Monday, June 28, 2004
A scholar says the government has given enormous power to conglomerates.
By FRAZIER MOORE
ASSOCIATED PRESS
NEW YORK -- Anxious Americans can rest a little easier.
In this age of potty-mouthed talk radio and Super Bowl breast-baring, the U.S. Senate rose to the occasion last week with a measure aimed at punishing media miscreants with stiffer-than-ever fines.
If that proposal becomes law, it will surely guarantee us safety from the Howard Sterns and Janet Jacksons of the world.
Who isn't feeling better already?
But maybe the cure isn't wrapping a "Sanitized for Your Protection" strip around the toilet bowl many people think the media have become. Maybe this crackdown on media indecency is just an artful dodge to distract the public from the underlying cause: government-assisted media consolidation.
"It's not like Janet Jackson's nipple is the only problem with our media system," says media scholar and activist Robert W. McChesney. "It's not like if Howard Stern had never been born, our media system would be great.
"They are both emblematic of problems that go far beyond that."
McChesney, a professor at the University of Illinois, has recently published a book that shines needed light on how the media really operate.
Correcting misconceptions
Though it might not be your first choice to carry to the beach, "The Problem of the Media: U.S. Communication Politics in the 21st Century" is highly readable and jammed with "aha" moments. Bolstered by scholarship, it's a treasury of common-sense insights that puncture common assumptions.
For instance: The enduring notion that the media are liberal.
Why should (and how could) the media be liberal, McChesney counters, when even the largest media outlets are only small pieces of ever-expanding conglomerates committed, above all, to stockholders' approval and the bottom line? As with any for-profit enterprise, the bigger Big Media grows, the more conservative it tends to be.
Another misconception: That media deregulation would restore the media ecology to its natural state of equilibrium.
More often than not, McChesney argues, so-called deregulation amounts to "government regulation that advances the interests of the dominant corporate players," and hands these corporations even more cause to use the public airwaves in ways the public finds objectionable.
Least expensive option
"The companies considered the main purveyors of crude and vulgar fare are Fox [owned by News Corp.], Viacom's MTV and VH1 [which also owns CBS], and Clear Channel [which owns more than 1,200 radio stations]," says McChesney. "These are huge empires. And what they've discovered is that, once they get all this market power and they don't have as much direct competition, the least expensive way to generate an audience is through vulgar fare.
"That's the rational outcome. Then, after letting those companies have all that concentrated market power, the government slaps them on the wrist for doing what comes naturally.
"The real solution," says McChesney, "is not to set up a system that makes it rational to do a show like 'Jackass."'
The agency in charge of regulating over-the-airwaves media is the Federal Communications Commission. But under Chairman Michael Powell, deregulation has been its main goal.
A tipping point occurred last June when, by a 3-2 vote that discounted widespread public opposition, the FCC opted to relax existing limits on how much of the U.S. audience a single company can reach with its TV stations, and how many broadcast outlets one company may own in any market.
The Powell-led campaign to ram through the new provisions rankled a citizenry that until then barely knew of the FCC's existence.
Latest actions
On Thursday, a federal appeals court largely reversed the FCC's deregulation package, and also left in place an order that had blocked the FCC from putting the rules into effect.
This came two days after the Senate, apart from wrist-slapping the media for naughty behavior, approved a separate measure to repeal those FCC rules and reinstate the original restrictions.