An increase in the limit on station ownership is slated to be approved at the FCC’s next meeting next week. Ted Turner disapproves.
Many liberal organizations oppose these rule changes, as does the National Rifle Association.
I support the change on the grounds of freedom of speech. I think the government ought not restrict people’s ability to communicate, unless there is an urgent, glaring need. I don’t think Turner’s arguments rise to that level of urgency. There are dozens or hundreds of stations potentially available in each local market. The problem isn’t a lack of stations, it’s the fear that a few organizations will do a better job, thus attracting more customers. That’s not something the government should “protect” us against IMHO.
Similar arguments could equally well support a hypothetical prohibition on selling local editions of the New York Times – a restriction most of us would oppose. The Times is higher quality than most local papers, but that doesn’t justify prohibiting the Times from competing with them.
Broadcast stations aren’t like papers, pamphlets, private speech, or even political rallies. By the nature of the beast, there’s only so many to go around. Owning too many channels creates a monopoly of speech, to some extent. They are stifling the speech of other would-be channel owners by taking all the stations, and controlling the distribution of prgramming (although the former is more worrying to me than the latter, the little guys could, and should, find alternative, innovative programming).
Now, some of the FCC rules I can see an argument for loosening. Owning a newspaper and a TV station in the same teritory for example, would not create the same sort of monopoly as owning multiple stations, IMHO.
The NRA? What’s their horse in this race? Shouldn’t they be sticking to gun issues?
I agree with Menocchio and Turner, and I find it utterly predictable that you don’t, december. It’s shocking–shocking!–that you’re on the side of those who want to narrow the spectrum of discourse in America.
It would be nice to see evidence that such rules improve the level and variety of “discourse,” or that the lack thereof worsens it. If it’s just an assumption, it’s a shaky one.
You equate reduced government restrictions with a narrower spectrum of discourse. That sounds paradoxical, although it could be a valid principle in certain special cases. It’s not obvious that it would apply that way here. If a city has 200 TV and radio stations, what happens if some of them switch ownership? The spectrum of discoure could be widened, if the new owner had different opinions than most of the market. Or, it could be narrowed if the new owner replaced a maverick.
Furthermore, the spectrum of discourse is already so wide, that it’s not a problem. It was a lot narrower when these regulations were adopted. I can listen to WBAI and KPFA, with their old-fashioned comminist POV, as well as right-wing Rush Limbaugh. The shortage that most bothers me is classical music, but that’s because of a lack of audienc, not lack of stations.
The problem, my dear december, is that One Company already owns 1200 radio stations in the US, and 60% of the rock stations. One company dictates what is played and said on those stations. How exactly would increasing this companies marketshare increase discourse? I’ll point you to an essay that addresses what this has done to US radio: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/5/29/11911/9588 . And here is the Salon.com article series on Clear Channel and other articles relating to the de-regulation of the radio waves.
To say the least, I am against further de-regulation.
This is fine when you live in and around a major media market like New York.
Unfortunately, most of us aren’t that lucky. Where I live in Central Pennsylvania, we have so few local broadcast media outlets that if there is one major owner like Clear Channel (for instance), that reduces the chances of broad discourse to a significant degree. And I’m not even sure that any of our local stations are owned by a local company, barring WITF, our PBS station (and even they have a significant relationship with our local NBC affiliate). And what of even smaller markets, like Abilene, Texas? They have so few outlets that even owning two or three stations makes a major impact.
Basically, what’s happening is that a large percentage of media outlets (this includes print as well as broadcast) is owned by an ever-shrinking number of corporations, many of which have interests in different aspects of media. And all of these companies exist to make money. So it’s expected that Time magazine is going to promote Warner Bros. movies, for example. (There is a stellar example of this kind of synergy in the recent issue of Time, which featured some rather gushing articles about The Matrix Reloaded, a movie to which the magazine’s reviewer gave a rather lukewarm review in a different issue.)
And when you have this kind of money to be made, and so many consumers, advertisers, and shareholders to please, discourse tends to be watered down to what is inoffensive and entertaining. So what if our President wants to declare war on everyone who disagrees with him? Ruben won American Idol!
So, the upshot of it is, ownership of media outlets needs to be kept to as many owners as possible. The freedom of the press that we pride ourselves on was predicated on the idea that the press would keep government honest, and massive corporate ownership defeats that idea.
December, I suggest you read Ben Bagdikian’s book The Media Monopoly. It might help explain this a little better.
Is primarily a rant against Top 40 music, which while interesting really has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of “discourse” and is a real reflection of people’s preference for radio music. I appreciate that if you like some kinds of music they’re hard to find at times, but at the same time the fact that most other people really do like Avril Lavigne and Destiny’s Child is simply the way things are; it’s neither good nor bad, and sitting on a self-built pedestal pretending your preference in music makes you a better person than the prones does not constitute much of an argument for government intervention in people’s lives.
Both articles contradict themselves by admitting that the relatively risk-free nature of pop radio has as much to do with the payola scandals as it does anything else.
(they also cannot seem to agree on the name of the company that owns 1200 radio stations and 60% of the market, but that aside…)
I am skeptical of the claims that deregulation will lead to a lack of diverse programming, if for no other reason than the fact that nobody’s provided any evidence it’s true. It might be, or it might not be. If you’re arguing in favour of government interference, though, it’s really your job to show solid evidence that interference is needed.
I have no doubt that what’s out there is profit-driven pablum. Problem is, it’s profit-driven pablum in one of the most heavily regulated industries there is. So how does regulation prevent profit-driven pablum?
You live in a town where all the radio and television and news outlets are owned by one of two individuals: Michael Moore or Hillary Clinton. How would you feel about the FCC deregulation then?
(For me, the two would be Fox News or Rush Limbaugh – the problem is that this hypothetical is closer to reality…)
I agree with Turner (which is a shocker, because I can’t stand him!)
Actually, didn’t the Reagan administration already loosen the restrictions on how many you could own?
We cannot afford, in this country, to keep on sacrificing quality and culture to big business and money-making interests. Now, there’s nothing wrong with making money-we all like money, right? But not at the expense of our culture, our intellectual pursuits, and our gaining of knowledge. We are pandering now to the lowest common denominator-our culture and artistic endeavors are suffering. We’re watering down our heritage, and it’s a sacrilege, in my opinion.
MsRobyn-how far are you from Pittsburgh? Just wondering, if there was a chance you could tune into WQED. We’re lucky here to have a WONDERFUL public radio station-almost all classical, with radio programs and my favorite, Adventures in Good Music, with Karl Hauss. And NPR, PRI, that sort of thing. I count myself very lucky to live in such a city, but not everyone is as fortunate. And it makes me SO mad sometimes.
I don’t know. I listen to sports, talk radio, classical music, show music (when I can find it), and jazz. I don’t listen to rock music.
I think it’s strange to use the phrase “broad discourse” to mean “several rock stations.”
That’s true countrywide, but not within a single market. No matter how many stations Clear Channel has in other places, their rock station in your city is just one station.
MsRobyn, are you sure the trend really is toward greater media concentration? When I was a kid, TV news was totally dominated by just 3 stations. We didn’t have cableTV… the large number of FM stations…the internet…satellite radio. Even though there’s a certain amount of co-ownership, we have access to news from many different POVs and many different owners.
Actually, our local NPR station, WITF, is a classical station, and we also have a couple stations in Philly that are on repeaters, so we have those, as well. (And, yes, I do pledge. A station like WITF is a Good Thing!)
We shouldn’t restrict freedom of speech to solve a hypothetical problem.
Fox News and Rush Limbaugh dominate radio and TB station ownership? I don’t know that Rush Limbaugh owns any stations at all. And, Fox is hardly a dominant owner of radio or TV stations. They’re significant, but they’re small potatoes, compared with ABC, CBS and NBC.
Maybe you would really prefer that conservative voices not be broadcast at all.
Hmm…wasn’t aware that I had stated my preferences or elevated myself above the “prones” as you put it. As for the articles, I do believe they both address the quality of radio programming, you just might want to scroll down and read a bit more thoroughly.
From december:
Sounds to me like you should have supported the classical programming on your local NPR station. The funds they raise during that program determine whether or not they keep that particular program.
In the May 22 New York Times William Safire (who may or may not be conservative enough for December) also weighed in on the “this particular deregulation is a bad idea” side, for similar reasons to Turner’s and those listed above. Unfortunately, it has moved off of the non-pay portion of the Times website. So it is not just hippies fightin’ the evil corporations who feel it is a bad idea.
No, it’s still pretty concentrated. My local cable company offers news channels owned by three or four companies: CNN (including Headline News), Fox, NBC (MSNBC, CNBC), and BBC (which is a stretch, since it’s a foreign outlet, and we’ve only got one BBC channel that splits its time between news and entertainment programming). Of these, only CNN, Fox and the NBC channels are available through a basic cable subscription; BBC America requires a digital subscription. And relatively few people have Internet or satellite radio access at this point.
I do think you’re taking a pretty myopic view of the U.S. In New Jersey, where you live, you get a mix of New York and Philadelphia programming. Both of these are megalopolises that have the population base and diversity of population to support many, many different kinds of programming. Not everyone has that. Where I live now, in the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, area, if we want cultural programming, we’ve got one choice for television and a handful for radio. Ethnic programming? Don’t make me laugh. (I’m deliberately leaving cable out of this part of the discussion.)
In fact, I’ve lived all over the country, and the only city that had any real choice in local broadcast outlets was Los Angeles.
Do my posts come out in some sort of invisible font?
All this “we’re sacrificing our heritage, our culture sucks” is fine rhetoric. Can you provide evidence that an increase in the station ownership limit will sacrifice anyone’s heritage or make culture worse?
There’s a positive correlation being assumed to exist between government-forced limits on media ownership and culture/discourse/insert your pet term here. I would like to see evidence of this. Perhaps a comparitive chart of Western countries with given levels of media conglomeration limits and some objective standard of “culture” or “discourse”?
No, it is not. The reality is that Clear Channel has bought multiple stations in many markets (often up to 90% of the broadcast stations in a smaller region) and has changed Country, Classical, Urban, Talk, Sports, and other format stations into Top 40 Pop stations, leaving little or no room for the other formats to fight for a license for the survivng station(s). With overwhelming control of the airwaves, they then remove the news organizations from all but the flagship station in the region (and usually turn that group into nothing more than a wire service reader outlet with no reporters of their own).
Extending that scenario to TV will do nothing to increase “free speech” in this country. It may, however, extend the issues of the Minot, ND train wreck to many more markets:
I don’t know that Rush Limbaugh owns any stations at all. And, Fox is hardly a dominant owner of radio or TV stations. They’re significant, but they’re small potatoes, compared with ABC, CBS and NBC.