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WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2007 |
COMMENTARY | 41 |
| Nurture, don't squelch, independent media voices |
DEBORAH DOUGLAS ddouglas@suntimes.com T he guys who run our media, they're one bland bunch. If you look at the big six media com- panies, they're all headed by males. All but one is white. They are rich, too. Because of their power over our airwaves, these same guys are the nation's conversation starters. How engaging can that dialogue be when such a homogenous group decides what we get to talk about? If more top executives were women, minorities and regular Joes, the national dialogue would be so much richer. We shouldn't stop there: Let's require those executives The FCC may give these guys more power to monopolize the conversation. to ask us what we want to watch and make them follow through. Let's de- mand more substantive, program- ming to offset an empty TV diet of Paris Hilton. Instead the Federal Communica- |
tions Commission may give these guys more power to monopolize the conversation if it decides to further deregulate media ownership. The guys with fat wallets and stuffed shirts could buy up more local me- dia, even allowing newspapers to easily merge with TV stations in the same market. That would thrust the country into a big, fat, one-way con- fab dictated from headquarters. Lo- cal issues that bubble forth with au- thenticity in search of solutions could be muzzled. Do you really want to live in a place dominated by stuffy Tribune types? "If we go in the wrong direction and allow more consolidation, I'm afraid we're going to invoke more se- rious damage on our media environment than we have right now," said FCC commissioner Michael Copps before a public hear- ing at the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition Thursday. "We're going to get more |
of that kind of nationalized, homo- genized entertainment. I think we endanger our civic dialogue." This has happened before. When the Telecommunications Act of 1996 passed, the public was promised more choice because of the in- creased competition from deregula- tion. What we got was less locally owned media, as evidenced by the rise of behemoth Clear Channel Communications, and fewer local broadcast jobs. Homogenized playlists dominate radio, choking the ability of inde- pendent artists to get radio play, or for audiences to hear something new and interesting. Our cable bills did not go down. Anybody who's watched TV in the past five minutes will know prime time hardly looks like America. Save for a few TV ghettos, strokes of cable brilliance and ensemble casts, TV doesn't reflect the diversity of real life. It certainly doesn't mirror the |
ethnic, racial and socioeconomic mix that is Chicago. Sure, the Internet has incubated new voices, and interesting new mu- sic can be found. Those voices could be controlled, too. "Guess who's buying all the major [Internet] outlets?" said Chicago music promoter Carl West. "Guess who bought MySpace? Big media. Guess who bought YouTube? Those companies who bought them are trying to figure out how to monopo- lize them. The same thing happened with downloading." Diverse viewpoints is a public safety issue, said rapper KRS-One: "What difference does it make if you own a station, black, white, whatever, if your heart isn't in the right place? Our culture is being criminalized by radio stations. Police officers listen to the radio as well, and if they keep hearing 'Yo, I'm a criminal, I'm a pimp, I'm a this,' when I walk down the street, they're going to immedi- |
ately think that's me. I beg the FCC to help us." The FCC won't decide what to do until they complete a series of pub- lic meetings like the one at PUSH. From little old white ladies and teen girls to struggling broadcasters, the consensus was clear: Don't let a handful of rich guys monopolize the airwaves. Restore localism. Inject a moral imperative to reflect public passions and concerns where the profit motive now prevails. The FCC is not bereft of ideas for boosting the ranks of media owner- ship. It could, for example, help re- institute a program that gives tax savings to owners of broadcast li- censes who sell their companies to minority owners. I'm not saying these six guys shouldn't keep their day jobs. But the FCC should give a more diverse, new group of people an opportunity to start conversations. Tuning into ownership is a good place to start. |
Listen to the Public Hearing of 9/20 -> HERE <-