LOCAL BROADCASTERS, OFFICIALS URGE FCC TO KEEP MEDIA LIMITS
DURHAM, N.C. -- A bevy of local public officials, TV station owners, radio broadcasters, journalists and public interest groups implored the FCC Mon. not to relax media ownership limits. Speaking at a standing-room-only forum organized here by Duke U. Law School and FCC Comr. Copps, the panelists almost unanimously called on the Commission to retain the 35% national audience cap on the TV stations one company could own, the ban on newspaper-TV station cross- ownership in the same market, the ban on radio-TV station cross-ownership and other ownership limits. Many speakers argued that without such limits, greater media consolidation would occur, the diversity of voices would suffer, communities would lose TV news, and events coverage and public service and the uniquely American concept of “localism” would be compromised, if not totally abandoned.
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Rep. Price (D-N.C.) said a key value at stake in the FCC debate over the media ownership rules was “community.” Despite the proliferation of hundreds of cable and satellite channels, he argued, “it’s competition among local broadcasters” that produces diversity: “Two hundred flavors on cable TV won’t do the job.” Price also pointed to the consolidation that had occurred in radio since the FCC lifted the ownership limits on that medium. He said Clear Channel, the nation’s largest owner of radio stations, was staging pro-war rallies in many of its communities and then covering those rallies as news events. “Consolidation has already gone too far in radio,” he said: “I can’t imagine why we'd want to go this way on TV as well.”
Rep. Burr (R-N.C.), vice chmn. Of the House Commerce Committee, reminded Copps, Comr. Adelstein and the 3 commissioners not in attendance here that Congress always had intended the broadcasting system to be locally based and oriented. He warned that the relaxation of the 35% ownership cap would lead to more “nationalization’ of commercial TV programming, with all creative decisions being made in N.Y. and Hollywood. Contending that “we have a moral crisis in network television,” he also warned that TV viewers would lose their local stations as “modest leverage” against “the lowest common denominator programming” policies of the national networks. “I fear we are on the verge of losing that important system of checks and balances,” he said.
Burr also sounded off against a similar trend in public broadcasting, where local stations were coming under more financial pressure to run national PBS programming instead of their own locally produced shows. He said he soon would introduce a bill in Congress to steer govt. block grants directly to local PTV stations and “further define the relationship” between the Corp. for Public Bcstg. (CPB) and PBS. Efforts to “nationalize” PTV programming, he said, “must come to an end.”
If anything, several speakers said, the FCC should lower the 35% cap, not raise it. Bill Brooks, pres., N.C. Family Policy Council, said independently owned affiliates had more freedom than network-owned stations to run their own shows and not run network programming they considered offensive to their communities. Deregulation “may not always be best for society,” he said: “What consumers want are alternatives… more choices, not fewer.”
Capitol Bcstg. CEO James Goodmon called on the FCC to retain all the current ownership limits and consider making them tighter. In spite of the growth of cable and satellite TV, he said, the TV industry was “actually less diverse, not more diverse,” now because the major broadcast networks owned 3 of the 4 most popular cable news channels and many of the top Internet news sites. He also said “the national cable and satellite networks are not a substitute” for local broadcast TV stations. “I don’t care if you have a thousand cable channels,” he said: “That is not competition for a local broadcast station. It’s not the same thing.”
Goodmon urged the FCC to go further by eliminating the long-standing 50% discount for UHF TV stations. Saying that more than 95% of all DTV licenses were for UHF stations, he said there was “no longer a valid reason for the discount.” He also urged the Commission to look at whether a vertically integrated syndicated programmer should be required to offer its programming on a market-by-market basis.
Hank Price, pres.-gen. mgr. of WXII Greensboro-High Point, said independently owned stations were more responsive to community concerns and less subject to network programming control. He argued that economics and station efficiencies shouldn’t be the only justifications for making or changing longstanding public policy. “If you raise the cap, the networks, in my view, will simply buy most of the local TV stations,” he said. “What’s the justification? If it’s economics, let one company buy all the stations and that won’t be an issue any more.”
Alone among the panelists, one local broadcaster did call for relaxing the ownership rules. Michael Ward, pres.- gen. mgr. of WNCN Goldsboro, a local NBC-owned station, argued that network-owned local stations produced more community news coverage than network affiliates and preempted network programming nearly as often. He said WNCN had greatly expanded its local news coverage, events programming, public service campaigns and community involvement since NBC bought the former home shopping station 6 years ago.
“The structural rules cannot govern a station’s content or conduct,” Ward said, saying the current ownership limits were “counterproductive” and “don’t make sense.” He said “local relevance, local acceptance and local involvement are simply good business” for any station owner, no matter where its headquarters is located. “These rules lose sight of the reality in today’s marketplace,” he said.
But, under questioning by price, Ward conceded that consolidation in the radio industry had hurt his hometown community of Sioux Falls, S.D., where all 6 radio stations now are owned by the same company. Ward said that when there was a local wreck of a train carrying toxic gas, nobody could get the local stations to run an emergency broadcast because there was nobody there to answer the phone.