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Making Media Work for Democracy
In February 2004, MediaChannel.org will launch Media for Democracy 2004 ("MFD2004"), a non-partisan citizen's initiative to monitor mainstream news coverage of the 2004 elections and advocate fairer, more democratic and issue-oriented standards of reporting. The project taps the expertise of MediaChannel's 100 U.S. affiliates and more than 125,000 users in a targeted campaign to prevent the types of media mistakes -- such as early, erroneous and politically biased projections -- that plagued the 2000 elections.
As Americans prepare for the 2004 vote, MediaChannel is reaching out to concerned citizens to join a broad-based initiative that encourages big media to follow best practices for coverage. Chief among these is the media's duty to educate voters about the democratic process, to devote more airtime to diverse political perspectives, and to provide more thorough coverage of the issues and candidates on the ballot.
MFD2004 will educate and activate a growing base of concerned citizens by delivering alerts -- breaking news and analysis of mainstream media election coverage. These alerts will provide citizens with the means to put their news executives on notice when reporting strays from standards for democratic coverage of elections. Alerts will also highlight instances where media perform well, drawing attention to reports and newscasts that fulfill their obligation to the public interest.
MFD2004 unifies the U.S.-based independent media organizations that are part of the MediaChannel network. The initiative strengthens their voices across the spectrum, combines their respective constituents and reaches out to new citizens to mount a non-partisan grassroots campaign for better coverage.
In December 2003, Bill Moyers and the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy provided a $350,000 "challenge grant" to realize MFD2004. The Center will match foundation and individual support provided by other organizations. Follow this link for more information about supporting this project.
THE PROBLEM: Abusing Public Domain for Private Gain
Despite a requirement to serve the public interest, many commercial broadcasters are devoid of any pretense of duty to American citizens. They pay nothing to the government for their licenses to broadcast, though they are allowed to sell these same licenses for hundreds of millions of dollars. This offering of airwaves to private interests was conceived in the 1920s as a social contract between broadcasters and the public. In exchange for use of a publicly owned asset -- the electromagnetic spectrum -- private media would provide their audiences with useful civic news and information -- the most useful being news coverage that guides American citizens on their role as voters and educates them about the issues and candidates on the ballot.
Today, many in commercial media have gone AWOL on this most obvious responsibility. "Pre-election news coverage of the candidates has in many cases all but disappeared," says Paul Taylor, chairman of the Alliance for Better Campaigns -- an organization that advocates fairer media rates for candidates. "What little candidate coverage that remains is devoted to incumbents, by a margin of nearly five to one, over challengers." In a study of media coverage, MediaChannel.org affiliate Norman Lear Center revealed that the amount of election-centered discourse provided by the typical local television station during the height of the 2000 presidential primary season was just 39 seconds a night -- far short of the five-minute standard advocated by a 1998 presidential advisory commission (headed by then Vice President Al Gore).
The Center for Media and Public Affairs, found that the total minutes of coverage of the 2002 midterm election on the national network news programs had declined by 78 percent over the coverage those networks devoted to the 1998 midterm election. Meanwhile, the cost of political ads on television, the third highest source of ad revenues for the industry, has more than quadrupled since 1982. In the 2002 election cycle, candidates spent more than $1 billion on political ads. 2004 will undoubtedly break all previous records. Despite legislation intended to limit candidates' advertising costs, broadcast stations take advantage of the compressed time period candidates have to get their message out. A recent study by Alliance for Better Campaigns found that ad prices at 40 stations around the country rose by more than 50 percent in the two months before the 2002 elections.
This arrangement suits both broadcasters and incumbents. The less a broadcaster covers a political race, the more candidates must rely on buying time to get their message across to voters.
THE IMPACT: Trampling the Standards
The net effect is a system where politicians give commercial broadcasters our public airwaves for free. During the campaign season, they turn around and sell our airtime back to politicians, while imposing a news blackout on candidate discussions of issues. By creating a pay-to-play model on the nation's premier medium for political communication, the television industry starves challengers, protects incumbents and enriches itself -- all at the expense of the public interest.
It wasn't meant to be this way. Public interest standards were set for broadcasting as far back as the Radio Act of 1927 and the Communications Act of 1934 -- both noble attempts to reconcile commercial goals with broadcasters' public-interest obligations. Congress and the FCC have over the years developed other regulations intended to foster diverse public affairs programming, encourage civic involvement and ensure candidate access to the airwaves. Sadly, commercial media has expended great effort to circumvent, downplay and redraft their duties to Americans.
Regulations have been chipped away under Republican and Democratic administrations alike. In 1987, Reagan's FCC eliminated the Fairness Doctrine, which required broadcasters to air and provide contrasting viewpoints on controversial issues of public importance. Now there's little recourse against a station that wants to be completely one-sided or that refuses to air a certain point of view. In 1996, under Clinton's watch, the Telecommunication Act radically restructured the radio landscape. The legislation loosened radio ownership caps and Congress gave -- to major corporations -- the public airwave spectrum valued at as much as $17 billion.
The massive popular resistance in 2003 to further loosening of FCC regulations on media ownership indicates that millions of Americans are interested in media reform. But the new plan to change the rules is only the latest in a long history of eroding public-interest protections. FCC commissioner Michael Copps, one of two Democrats on the commission to vote against the rule change, routinely stresses the fact that the airwaves belong to the public. "No one has a God-given right to use these airwaves for strictly commercial purposes," he said. While they can be used to run a business, the licenses are granted on a temporary basis, "using public property for a primarily public purposes on behalf of the public interest."
OUR RESPONSE: Taking Back The News
Our experience at MediaChannel.org shows you cannot count on all broadcasters to act ethically in reporting the news and putting the public interest ahead of their own. You can, however, reach out to, organize and educate the public to guard against continued media abuses. You can act effectively to encourage discerning media executives to better fulfill their professional obligation to serve the public interest during elections.
MediaChannel.org and its independent affiliate partners have joined to build Media for Democracy 2004 -- a citizens outreach campaign that includes a series of newsletters, alerts, weblogs, original commentaries and resources, and write- and call-in drives -- dedicated to educating citizens about the media obligations in a democracy, monitoring the media's performance in the 2004 presidential elections and holding news executives to higher standards of coverage.
MediaChannel will employ a four-part strategy to strengthen and better sustain the media's coverage of elections. This initiative is targeted at the 2004 election, but will remain an effective model for enforcing better standards for future election coverage in the U.S. and abroad.
Media for Democracy 2004 includes:
1. Uphold Standards: The first phase of the Media for Democracy 2004 strategy is to reach out and encourage news executives to agree to follow a widely agreed upon set of standards. MediaChannel.org is working with affiliates to draft a set of simple-to-follow standards for media coverage during the 2004 elections. We have learned that each newsroom has its own rules for election coverage, but that they don't share this information with the public. MediaChannel and its Affiliate advisors are now drafting universal rules in collaboration with selected news services. MediaChannel is "embedded" in Times Square and, as such, we have high-level access within mainstream media news outlets. We will propagate the rules for citizens and media executives alike and provide the means for those involved with the project to monitor election coverage in accordance with these guidelines.
2. Monitor Coverage: MediaChannel.org is working with German media-monitor firm Media Tenor to monitor nightly broadcast news and compile original analyses and data based on their coverage. Media Tenor's quantitative data will tell us definitively whether networks are ignoring key issues, informing citizens about voting, or devoting more time to one candidate at the expense of others. This analysis often reveals biases within media that are not readily apparent to the average viewer. MediaChannel will make Media Tenor research graphics available as an RSS feed to websites of the more than 1,100 affiliates that make up our network. At the same time we will distribute press releases to MediaChannel's comprehensive list (5,600 names) of American news critics, editors and media executives alerting them to transgressions by their colleagues.
3. Alert e-Activists: MediaChannel.org will convert Media Tenor data into easy-to-digest "alerts." Alerts will be emailed, in partnership with grassroots political participation web services, to the thousands of citizens who make up a "Media Corps," which today numbers 30,000 committed members. These e-activists have agreed to put the news industry on notice against their transgressions and oversights. Working with affiliated citizens activist groups -- including People for the American Way, MoveOn.org and Common Cause -- MediaChannel.org will educate participants on the standards, alert them to media problems as they occur, and provide the means for citizens to contact news executives via email and telephone. We are also reaching out to MediaChannel's more than 100 Affiliates in the U.S to combine their users under this initiatve. With success, the activist list will grow to include our 125,000 network members by Election Day.
4. Election Day Watchdog: In collaboration with Media Tenor, MediaChannel.org will assign media monitors to watch major news outlet during the national party conventions and November vote. Among their duties will be to watch for the types of mistakes -- such as early, erroneous and politically motivated projections -- that plagued coverage during election night 2000. They will be linked to a live action center at mediachannel.org that will stream examples of election coverage and send out real-time alerts to the Media Corps to orchestrate instant citizens campaigns. All MediaChannel affiliates can link to MFD2004's convention and election-night coverage to engineer as broad an impact as possible.
Returning Control of Your Reception
MediaChannel and its partners believe that political coverage is supposed to be about educating and interesting citizens to take part in a democracy. Journalists are supposed to be outside the process functioning as the fourth estate -- and not as political insiders, members of the political elite themselves.
Election campaigns are democracy's showcase events. They allow for differences to be aired and new politicians and ideas to emerge. At their best, they transform a diverse population into an engaged citizenry and elevate democratic ideas over images and money. But when we allow money and media to be the arbiters of who gets heard and who gets elected, democracy is at threat. Media for Democracy 2004 brings democratic information together with an activated citizenry to take back our airwaves and inspire mainstream media to better serve the public interest during a crucial election and beyond.
Join Media For Democracy 2004
Contact:
Timothy Karr
Executive Director
MediaChannel.org
tim(at)mediachannel.org
1.212.246.0202
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