With news coming today that Obama has selected Julius Genachowski to head the FCC (see Nuisance Industry's diary here for more info on who Genachowski is and discussion of the merits of the pick or you can check out the frontpage post about the choice; you can also find reaction to the pick by a group fighting the good fight on media concentration, Free Press, here), it seemed like a good time to pick up with a series of diaries that I've been posting on media consolidation and what policies the Obama administration can put in place to start working towards a less concentrated, better functioning media.
In my first three diaries (found here, here, and here), I looked at how the FCC and the courts managed to make such a mess of the regulation of media ownership since the 1980s. Today, I want to take a step back and look at why we need diverse media ownership in the first place.
While not everyone can agree on the wisdom of allowing the government to limit the concentration of media ownership, there is a long-standing and broad consensus amongst those who write and think about democracy and the philosophical theories behind it that, in order for democracies to work over the long-term, power over what gets included and what gets excluded from public discourse simply cannot be concentrated in the hands of a powerful few.
Although there is no guarantee that diverse points of view will be heard or even voiced in a public arena in the first place, it matters a great deal whether the content of public debate is determined by a powerful few who impose their own limits on the acceptable terms of public discourse or whether decisions about what information is publicly communicated reflects judgments made independently by a larger number of different people. As Professor C. Edwin Baker has argued, a diffuse ownership of the means that are used to facilitate public debate in this country "embodies a fairer, more democratic allocation of communicative power," and increasing the number of independent decisionmakers who can make choices about whether or not to allocate resources to expose government corruption or identify social ills makes it more likely that those functions, which a free press is meant to perform in a democratic system, will be carried out.
Conversely, allowing a greater concentration of communicative power in any one national, state, or local community places more decisions about which stories get covered and which are buried to protect powerful vested interests into the hands of a smaller, more select group of owners and editors, creating a media system that is rife with the potential for abuses of that power.
Even the FCC, as conservative as it has been in recent years, concedes that media ownership can influence the perspectives that are presented in both the original reporting and editorial content generated by the large corporations that decide which stories to cover and how those stories should be covered. This influence can be especially prevalent when the parent corporation’s interests are at stake in a matter that could potentially attract public interest or scrutiny.
If influence over one editorial staff and one media outlet creates a concern about potential undue influence, then one corporation’s control over a large number of a given community’s media outlets goes beyond a mere concern and becomes a real potential threat to maintaining a healthy democracy that is adequately overseen by an independent and adversarial press.
In the 2003 Order issued after the completion of the 2002 Biennial Review, the FCC attempted to play down the potential for corporate abuses of power that would justify a restriction on the ownership of multiple media outlets by one corporation. According to the Commission, the record it established did not provide the "high degree" of confidence that the cross ownership of multiple media outlets produces the kind of "uniform bias" that it believed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 required it to find in order to continue to limit the concentration of ownership.
The FCC claimed that, while there may be some evidence of media outlets that may reveal a bias on some occasions, especially when corporate self-interests are implicated, mere anecdotal evidence of such influence does not reveal a "pattern of bias" in news coverage and editorial commentary when such self-interests are not involved.
This heavy evidentiary burden that the FCC has decided to apply before it will retain its media ownership rules is drastically different from the rational relationship that both the Commission and the Supreme Court relied on when the first set of cross-ownership rules were promulgated by the agency and ratified by the Court and can only be seen as a response to the rather exacting scrutiny to which its media regulations have been subjected in recent years. In contrast to this high degree of certainty about potential effects, the FCC had, with the Supreme Court’s blessing, required little proof that a rule would enhance the "volume and quality of coverage" of issues of local importance because the possible benefits "do not lend themselves to detailed forecast."
It is also exceedingly difficult to prove the kind of "uniform bias" that the FCC requires since bias usually manifests itself in subtler ways. It is rather hard to imagine a media corporation making the choice to present a easily detected, blatantly biased perspective on news events on a daily basis (Fox News notwithstanding), but it is not so hard to conceive of a situation in which editorial decisions about which issues to cover and how extensively to cover them are made in order to influence how the public perceives a given issue of public importance.
This less blatant bias, however real it may be, is much more difficult to substantiate empirically in an agency proceeding. Thus, the FCC has seemingly decided its statutory duty under the deregulatory logic of the 1996 Telecommunications Act compels the creation of a standard for retaining ownership rules that is so high that it is essentially impossible to meet.
Given this high burden that must be met in order to retain media ownership regulations, unless a real shift in the agency (and the statutory authority the agency interprets) occurs following the elections of both Barack Obama as President and larger majorities of Democrats in both the House and the Senate, the next Quadrennial Review in 2010 could see the further dismantling of the remaining limits currently placed on media concentration.
The FCC has long been tasked with the goal of maintaining the "widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources," an objective which serves to protect the public interest in viewpoint diversity in all the various forms of news media. At this point, however, the Commission – guided in large part by Circuit Courts’ dismissal of the reasoning behind its rules – has seemingly rejected the notion that it can use ownership as a proxy, perhaps solely on the basis of that stand-in’s admitted imperfections as a proxy, for guaranteeing that it protect the public interest in preserving viewpoint diversity.
While this might require that Congress and the FCC adjust the way in which they measure diversity in a market (a topic I'll tackle in a future diary), it is important to realize that this abandonment of the only vehicle that the FCC has ever used to even attempt to ensure diversity in the viewpoints a community has widely available to it leaves basically no principled means with which the FCC can put the brakes on further consolidation.
This is crucial because, with the decrease to the number of independent television stations and newspapers and the increase in giant media companies that continue to expand their holdings both in individual markets and across different communications mediums, it grows increasingly likely that editorial decisions in broadcast and print will be shaped by a small group of editors and corporate owners who decide which stories should be told and whose voices should be heard in matters of public debate. Since these decisions are shaped both by a need to create the maximum number of profit-generating economic "efficiencies" by limiting resources devoted to the hard work of gathering news and also, conceivably, by a desire to stifle stories that are contrary to a parent company’s corporate interests, the FCC’s recent decisions leave an essential democratic safeguard at the mercy of a market whose logic does not align with the larger public interest in protecting against abuses of power.
Losses in the newsgathering capabilities of media outlets and the increased dangers of a small group of editors and owners with the capacity to influence which stories are covered and which stories are left uncovered is dangerous precisely because the public is simply not aware of policy issues that news organizations suppress or choose not to cover, leaving politicians - and the special interests that influence them - free to make decisions that have real and wide-ranging impacts on the public without real public scrutiny. In other words, increased consolidation decreases the media’s ability to fulfill its function as a public watchdog, an important task that is not easily quantified by the economic analyses favored by the FCC and other proponents of a market-based approach to media regulation.
All of this suggests that the Commission’s recent focus on the economic viability of media outlets and the de-emphasis on creating an ownership structure in which power over communicative channels is disperse creates real dangers for the health and well-being of our democracy, a consideration that has been lost in the drive to quantify the positive net impacts of media ownership regulations.**
In the next diary of this series, I'll talk about why, even with the technological advances that have paved the way for new media like Daily Kos, the Obama Administration, the FCC, and Congress still need to be concerned with media ownership concentration.
**In addition to these concerns about the negative implications that media concentration has, it must also be noted that increased media consolidation, because it helps erect high barriers to entry, can also lead to a media that is less demographically representative of the nation as a whole. For example, even though minorities make up one-third of the population, they own less than four percent of our commercial radio and less than two percent of our commercial television stations. And while women represent more than fifty percent of our population, they own less than four percent of broadcast stations. This is certainly a significant concern and raises a whole other host of issues for a healthy democracy, and should not be left out of any discussion of media concentration. But these are topics that will have to be left for another day.