By Aliza Dichter
"Whose radio? Our radio!" the crowd chanted outside the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco last Friday. Inside, convention-goers rolled their eyes as staffers and police stood guard around four young activists who had locked themselves together with bike locks. Someone asked what all the fuss was about; another onlooker responded: "I think it's that Gore-Bush thing." Behind us all, the "Radio Station of the Future" exhibit blasted Led Zepplin's "Stairway to Heaven."
The fuss at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) "Radio Show 2000" last week was about a conflict of interests. The non-profit National Association of Broadcasters is dedicated to "the interests of radio and television broadcasters in Washington and around the world," according to NAB President Edward Fritts. But legally, broadcasters must serve "the public interest," and the crowd at the door had come to say that these interests are not one and the same.
"Independent, critical and genuinely representative media are crucial to a healthy democracy; without them, citizens lose the means to control and participate in the public debate that sets the nation's political agenda," reads an open letter to the NAB signed by activists, academics and organizations in support of the demonstrations.
All sides in the debates over control of the airwaves hold up the endangered heart of America for their cause. Though generally ignored by mass media and big politics, the battles are waged in epic tones. In challenges to ownership restrictions and content obligations, broadcasters' rallying cry is "Freedom," while reformers call for "Democracy." In the fight to allow new short-range stations, the NAB warns of the danger micro-radio poses to America's media, while advocates insist that the very fabric of community is at stake.
All sides appeal to the "soul of America," because the core issue here is who has the right and the ability to determine the needs of the public. "This is what plutocracy looks like!" shouted the activists in the streets. The NAB do indeed wield tremendous political influence, as documented in recent reports from the Center for Public Integrity,
microbroadcaster Richard Edmundson and MediaChannel. Besides the money and lobbying forces available to any large industry, the media have, in the words of former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt, "near ubiquitous, pervasive power to completely alter the beliefs of every American."
"What the American people don't know is, in fact, they own the airwaves," insists Helen Grieco, president of the California National Association of Women, at a press conference outside the NAB convention.
With protests and direct actions, public education and government lobbying, coalitions are building to challenge the power of the NAB. (See links on right.)
The NAB was formed in 1922, the year of the first commercial broadcast in the United States. Twelve years later, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was created by the Communications Act of 1934 to regulate wire and radio communications in the public interest. But while the Act took great legal care to define its terms, spelling out the meanings of "broadcasting," "radio station" and even "person" (which, we learn, "includes an individual, partnership, association, joint-stock company, trust, or corporation") the definition of "public interest" was left to the beholder to interpret — and the FCC to regulate.
(Even the meaning of "public" may be disputed: During Thursday's highly technical discussion on Radio Ownership, Roy Stewart, the head of the FCC Mass Media Bureau, defended agency policy, explaining that they must balance the interests of the broadcasters with the "public interest of advertisers.")
The guest of honor at the convention's "FCC Policymakers' Breakfast," FCC Commissioner Harold Furchgott-Roth, intoned the American values of "Freedom and Opportunity" as activists played on a Media Monopoly Board outside.
Furchgott-Roth, often a dissenter from Commission decisions, warned radio station executives of the dangers that regulation-loving "defeatists" pose to "American victory." The breakfasters had enjoyed a good laugh at an actual "defeatist" in their midst when Andrea Buffa, Executive Director of Media-Alliance, seized the microphone and began, "I am here on behalf of the free-speech protesters. The airwaves are for the public, not for corporations —" until a large man in a sports coat muzzled her and carried her out.
"The peaceful expression of ideas is what makes this country great," Furchgott-Roth commented.
(Diane Mermigas, Deals Page editor for the trade mag Electronic Media, offers her own nod to patriotism: Of course media companies employ all their political might to consolidate and fight to evade regulation, she writes: "That's the American way. It's what makes free enterprise the engine for creating extraordinary wealth.")
Homage to American values was the theme of the convention's keynote speech by America's military hero, General Colin Powell. For all his hard-won fame, Powell cracked, broadcasters only care about his son, Michael Powell — Furchgott-Roth's ally on the Commission. "N-A-B ... F-C-C ... K-I-S-S-I-N-G," shouted protesters outside. I counted at least six FCC staffers besides Commissioners Powell and Furchgott-Roth attending the convention, including the heads of the Mass Media Bureau and the Enforcement Bureau who joined NAB panel sessions on the present and future of broadcasting policy.
When Congress relaxed the ownership rules in the Telecommunications Act of 1996, it was seen as a great victory for broadcasters, allowing for multiple ownership of media outlets. In the NAB hall, exhibitors pitched software to run multiple stations from a single machine while, with handouts and slide shows, broadcasters and their lawyers were trained in the intricacies of the ownership rules and the threats to free consolidation.
In his speech, General Powell trumpeted the triumph of America over the Soviet Union: "Our ideology is triumphant ... There is no competing ideology." The crowds who attended protests, speeches, workshops, concerts and marches this week in San Francisco might beg to differ. They warn us: dissenting views and diverse perspectives have been squeezed off of ever-concentrated airwaves.
The NAB disagrees: "Consolidation has greatly increased program diversity," reads an article in an NAB press pack, "... superduopoly owners have broadened their scope to
include such new offerings as Smooth Jazz, Urban AC, Hot Talk, AAA and even Christian Country." That's not the kind of diversity the public-interest advocates are concerned about.
Can national media chains serve the needs of local communities? The Bay Guardian, San Francisco's independent weekly newspaper, notes that over half of that city's commercial radio stations and all four TV stations are owned by out-of-town conglomerates. The NAB's Fritts insists: "[A] large percentage of the program day is still local ... local traffic
reports and weather." But traffic and weather are not the community concerns that bring protesters to the streets. While broadcasters claim $8 billion of community programming in the forms of public service announcements, social campaign support and weather emergency coverage, reformers point to studies by the Media Access Project and the Benton Foundation that find local public-affairs programming makes up less than one-half of one percent of the content offered by commercial broadcasters.
Consolidation and commercialization have also been blamed for the demise of ethnic and non-English radio. An industry report promoting the boom in Spanish-language radio indicates that market value might not be the key to diversity: almost 90 percent of all 600 Spanish-language radio stations are commercial, soon to include 2 formerly Korean-language stations purchased for $75 million.
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