Fw: Cable and Broadcast Associations Go into Secret Meetings with FCC

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Thursday, August 12, 2004 9:58 PM

Cable and Broadcast Associations Go into Secret Meetings with FCC

 

Category: News & Opinion (General) Topic: Government

 

Synopsis:

 

Source: www.corpwatch.org

 

Published: August 11, 2004 Author: by Chellie Pingree and Jonathan Rintels

 

For Education and Discussion Only. Not for Commercial Use.

 

USA: Cable and Broadcast Associations Go into Secret Meetings with FCC

 

by Chellie Pingree and Jonathan Rintels, Seattle Times

 

August 11th, 2004

 

With the encouragement of Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael K.

Powell, the country's broadcasters and cable operators have agreed to meet

behind closed doors to decide what Americans will see on their televisions as

the nation transitions from analog to digital broadcasting.

 

Representatives of the public interest were not invited. Neither were the

commissioners of the FCC, nor members of Congress.

 

Why do we call the public's attention to this private meeting? Because these two

corporate oligopolies that control television are meeting to decide what the

public will see on airwaves that are not their property, but the property of the

public.

 

Television is acknowledged to be the most potent information medium ever, with

tremendous power to influence our citizenry and our democratic process. With the

public interest so obviously at stake, the public must be involved.

 

For years, there has been a war going on between the National Association of

Broadcasters (NAB) and the National Cable Television Association (NCTA), two of

the most powerful lobbies in Washington. Today's digital technology makes it

possible for each over-the-air TV station to broadcast up to six channels, where

before they could air only one. This makes broadcasters' digital TV licenses,

which they received for free from the public, worth hundreds of billions of

dollars.

 

Since the vast majority of the American people now receive their television

signals from cable, broadcasters are demanding that the FCC pass a " must carry "

rule requiring cable companies to carry all their new digital programming. The

NAB argues that they deserve a special FCC rule requiring digital " must carry "

because broadcasters serve the public interest, so it is vitally important that

their availability to cable rs be guaranteed.

 

Conversely, cable owners are equally adamant that a " must carry " rule for

broadcasters' digital channels will force their customers to take channels they

don't want. They claim it will infringe their First Amendment rights to free

expression and also steal valuable property from them - channel space on their

cable systems. And they say they should be the ones to decide which network or

local TV station programs are carried on their cable systems.

 

The private meeting has been called to end this stalemate. Powell has encouraged

the meeting in the hope that the FCC itself won't have to act.

 

But all of this backroom jockeying misses a fundamental point: Do today's

broadcasters serve the public interest so well that such a huge government

giveaway of the public's digital spectrum and cable's precious channel capacity

is justified?

 

We believe this claim ought to be put to the test. At a time when broadcasters'

news coverage has never been weaker, more frivolous, and empty of any real

information that helps citizens participate in their democracy, we believe that

broadcasters ought to be held to real, quantifiable public-interest standards.

 

At a minimum, broadcasters should provide on their most-watched channel three

hours a week of substantive coverage about important local, state and national

issues, a higher percentage of non-network-produced programming, and at least

two hours a week of quality election coverage. Is that too much to ask of

broadcasters who received for free billions of dollars of public spectrum?

 

As the chairman of the FCC, Powell has a duty to regulate media in the public

interest. He cannot simply let giant media conglomerates decide behind closed

doors, without public input, what constitutes the public interest.

 

We hope Powell won't repeat the same mistake on digital " must carry " that he

made on last year's controversial media ownership proceeding, when he held just

one public hearing before he rammed through the commission new rules encouraging

an unprecedented and dangerous consolidation and concentration of our nation's

media.

 

Excluding the public from that proceeding earned the chairman an extraordinary

triple rebuke from the Congress, the courts and the public.

 

This time, Powell needs to get the process right. Before the FCC can decide

whether digital " must carry " is in the public interest, it must first articulate

public-interest standards for broadcasters. To do otherwise puts the

broadcasters' special-interest cart before the public-interest horse.

 

And this time, Powell must let the public weigh in on the fundamental question

of what constitutes the public interest. If he does not, media conglomerates

will meet behind closed doors to craft a deal that serves only their own

corporate bottom-line interest, at the expense of the public.

 

That is something the public has no interest in.

 

Chellie Pingree is president of Common Cause, a nonpartisan, nonprofit citizens'

lobby based in Washington, D.C. Jonathan Rintels is president of the Center for

Creative Voices in Media, a nonprofit organization in Washington, D.C.