The following is an excerpt from an article on media consolidation written by NWU Bay Area Chapter member Richard B. Simon. It is posted here by permission of the author. The article was originally published in the August/September 2003 issue of Relix magazine.

Media Consolidation: The Sound of One Hand Clapping

NEW FCC RULES CEDE CONTROL OVER AMERICAN CULTURE AND PUBLIC DISCOURSE TO A FEW MEDIA MEGA-CONGLOMERATES

By Richard B. Simon

Last fall, I tried an experiment with one of my English classes. I asked one student to stand up front and tell us what he had done the previous night. Nervously—I don't think he wanted to reveal everything he had done—he mentioned the different subjects in which he had done his homework, and that he had mostly just hung out with his roommate, talking until late into the night.

I asked him to leave the room, and instructed the class to write down everything he said. Then I asked them to describe what he was wearing.

When the students read their accounts, each had different pieces, but not one had the entire story—and each had seen a different outfit. Their descriptions seemed to have more to do with their perceptions about their classmate than with his actual clothing. "Suppose you are all different news sources," I told them. "If your audience had access to all of your reports, they might be able to figure out what Kwame really did last night." They agreed. "Now imagine that we only had one source of information." I pointed to the student whose report was the least accurate.

"We'd be in trouble," said one student. Trouble, indeed.

On June 2, 2003 the Federal Communications Commission, the agency charged with licensing the public airwaves to the media industry, announced major changes to rules designed over the past seventy years to limit the number of media outlets a company can own. Essentially, the revised rules will allow a single owner (typically, a corporation) to possess larger portions of a community's radio stations, television stations, and newspapers than was previously allowed.

Critics of the rule change are many, and vary in ideology from the liberal National Organization for Women to the conservative National Rifle Association to the libertarian American Civil Liberties Union. They include Democratic presidential candidates, prominent Republican Senators, and members of Congress from both major parties.

They, along with some three quarters of a million citizens who contacted the FCC to oppose the changes, fear that the relaxed rules will allow more and more media outlets to concentrate under fewer owners, and that fewer points of view will be represented in the media. This, they claim, would endanger democracy, the life's blood of which is a wealth of divergent opinions.

Proponents of the rule changes include FCC Chairman Michael Powell (son of Secretary of State Colin Powell), his two fellow Republican Commissioners, and the media conglomerates themselves—and not many others. They argue that the critics are alarmists. The old ownership rules, they say, were created in a media landscape dominated by three major TV networks—before cable and satellite TV, and before the Internet. The communications marketplace has changed—drastically—so the rules that govern the market must also change. In answer, critics point to radio ownership rules that were loosened a few years ago.

The Thing That Ate Radio

The anti-consolidation movement's poster child is the radio titan Clear Channel. Before 1996, a single entity could own only 20 AM and 20 FM radio stations nationally, and the little-known company owned about that many. Once the 1996 Telecommunications Act removed the longstanding national cap and relaxed local ownership rules for radio, Clear Channel went on a feeding frenzy. Today, it owns over 1200 stations. In New York City, the company owns five FM stations. In Los Angeles it owns seven FM and four AM stations. In San Francisco, it owns five FM and two AM stations. In some smaller "markets"—that's how media business folks refer to your community—Clear Channel owns the majority of stations, so that most of what a radio listener hears on a trip across the dial has originated in the company's central office in San Antonio, Texas. And, because of the long-distance programming tactic called "voice tracking," the DJ on your local morning show may actually be in a studio somewhere in Los Angeles, having pre-recorded phony between-songs spots that make careful reference to clubs, people, and even high school sports teams, for "local" radio shows all across the country.

The most infamous Clear Channel horror story takes place in Minot, North Dakota. Late one night in January, 2002, a train derailed in the city, releasing a cloud of highly caustic ammonia. When the local Emergency Broadcast System failed, police tried to contact local radio stations—but no one answered the phone. The town's six Clear Channel stations were run by remote control. The New York Times reported that, as police spent over an hour trying to track down a human being who could access the airwaves, three hundred people were hospitalized from inhalation, a few were blinded, and some pets and livestock were killed. But the effects of media consolidation are not always so dramatic.

David Gans, host of the nationally syndicated "Grateful Dead Hour," has been itching to play protest songs, such as folksinger Dan Bern's "Jail" (about being busted for marijuana possession), Jim Page's "Not In My American Name," and tracks from country badass Steve Earle's post-9-11 disc Jerusalem. "I've been wanting to stick [Earle's] 'America 6.0' on The Grateful Dead Hour, and I'm a little bit afraid to do that because that pokes my head up, and that could get me bounced from some Clear Channel stations," Gans said. "Fear of censorship does affect me right now but I'm sort of loath to say anything about it, because I haven't tested it. I can't say that they're doing it, and that I am going to get in trouble if I do that—I'm just afraid to try."

After the September 11th attacks, Clear Channel was reported to have distributed to its stations a list of songs which listeners might find objectionable—among them, John Lennon's "Give Peace a Chance" and Cat Stevens' "Peace Train." More recently, several Clear Channel stations broke down the barrier between creating and reporting on events by promoting "Rallies for America" in support of the war in Iraq. The practice of both creating and reporting on events is known as "synergy"—a scientific term that refers to two or more systems that work together for a greater effect than they could produce individually. It is increasingly common in entertainment, where a media company sponsors an event, promotes it through its features (rather than through advertising), and reports on what happens there as news...

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RICHARD B. SIMON is a Contributing Editor at Relix magazine. He teaches writing and critical thinking at Chabot College and at Dominican University of California. For information on licensing the rights to use or re-publish this work, please contact the Publication Rights Clearinghouse.