Ted Turner on Media Consolidation
Just finished a supurb article written by Ted Turner on the subject of media consolidation. In a response to the previous entry, one of my readers asks why I am boycotting ClearChannel. Mr. Turner's article express my sentiments better than I could myself. The boycott is about more than ClearChannel, it's really a statement against media consolidation.
It is so very rare that I come across a written viewpoint that actually expresses my own in a way that is clearer, more well-researched, more eloquent, and more accessible than I could write myself. This is one of those articles, and I want to encourage my readership to read the article in its entirety, even though it's long. The article is the most complete dissertation on the perils of media consolidation that I have ever seen. This issue goes to the core of democracy itself, and affects every person in the world. It's something that I've been trying to figure out how to express for a while, and it's just so refreshing to see that someone else already did it.
Some key excerpts:
Big media today wants to own the faucet, pipeline, water, and the reservoir. The rain clouds come next.
The loss of independent operators hurts both the media business and its citizen-customers. When the ownership of these firms passes to people under pressure to show quick financial results in order to justify the purchase, the corporate emphasis instantly shifts from taking risks to taking profits. When that happens, quality suffers, localism suffers, and democracy itself suffers.
When media companies dominate their markets, it undercuts our democracy. Justice Hugo Black, in a landmark media-ownership case in 1945, wrote: "The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public."
Naturally, corporations say they would never suppress speech. But it's not their intentions that matter; it's their capabilities. Consolidation gives them more power to tilt the news and cut important ideas out of the public debate. And it's precisely that power that the rules should prevent...This is a fight about freedom--the freedom of independent entrepreneurs to start and run a media business, and the freedom of citizens to get news, information, and entertainment from a wide variety of sources, at least some of which are truly independent and not run by people facing the pressure of quarterly earnings reports. No one should underestimate the danger. Big media companies want to eliminate all ownership limits. With the removal of these limits, immense media power will pass into the hands of a very few corporations and individuals.
(This entry was originally posted without a PGP signature because I did not have my key on me. It has been subsequently modified to add the signature, but the content above this paragraph is unchanged from the original post.)
Comments
I think Bobby made a good point in his comment on your last post. And I don't see anything that addresses it here. You and Mr. Turner talk a lot about corporate monopoly power and the need to have the government change the rules to fight it, but that totally ignores the real monopoly. The government, in the form of the FCC, owns almost every Hertz of frequency over every square meter of the country. The media giants don't own their broadcast spectrum; the government leases it to them and has completely arbitrary power to punish them on a political whim, from either party.
The stultifying studio regime of the 60s and early 70s was a direct result of the FCC regulators approaching the networks and letting it be known that they might be forced to intervene if something objectionable was aired. Before that sponsors put together their own shows and the networks pretty much broadcast whatever they were paid to broadcast. But when the FCC leaned on them, everything became much more consolidated to limit the risk. That is exactly what's happening today. Bobby's right, if the FCC wants to, they could slap millions of dollars of fines on a company at will. In that environment only large firms can bear the risk, and they will not engage in anything controversial.
As long as the government owns all the airwaves, there is going to be a real monopoly however many companies exist in any given market. And broadcast media will be at least as stultifying and banal as the government wants it to be.
Posted by: Matthew Hammer | July 27, 2004 2:44 AM