Consolidated Coverage

The big danger in Monday's FCC ruling is supposed to be that it will reduce the variety of opinions, views and commentary represented in the media, and I'm beginning to think that must be true: Since Monday, all the commentary I've heard about the FCC ruling says the same thing: The move will reduce the variety and opinions represented in the media.

The Reason staff sees things differently. Chuck Freund in the most recent Reason Daily takes a trip down memory lane to a pre-deregulation era when local markets really were cornered by single media companies. Last week, Jesse Walker spelled out some of the flaws in the FCC's decision-making process. Jesse and Jeff Taylor tracked the news of the FCC announcement earlier this week. On Monday I had the privilege of appearing on "Air Talk" with Larry Mantle, to debate Corporateering author Jamie Court, and we spent much of the discussion covering media consolidation; you can hear us puff and wheeze in Real Audio. In an essay for the Los Angeles Times this weekend, Nick Gillespie analyzes how deregulation consistently expands consumer choices.

Who's right: Reason or the Chicken Littles? We'll have to see how the deregulation (or is it "deregulation"?) pans out. That is, if it gets the chance to pan out.

Comments

[Jim N]

erf, this is, you will notice, an opinion magazine.

[Bryan R. Sanders]

Leaving aside the specific policy changes implemented by the FCC in this round, the real problem is the method by which these decisions are being made. In the discussions I’ve had with people on this matter (l and non-l alike) have been focused on the absurdity of a 5 member political board making this decision at all.

[Ron C]

I remember when everyone was moaning about the rise of chain bookstores. “Serious literature” was going to go the way of the dodo. Fact is, the chain stores sell more midlist titles than the independents did pre-Borders. The reason? People want to buy them, so they get shelf space, I would guess.

All of this to say, I don’t think the sky is falling on mass media after Monday’s changes, but what do you expect from the political process of FCC rule-making? James’ comment above gets at the real problem, IMHO.

[Phil]

But the answer to consolidation isn’t to pass rules or laws against it; rather, it is to open the floodgates of competition and let truly valuable or entertaining program content sweep away the corporate offal. The corporate broadcasters are here to stay, of course . . . [they] can co-exist with small, independent broadcasters, provided the FCC doesn’t artifically restrict the ranks of the latter.

All of this is true, but it ignores away the problems which would result, and which caused broadcasters to ask the government to get into the spectrum-dividing business in the first place: If you’ve got a bunch of local broadcasters stepping all over each other’s signals, you’ve got no way to determine what programming there is, let alone what’s good and what’s bad.

There’s still room for an agency, government or otherwise, to apportion spectrum. Otherwise, what you have is chaos on the airwaves. It is ridiculous that the FCC won’t license LPFM or LPTV stations, and protect commercial broadcasters’ signals at the fringes of listenability, though. There’s no reason why some 50KW giant’s secondary or tertiary contour in some 200 sq. ft. parcel should be protected at the expense of local broadcasting.

[Douglas Fletcher]

Croesus — wasn’t that a name from a Star Trek episode?

[Anonymous]

‘Who’s right: Reason or the Chicken Littles? We’ll have to see how the deregulation (or is it “REregulation”?) pans out.’

Definitely RE-regulation.

[Croesus]

Douglas,

Holy crap, it just might be!

[Anonymous]

That’s okay, I’m sure this is exactly what the founding fathers would have wanted, so We The People can bow down and submit to the FCC.

[James Merritt]

“If you’ve got a bunch of local broadcasters stepping all over each other’s signals, you’ve got no way to determine what programming there is, let alone what’s good and what’s bad.

There’s still room for an agency, government or otherwise, to apportion spectrum. Otherwise, what you have is chaos on the airwaves.” -Phil

We no longer need the FCC or any agency like it to keep order on the airwaves, if we ever did. The Communications Act of 1934 was based on the notion of radio spectrum as scarce commons. Not only has technology improved to the point where available, usable spectrum space is orders of magnitude larger than it was in the 1930s, but utilization of that spectrum is much more precise and clean. So, even the old, clunky, interference prone transmitters have more room to breathe without infringing on their next-door neighbors in the band, and the newer transmitters can be squeezed even more tightly together, if need be, to let all who want a broadcast soapbox to have one.

We could hardly do worse than the present situation, were we simply to treat spectrum space like real-estate: the first concern to come along and actually DEVELOP an area of spectrum (not just claim it) establishes rights there, and can take the parties responsible for an interfering signal to court as trespassers. No need for an FCC to come up with an elaborate allocation and licensing scheme, and perhaps not even a need for government courts to be involved.

They say about real estate, “they aren’t making any more.” The spectrum-land analogy thus breaks down when you take into account the fact that technology opens up new spectrum space, or allows more transmitters to use existing space without mutual interference, all the time. If the usable spectrum can, by virtue of natural business attrition and technological advancement, be much more vast than necessary to accommodate all who would broadcast in it, then the regulatory mechanism can be a lot looser and friendlier than has ever been the case with the FCC.

[Franklin Harris]

The Founding Fatheres would not have tolerated an FCC at all and likely would have scoffed at the notion of “publicly owned” airwaves (just as they would have scoffed at publicly owned newspapers). Your point is?

[Anonymous]

clearchannel blows, most people can’t afford XMS and internet radio is dead in the water. media consolidation can only help if in the flurry of M&A deals the whole edifice collapses from it’s overall rotten-to-the-core suckiness. then hopefully, unshackled from bureaucracy, programmers and producers can rise up from the ashes to better serve us (not the FCC, not the advertisers and not the labels).

[erf]

“Reason or the chicken littles” – How Fox News of you.

[Croesus]

Franklin Harris,

I seriously doubt whether anyone knows what the “founding fathers” would have desired. Case in point, both Jefferson and Madison (one the author of the Declaration of Independence and the other the “father” of the Constitution since he was the architect of the “Virginia Plan”) argued for qoutas and price controls of copyrighted works when the first Copyright Act (1790) was being debated. In other words, instead of assuming that the “founders” would not have desired this agency based on some bizarre notions that they were all or even mostly proto-libertarians, do a bit of research on these figures – you’ll find that many of them were not small-government types, and that those that claimed to be generally did not live up to their word.

[JDM]

Croesus,

I’m glad you made that point. Jefferson also realized he was violating the constitution when he made the Louisiana purchase, but thought that it was too good to pass up. The founding fathers were not idealogues. Otherwise, they would never have moved past writing pamphlets to save the world from itself.

[James Merritt]

The problems inherent in the latest ownership scheme are similar to the problems of California’s energy industry under faux-deregulation. To wit: the government uses its regulatory power to restrict the supply, while eliminating or fiddling with its regulation of certain downstream activities.

Why would we care much about consolidation of media ownership if anyone could start a professional-looking newspaper for a couple of hundred dollars and keep it running on a shoestring budget? But with today’s tech, it is possible for a few hundred dollars to buy you a technically acceptable radio signal that covers your town or county region. Or an internet radio- or streaming-video website. A few thousand would buy you the guts of a halfway decent low-power television station.

It isn’t technical difficulty or expense that restricts the number of TV and radio stations. It is the FCC, “regulating” the supply of stations via the high hurdles of its licensing processes, and viciously punishing the “pirates” who don’t bother with those processes. As long as new players can’t enter the game to compete with the consolidated, corporate media empires, we SHOULD be worried about consolidation. But the answer to consolidation isn’t to pass rules or laws against it; rather, it is to open the floodgates of competition and let truly valuable or entertaining program content sweep away the corporate offal. The corporate broadcasters are here to stay, of course. But just as McDonalds and Burger King co-exist with thousands of independent eateries across the nation, the corporate broadcasters can co-exist with small, independent broadcasters, provided the FCC doesn’t artifically restrict the ranks of the latter.

[Croesus]

JDM,

I just get sick of the hagiography that gets passed off as history when it comes to the “founders” (the term itself sounds like something from a bad sci-fi movie to be honest).