acquisitions, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers.

In October 2007, current FCC Chairman Kevin Martin announced his intention to “complete these media ownership issues” by easing restrictions, though it is unclear whether he can garner sufficient support. Deregulation advocates point to the Internet as a medium so vast and fertile that it is capable of supplying all the diversity a great democracy could require. But opponents argue that the Internet, where most of the largest information sites are owned by the biggest media companies, is not immune to the laws of twenty-first century media dynamics. The medium is sure to be a contentious battleground not only in the fight over consolidation, but on other issues, as well. In fact, it already is.

The Tangled Web

The notion that the Internet should be neutral in moving content among users has deep and complex roots. The government required the telegraph companies founded in the nineteenth century and the telephone companies that emerged in the twentieth century to deliver content on an equal basis, regardless of origin or endpoint. That meant, in the simplest terms, that phone lines had to handle each call or transmission equally. The question of net neutrality boils down to whether web content will continue to be governed by that same principle.

The Internet as we know it is not a new network at all, but the movement of digital data along the same phone network that handles our calls, the cable lines that deliver our television service and the cellular networks that transmit our mobile conversations. Cable and telephone companies have invested billions of dollars to improve their ability to deliver Internet content. Dial-up service has rapidly given way to high-speed broadband connections that can handle a much greater flow of data.

Complex technical protocols manage the manner in which web content is shuttled along these networks — and to a considerable degree these protocols strive for “neutral” handling of content, despite the obvious difference between handling, say, a high-quality video transmission and a routine email message.

Many providers see net neutrality as an impediment to their ability to charge content providers based on the demands their content places on the pipelines. Without net neutrality, for instance, broadband providers could move fee-paying commercial customers to the front of the line, making sure their content and applications are accessed more quickly and easily by consumers. Conversely, the content and applications of those unable or unwilling to pay high fees could be rendered less accessible to users — and potentially less valuable in both the commercial marketplace and in the marketplace of ideas.

“Speedier — and more costly — access will benefit the big brands and companies, which can afford to pay the various fees,” says Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. “Think movie companies, ad agencies, fast-food chains. Such a scenario would threaten all civil society-related content, especially from nonprofits.”

Because some broadband providers are also content providers, a non-neutral Internet could create another inequity: Providers such as Time Warner and Verizon would be able to provide speedy access to their own content while slowing down rival content. Net neutrality advocates say the very idea of free and equal access that the web represents would be severely undermined.

Net neutrality is being enforced by the FCC as a basic organizing principle of Internet traffic, but it rests on a shaky foundation. Cable and telecommunications companies, which together control most broadband Internet access, supported legislation in 2006 to eliminate net neutrality.

Media democracy activists, reconstituting the coalition that defeated the FCC's plan to weaken broadcast ownership rules in 2003, organized opposition to the industry-backed legislation. More than one million people wrote or called members of Congress to register their support for net neutrality. Despite a tenacious lobbying effort by broadband providers, the 2006 legislation languished. (During the same time period, two legislative measures that would have advanced net neutrality also stalled in Congress.)

In the campaign to ensure equity and access along Internet pipelines, public interest advocates have been joined by technology giants Google and Microsoft. “Allowing broadband carriers to control what people see and do online would fundamentally undermine the principles that have made the Internet such a success,” says Vinton Cerf, one of the key technical founders of the Internet and chief Internet evangelist at Google.

Few believe net neutrality has been secured. The amount of money at stake for broadband providers is enormous, and the Internet remains a volatile and evolving technical and business arena.

While Japan and some other nations that invest public funds in Internet infrastructure have ascended to the next level of high-speed connectivity, the United States is still searching for ways to overcome the gap in access to digital technology in low-income and minority communities — the original digital divide. That struggle, along with others tied to the structure, function, and economy of media, is a prerequisite for media democracy.

Social Inequality and Media

Media justice may be an elusive term to some, but the concept is fundamental. It stems from a recognition that democracy requires a media infrastructure that is open, accessible, and diverse in ownership, content, and point of view. Activism focused on media justice is growing. However, some of the most powerful trends in media — consolidation, homogenization, and the high cost of broadband — have reinforced the obstacles.

For example, the consolidation wave has had an enormous negative impact on minority ownership of television stations. Since 1998, 40 percent of the stations that were minority owned were sold to non-minority entities. In October 2007, minorities owned forty-three full-power commercial stations, accounting for 3 percent of stations nationwide.

And access to the Internet remains a vital issue in many communities. In Indian Country, where Loris Ann Taylor, executive director of Native Public Media, focuses her work, many homes still lack even a dial-up connection. “The digital divide is so huge I call it a chasm,” she says. “With new technologies and new platforms, we have to look for new ways for the underserved populations to have some opportunity to participate.”

Cable and satellite fees, which for years increased faster than the general rate of inflation, are beyond the means of many poorer Americans, effectively cutting them off from the broadband revolution. “If we literally cannot access the infrastructure, then we're going to be locked out of the discussion,” says Joaquin Alvarado, director of the Institute for Next Generation Internet at San Francisco State University.

Deficits in Internet access, as well as in minority ownership and representation, are easier to quantify than more subjective criteria relating to content. Yet even here, the data can be stark. FCC Commissioner Michael Copps says local TV news is four times more likely to show a mug shot during a crime story if the suspect is black than if the suspect is white. It's a data point that would surprise few African Americans.

“If you're marginalized by the media you notice it much more,” says Cheryl Leanza, managing director of the Office of Communications, a media justice project affiliated with the United Church of Christ.

Leanza's group oversees three projects on media justice in minority communities. In Dearborn, Michigan, one project monitors newspaper and television news portrayals of Arab Americans, who are often cited in terrorism-related stories but rarely appear in the news in any other capacity, Leanza says. Part of the project's mission is to educate journalists about their own racial and cultural biases.

We must be alert to social inequality and its expression in the media. Progress depends in part on securing the goals of media democracy advocates — policies to ensure net neutrality, limit consolidation, and protect localism and pluralism.

Looking Forward

While powerful in the past, the media is likely to become an even more significant contributor to social, political, and cultural capital in the future. What's more, in the media arena there is often a clear connection between policies and outcomes, a fact that enables the nascent media democracy movement to focus its energies efficiently. As was the case with the 2003 campaign.

“The 2003 effort has had lasting impact because it generated stronger relationships between grassroots, national, and research organizations that have been maintained and in some cases expanded,” says Gene Kimmelman, vice president of federal and international affairs at Consumers Union. “We are more prepared as a community, and extensive media coverage of our success has made policy makers wary of reigniting the furor.”

As public awareness of media democracy issues expands, new opportunities arise. Surveying the next phase of the media democracy movement, Kimmelman, who has been working on deregulation and consumer-protection issues for more than twenty years, sees “renewed efforts to promote diverse media ownership and an open Internet, coupled with new campaigns to open up affordable new sources of information.” Such sources might include new broadband distribution systems, such as community-controlled Wi-Fi, as well as low-power radio, a new class of community-based FM stations with broadcast ranges of two to four miles.

“The people we work with sense the potential of media to strengthen democracy, increase civic knowledge and participation, and bring disenfranchised people into the social dialogue,” says Pete Tridish, founder of the Prometheus Radio Project, a nonprofit focused on building the low-power radio community. “These small civil rights groups, farm workers unions, neighborhood associations, and others are poorly served by the commercial media and are not even in the demographic that public stations are shooting for — they know that the best way for the communities to get the full benefits possible from media technologies is to do it themselves.”

Looking forward, one of the key issues for media activists and policy advocates is finding sustainability. “Funder education is essential,” says Helen Brunner, director of the Media Democracy Fund. “I always ask foundations to consider whether media could be their ‘second issue’ — it plays a role, whatever their primary concern is.”

The agenda is large; so are the complexities and obstacles to its realization. But the movement's vision of shaping media to become more diverse, open, and just — that is, more democratic — is informed by values that are central to the American experience.

Under the portfolio of former program officer Becky Lentz, the Ford Foundation became an early funder of groups working on public interest media issues. Since 1998, the foundation has provided more than $30 million of support to more than 100 grantees.