Saturday, Sep 6, 2008
In Atlanta, at the last "unsanctioned" FCC hearing organized by dissident commissioners, Big Media gets small support.
May 29, 2003 | Atlanta has dubbed itself "the city too busy to hate." We are a city of people too harried to do anything much except go to work, fight traffic, pick up some franchise takeout, rent a DVD, and go home. Atlanta is a fragmented and disconnected city where pods of commerce are linked by highways choked with people driving SUVs and talking to themselves, cellphone wires dangling from their ears. It is not a city where we often get together to talk about the future of our democracy.
But on Wednesday, May 21, some Atlantans did just that at an unsanctioned Federal Communications Commission hearing attended by two dissident FCC commissioners, members of the alternative press, local activists, and 600 very worried U.S. citizens. The attendees assembled to register their opposition to the tsunami of media consolidation -- and subsequent loss of real news reporting -- they fear the regulatory commission's June 2 rule change will unleash.
The meeting was the last in a series of unsanctioned protest hearings convened by FCC commissioners Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein to provide a forum for public comment on the impending rule change.
What was most striking about the hearing was how much the people who attended cared -- from the commissioners who have been touring the country to warn the American people of the impending deregulation to the hundreds of Atlantans who spent four hours sitting in hard pews in a drafty church on an unseasonably cold and rainy May night waiting for a chance to make their voices heard.
Copps and Adelstein began the proceedings on an ominous note: "We are on the eve of the most sweeping and potentially most destructive overhaul of ownership laws in the history of American broadcast -- and most people have no idea what's about to happen to them and their media," Adelstein said.
"The FCC is about to supersize the media," he said, explaining that the rule changes will allow existing Big Media corporations to get even bigger, at the expense of the American people.
"America needs to wrap its arms around the issue of who's going to control the media, while there's time. It's a question of who's going to control the public interest," Copps warned.
But when asked how the American people can prevent the loosening of media cross-ownership restrictions, Adelstein said that the chances of stopping the FCC on June 2 are very slim. What's more, he added, once companies merge, the FCC cannot make them unmerge; only an act of Congress can do that.
Nevertheless, he urged his listeners to keep protesting the changes. "The entrenched media in Washington is very powerful," he said. "And we've seen small entrenched interests override the interest of the American people time and time again. But our democracy is at stake."
In the course of these hearings, Adelstein said, he's found that people have "zero interest" in seeing media companies grow bigger. "I suspect that Americans have an instinctive and deep hostility to Big Media. It's against what we're about -- it's not in the public interest."
"Use the airwaves in your interest and not in the interests of companies that profit by using them," he exhorted the crowd, which responded with thunderous applause.
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