Random Thoughts

May 28, 2003

A monkey too big for its britches

King Kong is a pretty big monkey. He eats people alive and doesn‘t give a fig about anyone but himself and his pyramid of bananas. Do you think it‘s a good idea for him to get even bigger?
That‘s a question the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is considering this week as it mulls over whether it will allow gigantic media companies to control even more of what we hear, see and read.
To continue the monkey metaphor, many people fear that placing too much broadcasting power in the hands of corporations like Clear Channel will threaten us with a “hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil“ media which will make a mess of our democracy. A media dictatorship could turn every radio and television network in America into a version of FOX “fair and balanced“ News, for instance, broadcasting a single political party‘s viewpoint night and day, much in the manner of the state-owned media of the old Soviet Union.
Through the years, King-Kong sized companies such as Viacom, Murdoch‘s News Corp., AOL Time Warner and the Tribune Co. have pressured the FCC to allow them to have more cross-ownership of newspapers, television and radio stations.
On June 2, the FCC will decide whether to relax its rules on media ownership. Although 18,000 U.S. citizens have responded 10-1 against allowing the King Kongs of the media to get even bigger, one can only imagine that the power behind this issue is in the hands of those with deep corporate pockets.
And those folks are the ones who‘ve orchestrated a virtual media blackout on the FCC decision. According to a May 22 Salon.com article by Eric Boehlert, “72 percent of Americans had heard ‘nothing at all‘ about the possible changes in media ownership rules.“
Why? Partly because “the two television news operations most reluctant to cover the FCC debate -- CBS and Fox -- are owned by the two media conglomerates with the most to gain from a lenient FCC ruling: Viacom and the News Corp.“
Are your eyelids getting heavy with this stuff? Well, perhaps higher cable and internet fees will provide a wakeup call (after the monkey is out of the cage and it‘s too late to stop his shenanighans, that is). Our when you discover that two or three King Kongs control the whole shooting match -- cable, web services, newspapers, TV and radio -- and your rights and freedoms are as expendable as bananas in the chimp house as corporate powers decide what makes the news and what gets trashed.
The fear is that good reporting -- vital to the give-and-take of maintaining a free society -- may be replaced by corporate public relations masquerading as the news on issues of public importance.
Take the current debate over financial caps in medical malpractice lawsuits, for instance. On one side, you have the insurance industry playing the sad violin, claiming there should be reasonable (ie: paltrey) caps on malpractice settlements. On the other hand, public interest groups argue that a cap of, say, $100,000, is small compensation for having one‘s teeth mistakenly pulled (this actually happened to a five-year-old girl). Citizens might argue that they deserve their day in a court of their peers to decide what‘s right and fair. This is what democracy is -- hashing things out in the press until the public arrives at a balanced decision. Yet, under a media completely controlled by corporations which also own major insurance companies, you might not hear much -- or anything at all -- of a fellow citizen‘s perspective involving your rights. Instead, you‘d hear the blare of the insurance industry masquerading as “news.“
There‘s plenty of proof that this sort of thing is already happening with the example of Clear Channel Entertainment, Inc. which owns 1,225 radio and 39 television stations in the U.S. as well as billboard companies and entertainment operations in 65 nations. Over the past few years, musicians across the country have bemoaned the fact that no one gets airplay on Clear Channel‘s stations unless they have the corporate polish proscribed by such sickening shows as “American Idol.“ Tom Petty‘s hit song, “The Last DJ“ demonstrates that many musicians feel that Clear Channel is strangling creativity and expression on the public airways.
Clear Channel also now controls the booking rights at nightclubs and theaters across the country. Conceivably, if the corporate suits didn‘t like the uppity views of a new Kurt Cobain or an Ani DeFranco, they could prevent the artist from even appearing before the public, much less being played on the public airwaves.
The point about the public airwaves is very important in this debate because we, the American people, own the rights to those airwaves, and corporations are using our own resource to block free expression. Obviously, a business has a right to have control over its product, but the National Broadcasting Association and the likes of NPR have also taken it upon themselves to block the creation of low-power radio and internet radio, which would make it possible for citizens to get more music and opinions on the air. This kind of control, extended to TV and newspapers, is not a good thing for democracy.
Tom Petty got played on Clear Channel because his peevish song is hardly a threat to the company, but the Dixie Chicks have felt corporate radio‘s wrath by being blackballed. And Clear Channel has also been criticized for taking a rah-rah approach to the war in Iraq. Yet, the role of the media isn‘t to be a cheerleader for the government -- the Founding Fathers established the First Amendment to guarantee a watchdog press; they never intended the media to be screwing the public and stifling free expression in a menage a trois conducted in the same bed as the corporate powers and their pawns in Washington.
Could a Bob Dylan, circa 1963, or The Clash of 1980 get their politically-active music heard on Clear Channel today? It seems doubtful. Will the alternative viewpoints of Sean Penn, Michael Moore or Susan Sarandon be presented on television prior to the next war once all of the media is controlled by companies such as General Electric, which also produces weapons of war?
We need to stop this big monkey monopoly before it‘s too big for its britches. As a reader advises in our Letters section this week, you can still make your voice heard (faintly, very faintly) by contacting the FCC at: www.fcc.gov/contacts or call them toll-free at: 1-888-225-5322.