Over the past week or so, I've been publishing a series of diaries about media concentration, laying out how we came to be in the mess that we're in and why we need media regulation in a democracy (you can find the previous four diaries in this series on my user page here).
But there may be some of you out there saying to yourselves: "This guy needs to wake up and smell the electronic revolution brewing. We don't need the old media. In the Internet age, we have citizen journalists who can do the investigative work that the broadcast outlets and newspapers really stopped doing effectively years ago and post the information online with little or no overhead. And this provides all of the diversity of information that we need."
To those people who may be thinking along those lines (and I admit that this is a bit of a strawman, but I did get at least a couple of comments along those lines in my previous posts), I would simply argue that, while there are some fantastic new websites and blogs out there doing some inspiring journalism, we need to look a little closer at where we are in the digital age before we jump to the conclusion that media regulation is soooo 1990s.
While new forms of electronic communication hold tremendous potential for informing and engaging citizens, it is important to realize that they remain limited by both the fact that the Internet remains far from universally accessible in this country and by the way in which the Internet has developed as a news and information source over the past several years.
It remains a fact that, while Internet use has rapidly increased in the nation as a whole, Free Press reports that "[o]nly 35 percent of homes with less than $50,000 in annual income have a high-speed Internet connection." Additionally, there are almost 20 million Americans who live in areas that are not even served by a broadband provider at all, while tens of millions of people in this country live in places where there is only a single high-speed Internet service provider.
Along these same lines, it is also important to note that there is unequal access to broadband service that cuts across racial and ethnic lines in the United States. While approximately 55 percent of non-Hispanic white households in the country are connected to some form of broadband, only 40 percent of racial and ethnic minority households have access to it at all. In fact, when compared to other nations, the United States ranks only 15th out of 30 industrialized countries in the percentage of citizens with access to the Internet.
Given these realities that illustrate the simple fact that high-quality Internet access is not currently available for everyone in the United States, it would seem like a rather dramatic mistake to allow further media ownership concentration to proceed based on the false assumption that everyone in the United States can simply replace the news and information available through broadcast outlets by accessing resources that are digitally available.
Until and unless broadband access becomes roughly equivalent to the availability of broadcast radio and television, the rationale for continuing to regulate broadcast and print media ownership will still exist. Otherwise, given the deleterious effects that consolidation can have in the availability of a wide diversity of voices in the media, any further deregulation runs the risk of further circumscribing access to relevant news and information about citizens’ local communities and the decisions that affect their day-to-day lives for a rather wide swath of the American population.
Additionally, supporters of further deregulation of media ownership frequently point to the emergence of Internet and other digital news sources, as well as the growth of cable and satellite television as undermining the rationale behind the rules that limit media concentration. However, as numerous critics of media concentration have pointed out, although the Internet may provide a large number of new sources, those sources actually provide little or no original news reporting, especially reporting on issues of local concern.
There are even a number of critics who rightly question whether these new digital sources on the Web have any appreciable effect on local civic discourse. The implicit – and valid – issue raised by these criticisms is whether endless iterations of the same information can provide for a diversity of ideas in a given marketplace or whether new digital forms of communication simply further amplify the already large megaphones of large media outlets.
In the 2004 Prometheus Radio Project court decision, the Third Circuit rejected the notion that the "virtual universe of information sources" on the Internet qualified it as an information source that the FCC could rationally or reasonably consider in determining if there was sufficient viewpoint diversity in a given market.
The court found that, for the purpose of measuring viewpoint diversity produced by media outlets in a particular local market, it could not accept that the universe of content provided by the Internet counts towards the number of accessible media voices unless the Commission could provide evidence that the sources of information available online actually functioned like other media outlets by providing original reporting that has some depth and accuracy and less like mere aggregators or distillers that merely collected and filtered information available in other outlets. In its analysis, then, the court rejected the idea that the important functions served by more traditional forms of media could simply be replaced with a sea of undifferentiated information provided online.
For those Internet users who do go online to find original reporting on local news stories, they may simply make choices about the sites to visit based on the offline sources with which they are familiar. This may mean that Internet users looking for local news may just focus their searches on websites owned and operated by the same media conglomerates that provide the broadcast and print media in their local market.
If, as is usually the case, the content on these websites are nothing more than the same stories repurposed for distribution on a media outlet’s website, it is difficult to argue that this use of electronic or digital media actually has an actual positive impact on the diversity of sources available to citizens in a given community. In fact, it may actually have the effect of just further amplifying an already dominant point of view, putting what may be undue emphasis on the stories and issues on which a large media outlet chooses to report.
In addition to these problems with finding new information or local reporting on the web that is not just repurposed content from offline sources, there is evidence that, even despite the relatively low barriers to entry and the seemingly infinite number of Web pages that exist, the concentration of online media is, in some ways, even greater than offline media. According to a study by Matthew Hindman, "the top ten outlets in radio and print garner[ed] between 20% and 39% of the total audience for their respective media. On the World Wide Web, [by contrast,] the top 10 sites accounted for more than 62% of the total traffic."
This concentration is largely due to the fact that people only use a tiny portion of the Internet to which they have access, consistently visiting and returning to only the most successful sites to which they are directed by search engines or hyperlinks, which are tools that Internet users rely on particularly because of the absolute vastness of the Web itself.
In assessing the impact that the Internet and other digital media have had in supplementing the information provided by broadcasters and newspapers, it is also important to look to whether people have actually begun to use the Internet as a substitute for or a supplement to more traditional media outlets. According to a 2006 survey commissioned by the Consumer Federation of America and Consumers Union, 82% of those surveyed reported that "they still primarily get information about their communities from daily and weekly newspapers and TV and radio stations." The newest data from a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press also shows that, while overall patterns of news consumption are beginning to change, a plurality of the population, or 46% of those surveyed, still get their all or the vast majority of their news from the TV or other traditional media sources and none of it online.
Significantly, given the data on the limitations in broadband access, this portion of the population tended to be the oldest, the least affluent, and the least well-educated. Meanwhile, the Pew survey revealed that 23% of the population reportedly relies primarily on the television for information about their world, but may get some news from online, while 13% get more of their news from political blogs and other online sources than from more traditional news sources.
It should be noted that while the Pew survey provides more evidence of the important role that broadcast sources still play in providing information to a sizable portion of the population, especially those who are older and less well-off, the younger survey respondents tended to integrate at least some internet sources in their news consumption. So although the Pew survey did not specifically address whether any of this news collected from the Internet included local news, it does show that the Internet may, in the future, become a useful resource for people who want to use it to learn about issues of public importance.
Finally, while cable and satellite cable services may increase the number of channels available for their subscribers, there is no evidence that these extra channels are a significant source of local news. And cable and satellite television channels have not been immune from the consolidating trend that has had such an impact on other sectors of the media.
Indeed, the majority of channels provided to cable or satellite subscribers are owned by the same handful of massive media corporations that own the major broadcast networks, and it is simply unrealistic to assume that this same group of owners will provide significant increases in news or other programming that would constitute meaningful competition within a market just because they provide content through both broadcast and cable or satellite outlets.
Now that we've traced how the problems came about and why media ownership regulation is still necessary, in the next couple of days, I'll be posting dairies detailing policy prescriptions that I think will help us create a media structure that better serves our democracy and the citizens that rely upon it.