All Kobe, all the time

Sleazy scoundrels like Steven Griles and Jeffrey Holmstead or medicine-show fakirs like John Graham make the endlessly broadcast Clinton-Whitewater scandal look like a Sunday-school romp, yet they are invisible in the press. "The networks are owned by big corporations and they're mainly Republican," DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe recently complained to me. "It's a heavy lift getting them to cover corporate control issues or to criticize a Republican president."

Public-interest advocates can't criticize corporations on the airwaves even when they have the money. MoveOn.org learned this lesson when they tried unsuccessfully to air an ad criticizing President Bush's corporate coddling during the Super Bowl. In 2003, when Laurie David and Arianna Huffington's "Detroit Project" attempted to air paid advertisements touting automobile fuel efficiency, the networks, which make $15 billion annually from the auto industry, refused to carry the ads. "They wouldn't run them," Huffington told me. "And we ended basically not being able to use the money that was budgeted to buy airtime." Huffington turned to Laurie David, a former David Letterman producer whose husband, Larry David, created "Seinfeld" and the popular series "Curb Your Enthusiasm." "I met with Lloyd Braun, the president of ABC," David told me, "and brought the commercial up there to see if they could run the ads. He pretty much laughed me out of the office. He said, 'We have three offices. We have an office in Los Angeles, we have an office in New York City, and our third office is in Detroit.' There was no way he was going to put something on his network that might piss off the auto industry."

When George W. Bush arrived at the White House, there was still one significant media law in place: No media company was allowed to dominate any one particular market. But Bush's FCC is looking sideways while the media giants violate this restriction. FCC regulations prohibit ownership of more than eight radio stations in a single market. A recent study of 337 cities by the Center for Public Integrity found giant corporations owning more than eight stations in 34 of them. Clear Channel is the big kahuna, with 11 of the 17 radio stations in Mansfield, Ohio. Second in size after Clear Channel is right-wing Cumulus Media, which enforced skinhead-style censorship when it blackballed the Dixie Chicks for criticizing President Bush. Cumulus owns 8 of the 15 stations in Albany, Ga. In every city surveyed, a single company owns at least one-third of the radio outlets.

The TV companies are engaged in the same shenanigans. The FCC rule that forbids ownership of more than one TV station in any market has been broken in 43 cities surveyed by the Center for Public Integrity. Recently, for example, Fox's affiliate in Wilmington, N.C., was purchased by a company that turns out to be a sister subsidiary of the company that already owns the NBC affiliate. They fired staff and combined newsrooms, so now one media company controls two of Wilmington's three stations.

When Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation bought Chris Craft's TV stations and Viacom merged with CBS in 2000, both companies were suddenly violating FCC rules prohibiting a single entity from owning stations reaching over 35 percent of the national audience. The FCC, now chaired by merger-maniac Michael Powell, solved the problem by handing both companies temporary waivers. Then the FCC tried to make the waivers permanent by raising the limit on market share. This new FCC rollback will unleash the largest wave of media consolidation in U.S. history. The new rules allow gigantic media conglomerates to buy television stations reaching 45 percent of the nation's viewers and to own newspaper, radio and television stations in the same city.

Chairman Powell, Secretary of State Colin Powell's son, conducted his rule-making proceedings in virtual secrecy, confining debate to a single public hearing in Richmond, Va., on Feb. 27, 2003. Not surprisingly, it received very little attention from the TV networks. The big newspaper chains -- the New York Times, Knight Ridder and Gannett -- enjoying their own unprecedented consolidations and creating their own plans to enter the television market -- all but blacked out coverage as well. In June 2003, Powell and his two Republican commissioners announced the deal as a fait accompli.

But Powell's corporate sop ignited a firestorm as conservatives, frightened by the prospect of monolithic corporate control of the nation's fundamental freedom, joined liberals in protest. Sen. John McCain pointed out that a similar media consolidation had subverted Russia's new democracy. Conservative columnist William Safire campaigned in favor of bipartisan legislation in the Senate to kill the deal. Public pressure forced Powell to reopen the process and hold open meetings in cities across the United States. A record 2.4 million people wrote letters opposing the rollbacks, recognizing what George W. Bush and Michael Powell apparently do not -- that the control of our media by a half-dozen powerful multinationals who can dictate what we hear, see and read is dangerous for our communities, our families and our democracy.

The Senate voted to stop the deal, and the House had sufficient votes to do the same. But the White House, working with Tom DeLay, the media moguls and their lobbyists, blocked the vote. Fortunately, in June the federal court of appeals in Philadelphia rejected the FCC's rollbacks, citing a lack of "reasoned analysis," and directed the agency to start over.

Nevertheless, absent a resurrection of the Fairness Doctrine, our nation's broadcast media, which should be an open forum for our democracy, will continue to devolve into a marketplace exclusively for commerce. It allows these corporations to extend the reach of their empires into American homes with customized, interactive multimedia content hell-bent on transforming us into 24-hour-a-day consumers. The so-called news and entertainment content will be dictated by advertisers with personalized appeals calculated to program us to buy, buy, buy. Meanwhile, our civic life, already invisible on TV, will become an irrelevant relic to the next generation, which will know little about the issues or why they should participate in democracy.

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