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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
The backlash against the FCC's media consolidation scheme is growing -- and could claim the head of chairman Michael Powell.
Jul 23, 2003 | Following the Federal Communications Commission's controversial decision on June 2 to ease media ownership limits, supporters in Congress were so sure they had momentum on their side that Rep. Billy Tauzin, R-La., announced the ongoing debate had become a "soap opera" and that given the chance he intended to "cancel its run."
But instead, there's a cliffhanger: A series of increasingly lopsided, bipartisan congressional votes vowing to undo the FCC's work on media concentration has challenged Tauzin and other supporters. The votes make it increasingly clear that America's largest media companies, such as Viacom/CBS, Disney/ABC, NBC, AOL Time Warner and News Corp./Fox, along with their army of lobbyists, are in danger of losing control of an issue they thought they had put to bed. And if the political momentum continues to mount this summer, there's a growing chance a key portion of the FCC's June 2 decision on media ownership will be overturned by Congress.
That would represent a humiliating setback for FCC chairman Michael Powell and could cause real discomfort for the Bush White House, which has backed Powell's aggressive agenda of deregulation.
Right now, some Democratic candidates smell blood. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., quickly signed on with a procedural effort in the Senate to nullify the FCC's vote. And last week, Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., said Powell's media ownership vote had "betrayed the public trust," adding, "He and his FCC must be stopped."
"I suspect Michael Powell and his supporters are getting nervous," says Mark Fratrik, a vice president at BIA Financial Network, an investment firm specializing in broadcasting and telecommunications. (Time magazine reports this week that Powell may step down as chairman in the fall.)
"June 2 was a bigger deal than a lot of people expected it to be," adds Liz Rose, spokesperson for Consumers Union, a public policy advocacy group that opposes media deregulation.
The new FCC rules allow one media corporation to own up to three television stations, one newspaper, and eight radio stations in the country's largest media markets. They allow TV networks to own local stations that reach, in the aggregate, 45 percent (up from 35 percent) of U.S. television households. And the FCC recommended lifting the ban on newspaper/television cross-ownership in all but the smallest cities.
The surprisingly stiff opposition in Congress, where commercial broadcasters have often enjoyed good working relations with politicians, is just the latest example of how the swelling anti-FCC, anti-media-consolidation movement is reverberating around Capitol Hill. In fact, the story behind the media-consolidation battle is the unprecedented grassroots campaign, joined by both liberals and conservatives, that has clearly sparked action inside the Beltway.
Conservatives are worried about indecent television programming, and how consolidation could further erode standards, while liberals decry how deregulation drives political diversity from the airwaves. During the final days before the FCC's vote, the commission was buried by nearly 800,000 opposition e-mails and postcards from, among others, National Rifle Association members on the right and MoveOn.org readers on the left. Conservative New York Times columnist William Safire now warns the Bush White House that pushing a media-consolidation agenda could come back to haunt it in the upcoming presidential election. Meanwhile, touting the FCC backlash, former President Bill Clinton recently wrote in the New York Daily News, "The opposition is truly a grass-roots movement, and it won't go away. And the voice of the people is beginning to be heard, at least on Capitol Hill."
He may be right. A recent poll by Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that the more Americans learn about the FCC's move to relax caps on how many newspapers and TV stations a media corporation can own in local markets, the less they like it. Fifty percent of Americans today see further media consolidation as a negative development. Just 10 percent view it positively. And among Americans who have followed the issue closely, the negative percentage balloons to 70.
"We've been filing with the FCC for years," says Rose, of the Consumers Union. "Suddenly it went from us and a handful of other public policy advocacy groups to a much wider base of support."
Not everyone is convinced it will matter. The issue has "received more grassroots response than most people anticipated," concedes Rudy Baca, vice president at the Precursor Group, an investment research firm. But he insists the current last-gasp jockeying represents the "dying embers of the political smoke" that "won't result in political actions to rescind the FCC vote."
Others aren't so sure.
