Nearly two years ago, a small band of grassroots radio activists astounded the telecommunications world by convincing a U.S. Federal Court to strike down the Federal Communications Commission's July 2003 decision to significantly relax media ownership limits in the United States. In a controversial series of rulings, the FCC made it easier for companies to create TV "duopolies"—two or more TV stations owned by the same firm in the same market, to own TV stations and newspapers in the same commercial region, and to control TV and radio stations in a similar manner. The Commission also allowed TV networks to reach 45 percent of the national market; the previous limit had been 35 percent.

 

The months leading up to the FCC's ruling had been filled with impassioned public hearings across the United States. Hundreds of thousands of Americans wrote to the FCC to express their fears about "media consolidation." Finally a group of media reformers led by the Prometheus Project, an advocacy group for low power FM stations, sued the Commission.

 

On June 24, 2004, they won. In Prometheus Project vs. FCC, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals decided that the FCC's formulas for measuring the impact of their rules on local diversity all had "the same essential flaw." Namely, "an unjustified assumption that media outlets of the same type make an equal contribution to diversity and competition in local markets." This criticism struck at the heart of FCC's central argument for changing the rules—that the Internet had made previous ownership limits irrelevant.

The court told the FCC to come up with a better diversity formula—or at least a better explanation for their decisions. Now the Commission's new chair, Kevin Martin, says he plans to do just that. On Friday, March 17, Martin told reporters that he hopes to see the FCC's media rules "updated" as soon as possible. In this he has the support of the National Association of Broadcasters, whose president has already filed a request that the Commission once again revise its newspaper/TV station cross ownership and duopoly limits.

But opponents of the changes are also mobilizing to influence the FCC again (see LL-FCC, March 17, 2006). Today we caught up with Pete triDish, Prometheus Project staff member, to get his sense of immediate future on this issue. This is the first of a series of interviews on the media ownership debate.

LL-FCC: Kevin Martin said on Friday that he wants to get back to media ownership questions as soon as possible. When do you see that really getting underway?

Pete triDish: Well, I try not to predict these things. I don't have a Washington, D.C. understanding to be able to predict its actions. I only react to them.

LL-FCC: How does the court victory that you won in 2004 change the media ownership debate? What does the FCC have to do this time thanks to that ruling?

PT: I think that the court ruling really laid out the way that the FCC rushed to judgment in the last round. It was apparent that the FCC Chair at the time, Michael Powell, had decided to make this very fundamental shift in the way that media ownership questions were regulated. And he really tried to rush it through in order to get it done on his watch. And that showed in the final rules that were put forward.

LL-FCC: How did it show?

PT: Well, the cobbling together of the Diversity Index [a gauge to indicate the level of media competition in any area], which at this point I don't think anybody can defend. And so the judge told the FCC to go back and make the rules that they need to make, but they have to have a fully intellectually defensible rationale from those rules. I am hoping that this time the FCC is going to look back at the many comments that were made and make sure that everything gets taken into consideration.

Our own concern in this whole proceeding has always been that the enormous power of the media monopolies. That is what really punched off the large number of citizen comments. People are very worried about a world in which just a few corporations own so much of the media. You can try to dress that up as a bunch of different concerns, but that's what it comes down to when you talk about why people commented in such great numbers and why this created such a firestorm.

LL-FCC: Your Prometheus Project and some other groups recently met with a representative of Deborah Taylor Tate, the newest commissioner to the FCC, and you asked for the FCC to emphasize openness in this procedure, and to put everything in one docket, rather than a series of separate issue dockets. Why the last request?

PT: Something that I always respected Michael Powell for was his intellectual honesty, at least on this point, in saying that this proceeding is not about whether a newspaper can own a TV station in a single market. This proceeding is about the overall confidence of the public that a single or a handful of entities will not control what the vast majority of Americans read and listen to and watch. In an age of consolidated media and corporations, it makes sense that we look at it all as one problem.

Our problem with the first series of studies the FCC did on this issue is that they did not go to the heart of the kind of concerns that we had. There was only one study that looked at whether an owner with a particular business interest might have an effect on content. They did look at cross-owner markets between newspapers and television stations and tried to determine whether they favored one presidential candidate or another. The sample was small and the study was relatively inconclusive. I thought it would have been much more worthwhile to look at a local issue of direct economic importance in a city. And so I think it would be well worth quite a bit more examination of the newspaper/broadcast cross-owned markets that already exist as a result of the various exemptions that have been passed out over the years. It would be good to look at what has happened in those circumstances.

LL-FCC: You praised former FCC Chair Michael Powell for his intellectual honesty. Do you feel that that's still there with Kevin Martin, the new FCC Chair?

PT: Kevin Martin has not really said a whole lot. He voted for the new rules. He hasn't said exactly how he is going to proceed in this. Kevin Martin generally keeps his cards close to his chest about what he's going to do.

It would be unfortunate if he chose to split up the proceeding and make it easier to pass individual pieces one at a time. That is something that we do not think would be the right way to proceed.

LL-FCC: Some years have passed since those heady days when there were all those hearings on media consolidation across the United States. How do you think the arguments are going to be different this time?

PT: I would hope for a change in the way that the FCC perceives this issue. They've already tried once to rush the whole thing through. I hope they would not choose to do it the same way this time. I hope that they would be willing to do a number of hearings and expose the commissioners and the decision makers at the FCC not just to the people they always talk to, who come once a month and knock on their door in Washington because they're paid to do it, but that the commissioners actually go out and get a sense of how Americans think about these issues.

To be honest—and I know it sounds quaint—we're counting on that. If you live in Washington, D.C. and the only people you talk to are cable guys and phone guys, you just get a different sense of the world than if you go out and listen to ordinary people's interests, views, and concerns. I'm glad that Deborah Tate, for one, is coming from a context that's not Washington [Tate comes from Tennessee]. We hope that all the commissioners will turn up and hear how ordinary people think about these sorts of issues. If you want to hear our strategy for winning, that's kind of it.

LL-FCC: But part of your strategy was also taking the FCC's 2003 decision to court. Would you do that again?

PT: It was a big deal for us to take it to court. As you know, we represent low power radio stations. So we have to go in front of the FCC on a daily or a weekly basis to talk about how it is going for these low power stations. So it was a big risk for us to stick our thumb in the middle of the chairman of the FCC's main agenda and to derail it. We did it because we thought that the issues were so important and critical. We think our low power stations are important as counterbalances to concentration in media, but we saw this change as being so big that we felt we had to take that risk.

If we feel that our concerns in this proceeding are not addressed, we certainly would sue again. Despite the risks to our constituents, we think that there are much larger issues at stake in the media ownership proceeding.