COMMENT
The Silence of the Lambs
WHO
SPEAKS FOR JOURNALISM BEFORE THE FCC?
© Marcellus Hall
In
October, when New Times Inc. and Village Voice Media agreed to
a journalistic double homicide — killing off alternative
papers in L.A. and Cleveland to give each other monopolies in
those cities — the U.S. press hardly raised an eyebrow. It
took the Justice Department to sound the alarm. Justice has mounted
what looks like a serious antitrust investigation. When editorial
voices are snuffed out, a staff member for one of those papers
told the Los Angeles Times, “it’s not good for the democratic
process. Nobody can argue that the problem with American journalism
is that it has too many voices.”
We agree. Now, will someone please deliver that message to the
Federal Communications Commission? And is it too much to ask the
press to be the messenger?
The FCC is not involved in anything so simple and unsophisticated
as bumping off a couple of weeklies. It is laying the groundwork
for startling changes in the rules of media ownership that will
encourage media monopoly and thus filter more and more American
journalism through a smaller and smaller number of media corporations.
Since a corporation’s culture shapes the quality and range
of its journalism, the danger in reducing ownership to a few leviathans
seems clear.
Media concentration is hardly new, but if these changes go through,
it will accelerate dramatically. Companies will buy and trade
to gain commercial dominance in major markets. Citizens could
suddenly find that their local newspaper and TV stations, along
with their dominant local Web sites, all have the same owner.
That owner could also control more than one national TV network,
including broadcast news operations, as well as most of what goes
through the cable wire. What might appear to be multiple sources
of information could all flow through the same corporate culture,
subject to its limits in terms of journalistic vision and citizenship.
Under antiregulator Michael Powell, the FCC is considering relaxing
several rules. They include cross-ownership bans on newspapers
and TV stations in the same market, for example, and on broadcast
and cable TV in the same market, as well as caps on the percentage
of households a TV network can reach. Powell ordered up a series
of studies with the stated purpose of weighing the relevancy of
current ownership rules in a world that includes new sources of
news and information — cable and the Web. He portrays the
studies as an effort to understand the new environment.
His critics see them as a setup, since, in the words of Broadcasting
& Cable magazine, they paint “a generally rosy picture
of broadcast consolidation in the past six years — a strong
hint that more deregulation is on the way.” The public comment
period culminates with a public hearing in February.
The media companies have an agenda: the fewer commercial shackles
the better. But the journalists who work for those companies ought
to look beyond the commercial perspective. Where are the journalistic
organizations and leaders who could illuminate these issues? In
a discussion that will affect everything journalists care about,
where is the voice of the journalists?
COMMENT
Homeland
Insecurity
EXCESSIVE
SECRECY PROTECTS NO ONE
Most
of the editorial guardians of the Freedom of Information Act were
napping when Congress approved the Homeland Security Act in November.
The result: shining a light on government activities that critically
affect the public’s health and safety just got harder. The
House version — unwisely accepted by the Senate — creates
a new reason to deny FOIA requests about information given voluntarily
to the new department. The measure also establishes criminal penalties
for whistleblowers who might be tempted to leak information.
Editors believed, mistakenly as it turned out, that a milder Senate
version would win out. “We may have gotten lulled to sleep,”
says Bill Felber, executive editor of the Manhattan Mercury, in
Manhattan, Kansas, and chairman of the Associated Press Managing
Editors’ FOI committee. With most of the nation’s infrastructure
in private hands — from pipelines to telephone systems to
nuclear power plants — companies have been averse to disclosing
problems or vulnerabilities. FOI advocates were willing to broaden
the definition of exempted material. But the new measure defines
information so broadly that almost anything a company tells the
new department about its vulnerabilities — from criminal
to just plain embarrassing — can be hidden from the press
and the public. Vermont’s Senator Patrick J. Leahy, a sponsor
of the Senate version, calls the new disclosure rules “the
most severe weakening” of FOIA in its thirty-six-year history.
The former Senate majority leader designate, Trent Lott, promised
he would allow reconsideration of several special-interest provisions
that were tacked onto the Homeland Security Act. That promise
should be kept under the new leadership. And the FOIA changes
should also be revisited. The public will be more secure if its
watchdog — the press — is able to do its job.
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