In The Future of Media, a collection of authors from varied backgrounds (the majority as activists) argue against increased media consolidation at the hands of the Federal Communications Commission, promoting grassroots activism to halt a trend that flies in the face of our democratic principles. This trend toward monopoly is nothing new to American business; but it picked up speed in 1996 when Congress passed the Telecommunications Act, drastically relaxing ownership regulations in the media sector and paving the way for corporate hegemonies like Clear Channel’s dominance of the radio waves. In the name of free market competition, deregulation allowed most of the images and sounds seen and heard on a daily basis, all over the world, to fall into the hands of only five major corporations: General Electric, Viacom, News Corporation, Time Warner and Disney. Instead of fostering competition, the act shrank the media industry into an even smaller group of self-interested parties that Robert McChesney, an academic media critic and one of the book’s editors, likens to Hyman Roth’s Havana patio in The Godfather Part II [12]. In 2003, the F.C.C. approved another set of deregulatory measures that would have allowed the media pool to shrink even further, has it not provoked a firestorm of citizen outrage and grassroots activism on both ends of the political spectrum. Several of the essays in The Future of Media describe the democratic fervor whipped up by the F.C.C.’s rule changes, culminating in a series of hearings before the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, which struck down the changes in 2004.
Each of the authors takes up the mantle of media reform forged in 2003, urging readers to get involved in the “fight to limit conglomerate swallowing of media outlets by sensible limits on multiple and cross-ownership of TV and radio stations, newspapers, magazines, publishing companies, and other information sources,” as Bill Moyers puts it in the book’s introduction [xxi]. The cause of media reform stems from the principle that the media are supposed to balance their financial interests with a concern for their audience, the public, whom they are obligated to inform as well as entertain. As F.C.C. Commissioner Michael J. Copps points out in his essay, “Where is the Public Interest in Media Consolidation?”, broadcast media companies receive their free licenses to use the publicly-owned electromagnetic spectrum in exchange for a pledge to serve the public interest (this system is known as the public-trustee framework, or the public interest standard) [120]. As those media companies join bigger, vertically-integrated corporations, where they are only one of many profit-seeking operations, the public interest loses out to the bottom line.
The problem is not a vast and insidious corporate conspiracy to control the hearts and minds of average Americans—it’s more subtle than that. Corporate emphasis on profit forces out programming that genuinely reflects the makeup and interests of the public in local markets, because selling more ad time means targeting the most commercially coveted demographics and promotes a “lowest common denominator” approach. Funding for informative and locally-geared programming gets cut as corporations consolidate their resources in order to maximize the ratio of revenue to production costs. Corporate honchos are also likely to hire and put on the air people who look and think like them, at the expense of voices of dissent. In the essay “Media Bias: How to Spot It—And How to Fight It,” Peter Hart cites a study conducted by his organization, the media watchdog FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting), which found that 92% of U.S. sources interviewed on network newscasts in 2001 were white and 85% were male [52]. Not surprisingly, corporate representatives were interviewed on the air 35 times more often than representatives of organized labor. FAIR’s study illustrates how the consolidation of media production and distribution runs directly counter to the Supreme Court’s opinion that “the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public” (quoted by Schwartzman, et al. in “The Legal Case for Diversity in Broadcast Ownership,” 153). Furthermore, the media’s conglomeration means that the people in control are increasingly elite, detached by class and culture from the majority of the public they are supposed to serve. If the elites in corporate media join forces with the elites in government, whose interests more closely resemble their own, then the media’s role as the “fourth estate,” a muckraking check on official power, will go out the window.
All of this is particularly scary in our postmodern age, which is so saturated with images and sound bites that there is no escape from mediation. If global media is a crucial node in the current heteropolar political landscape, as this course has argued, then the question of who controls the media is a direly urgent one. If media has the power to compete with governments in mobilizing political action and influencing our values and principles, then what happens when the media falls into the hands of an elite few, driven solely by the interests of free market capital?
Advocates for deregulation insist that the Internet and cable television will make up for the diversity lost in the consolidation of the newspaper and broadcast industries. But in “The Legal Case for Diversity in Broadcast Ownership” in The Future of Media, Andrew Jay Schwartzman, Cheryl A. Leanza and Harold Feld (lawyers who argued the case against the F.C.C. for the Media Access Project in 2003) maintain that the internet is still just a red herring. “Because of the economics of news production, only a handful of websites control the bulk of news generation and distribution over the Internet,” they write. “Although anyone remains free to set up a website and post or send information to the rest of the world, this freedom does not equate with an ability to effectively compete with existing media companies. The question is not whether news is somehow discoverable, but whether it enters into the public’s awareness” [155]. On the surface, this argument seems a little outdated. Political blogs like Talking Points Memo and the Drudge Report existed when the book was published in 2005, but they have only recently risen to prominence as the potential messiahs of 21st century news, especially since TPM received a Polk Award this year for its coverage of the US Attorney scandal. So maybe the Internet already plays a more important role as an alternative news source than it did three years ago. But the authors’ point about public awareness is well taken. Although online news has certainly become more important, it still pales when compared to mainstream news in terms of viewership and cultural permeation. Everyone knows what CNN is (we even have an effect named after it), but it’s unlikely that anybody outside politically well-informed circles has ever heard of TPM. And although the right people might be reading the blogs, allowing the info they dig up to circulate more widely—the US Attorneys scandal is a case in point—they still fail to reach an audience anywhere near as large as those of the network news shows or the 24-hour cable news channels. The other crucial distinction between online news aggregates and the mainstream news is money: no blog has the finances to bankroll the kind of investigative reporting that the media’s fourth estate role entails. Although the aggregation model is gaining traction as a valuable way to compile and distribute good information, the blogs have yet to figure out a reliable means of sustaining themselves financially while expanding their operations. All of which goes to show, yet again, the defects of a media system that depends on the capitalist model.
If traditional television news is still the average American’s main source of information, then who controls the media is just as important today as it was a few years ago. Indeed, as very recent events have proven, the question of media consolidation is not off the table despite reformers’ victory in 2004. In December, the F.C.C. relaxed a ban on ownership of different media in the same market, allowing companies to own one newspaper and one TV station in one city in the top twenty markets, provided that the station is not in the top four and there are at least eight other news sources. The Senate Commerce Committee passed a “resolution of disapproval” on April 24 to invalidate the new policy; but President Bush has threatened to veto the resolution if it passes in the Legislature, and several media titans have already filed a lawsuit against it on the grounds that it violates their First Amendment rights. Cross-media ownership is an especially pressing issue in light of current controversy over one of the world’s biggest media markets, New York City, where Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation is on its way to controlling several of the biggest media outlets. Thanks to F.C.C.-granted waivers of the pre-existing cross-media ownership ban, News Corp already owns The New York Post, The Wall Street Journal and two television stations, and is in talks to purchase Newsday from the Tribune Company. The sale would put Murdoch’s corporation in control of three of the country’s ten largest papers.
The authors of The Future of Media clearly anticipated in 2005 that the fight for media reform was far from over; the book is presented not as a commemoration of the successes of 2003 but as a primer for concerned citizens and future activists. The back of the book features a 70-page media reform action guide, with step-by-step guides to filing complaints with the F.C.C., monitoring local media outlets, organizing like-minded individuals, and other levels of activism. This call to action echoes what many see as the key strength of alternative news gathering on the internet: putting authority over information into the hands of the people that that information is supposed to serve. In our era of media conglomerates, we need individuals and local groups to keep an eye on policy and production/distribution institutions in the same way that blogs monitor the mainstream news. In order to preserve the fourth estate, we need a grassroots fifth estate to mediate the media.

Sources:
“Murdoch Taking on F.C.C. Media Rule.” Stephen Labaton. The New York Times, April 23 2008.
“Murdoch Closes in on Newsday and Reshapes Journal.” Richard Perez-Pena and Tim Arango. The New York Times, April 22 2008.
“Senate Committee Votes to Overturn F.C.C. Cross-Media Ownership Rules.” Katherine Skiba. US News & World Report, April 24 2008.