Why doesn't anyone care about broadcasting regulations anymore?
I've been reading a lot and doing quite a bit of research on ownership regulations in the media for my capitalism class, and it's pretty striking to look over the FCC regulations and the arguments that I remember from only two years ago. Doing this has convinced me that we need to not only roll back this deregulation (which Congress has already started), but perhaps major parts of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 as well.
The FCC was started to preserve the three key goals of "diversity, competition, and localism", in defense of "the public interest", which is a recurring, ill-defined term in many of the arguments laid out around these regulations. The newest round of deregulation was driven by charges from Congress to review the regs and eliminate all that were not "in the public interest". The changes included permitting TV duopolies in 94.5% of the national market, upping the market share cap on TV networks to 45% from 35%, and allowing cross-ownership of newspapers and TV in the same market.
The issues of diversity, competition, and localism should be addressed one at a time, and hopefully a look at each one is enough to persuade most readers that we need more, not less, ownership regulation of the media to serve the public interest.
First of all, is diversity, probably the thorniest issue. There's a semi-legitimate argument that since bigger corporations don't want to compete with themselves, they have an incentive to diversify their market in a way that individual stations, all aiming for mass appeal, would not. This isn't the case, because this classical market-based reasoning doesn't work in a limited, non-competitive market like broadcasting.
There's a government monopoly on broadcasting licenses, which means that dissatisfied customers can't respond as they would in the classical Adam Smith model, by starting up their own. In fact, the big corporation has a stranglehold on their slice of the spectrum until the spectrum auctions come around again. Once they are big enough, their economic incentive isn't to produce quality programming, but to produce programming as cheaply as possible, using economies of scale that large companies have in every field, and accumulate enough to outbid their competition for more spectrum. The same huge vertically integrated companies that can produce materially can produce material much more cheaply than can independent stations, and this is corroborated by recent growth in "repurposing", which is using content filmed for one station (or written for a paper) in another medium.
By regulating more strongly how many stations can be acquired (this means reversing part of the 1996 Telecommunications Act), we can eliminate the incentive to buy out the competition, and hopefully incentivize producing more quality material. In addition, we also protect diversity, the key issue I'm addressing right now, by insuring that many different owners can stay on the air and provide any kind of service that the public wants to hear. Free-market prescriptions will not protect diversity in a climate that is constrained by its very nature (the electromagnetic spectrum), but will encourage monopolization.
Next time, the issue of competition, which has already emerged here...these are all some pretty tangled threads.