An interview with Walter Cronkite and othersby Walter Cronkite; The Active Opposition; June 02, 2003
On June 2, the FCC will undertake the most massive reexamination of media ownership rules in the agency’s history. Their decisions will have profound implications on how Americans get their news and information, and from which sources. In an exclusive interview for WorldLink TV’s The Active Opposition: Your New$ and the Bottom Line, Walter Cronkite, dean of American broadcasting, explored the impact of media consolidation, including why, since the 1996 Telecommunications Act, the number of major U.S. news organizations has shrunk to six.
Hosted by film and television actor and activist Peter Coyote, Your New$ and the Bottom Line also featured a panel of media experts including: Jeff Chester, author and director of the Teledemocracy Project, a D.C. media watchdog group; Michael Parenti, author and media critic; David Honig, Director of the Minority Media and Telecommunications Counsel and Adam Thierer from the CATO institute. The show was part of WorldLink TV’s The Active Opposition series, which features public figures who are actively involved in the national policy debate and is produced by Stephen Olsson in the network’s San Francisco studios. Your News $ TheBottom Line is available via streaming video at www.worldlinktv.org .
WorldLink TV, a nationwide public satellite television network offering a global perspective on world events, issues and cultures. Its programs air on DirectTV channel 375 and Dish Network channel 9410 and are selectively streamed on the Internet. WorldLink TV’s primetime programming consists of documentaries on global and domestic issues, investigative reports on the environment and human rights, as well as current affairs series, foreign feature films and the best of World Music. The network’s daytime hours are often devoted to international news programming, including television news reports from national broadcasters in the Middle East, presented with English translation.
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PETER COYOTE- Good evening and welcome to the Active Opposition, tonight we’re presenting a national story which our corporate media has chosen to largely ignore, the consolidation of media ownership in America and how that affects what news and information we are allowed to receive. This is the information which determines what we know or think we know about the world and is the basis of a functioning democracy. For this reason we encourage our viewers to call in and participate in our discussion tonight. Before we introduce our guest experts and view an interview we conducted this week with network news icon Walter Cronkite, I’d like to give a little more background on tonight’s program: your news and the bottom line.
The 1996 telecommunications act dramatically altered the laws governing our communication industry. It removed the requirement for radio and television broadcasters to present any public interest programming in return for the free exclusive use of the public’s airways. It did away with controls on corporate media ownership, which had prevented one corporation’s owning the newspaper, television, and radio in a given area. Since 1996, six major media conglomerates AOL Time Warner, Viacom, News Corporation, General Electric, Vendi Universal and ATT Comcast have moved quickly to control 90% of the broadcast outlets. Republican Senator John McCain has called this group ‘the most powerful lobby I’ve encountered in Washington’. In the next few weeks, Michael Powell, son of Secretary of State Colin Powell and current chair of republican dominated FCC, is expected to further deregulate the media: To allow a single corporation to own all media outlets in a given community. Critics charge that this new market driven FCC regards citizens as consumers and communities as market places. And this apparently innocent change of terms fundamentally alters the relationship of the people and their media to a relationship between consumers and producers of products, services and ideas. Meanwhile our government is preparing to give away new public frequencies without requiring any public service or accountability. An issue for the American citizen is to what extent the news and information which informs our world view and our choices at the election poles, will be determined solely by the bottom line of accountability to the shareholders of six media conglomerates.
Tonight’s program “Your News and The Bottom Line” will investigate to what degree deregulation of American media might reduce the news to entertainment, and eliminate the historic role of media as watch dog of the public interest. Let’s begin by looking at a recent discussion on these issues I had last week with veteran CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite.
PETER: Once upon a time there was a clear problem there where 3 corporations and 3 networks that controlled 90% of the news. And so deregulation occurred and now there are 5 corporations and 500 channels but these 5 corporations control 90% of the news. Is this diversity as the FCC says it is?
WALTER : No of course not, it’s the reverse of that… it’s a monopoly...in our case being a few of them rather than one, but that’s what we are living with in our news assimilation.
PETER: Who owns the airways?
WALTER: Well allegedly we do, the people. It was decided early on in the 1920s, when radio was first becoming an important factor in our communications picture that we had to control the airways... There were only a certain number of frequencies available at that time, as there are now a certain number of channels available. But with a very few number of frequencies available somebody had to say who got those frequencies. So it was decided, congress organized the Federal Communications Commission to assign those frequencies to ‘those individuals who could promise the greatest service to the community’. The licenses were given to those who would serve the interest of the people in the community. And, indeed the licenses were given so that they could be withdrawn. If enough of the citizens of the community filed a complaint against their conduct and said we want better service in our community they were entitled to get it under the law, after an examination by the Federal Communications Commission. What happened at that time, was that in forming the FCC, the owners of the networks sat at the feet of the congress of the FCC and learned of their responsibility from those who were designing what the responsibility should be. And those gentlemen were all entrepreneurs, two of them… primarily Payley and Sarnof … Payley at CBS, Sarnoff at NBC, and they … they absorbed this lesson of responsibility. It’s only been in the more recent years, when that old ownership passed away, and we came with the new generation, and indeed it was with the … in the Reagan administration that the FCC changed its thrust entirely to the marketplace.
PETER: Is the public better informed today than it was 30 years ago?
WALTER: No I don’t think it is, it has a lot more quote news unquote thrown at it, with all of the cable facilities, but as for getting the information adequate to understanding the issues of the day, I don’t think there’s any improvement there whatsoever. We’re not covering international news nearly like we should we don’t have the bureaus we used to have in the major capitals of the world.
The management of the networks has asked the information to be more interesting, which they mean entertaining a word they wouldn’t dare use in the news rooms. But by being interesting they do your health and mine, your pocket book and mine, this doesn’t belong in the 19 minutes they have left in a half hour evening news program. They’re trying to cover a very complicated nation and a very complex world. Nineteen minutes is not nearly adequate just to get the headlines of the day, let alone to get some background information.
Now they’ve got these magazine programs and what do they do with ‘em? Sex, crime almost anything except the serious items of the moment, that people need some instruction about, some information.
PETER: I’m sure some of your confreres would argue and say, ‘Walter we’re just giving the people what they want. What’s wrong with that?’
WALTER: What’s wrong with that is that’s not the rule of editorial judgment. You don’t give people what they want you give people what they need. And this is how you become an editor, this is why you become an editor, that’s why we have editors, that’s why we have publishers. You give people what you know they need, in the light of keeping them informed as to the actions of their governments.
PETER: I’d like to introduce our guests with us tonight. Beginning in our Washington studio on the left, we have Adam Thierer, director of the telecommunications studies at the Cato Institute. He conducts research on how government regulations are hampering the evolution of the communications networks. He also examines the broader economic and constitutional aspects of telecommunications policy. Welcome Adam.
ADAM: Thank you
PETER: In the red tie, David Honig, is executive director of Minority Media and Telecommunications. This organization represents 51 national minority and religious national organizations before the FCC. And since 1983, Mr. Honig has been engaged in the private practice of communications and civil rights law. He’s participated in over 80 FCC rule-making proceedings. From 1975 to 85, he taught communications policy, research, and law at Howard University. Welcome David.
DAVID: Hello
PETER: Next to him, Jeff Chester executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, which focuses on ensuring that the digital media serve the public interest. Jeff is a former journalist and filmmaker. In the 1980’s he created the national media campaign that prompted the creation of the independent television service. He was executive director of the Center for Media Education, a leading force on issues such as internet privacy, media ownership and children’s TV. I’d like to also mention that we invited tonight a number of corporate CEOs and lobbyists to join us in this discussion and they declined.
Here in San Francisco Michael Parenti who’s published over 250 articles which have appeared in covert action, quarterly, z-magazine, the monthly review, the nation and numerous other publications. He lectures on college campuses and before a wide range of audiences across North America.
As a way of beginning, I’d like to start in Washington with Adam and just go around the circle with the following question. Walter Cronkite’s generational observations are not … unique, former generational peer Robert Dole has called our broadcast channels ‘as much a national resource as our national forest. If someone were to propose giving the national forest to the timber industry there would be a huge outcry. And yet it seems to me astounding that something as valuable as ownership of the broadcast spectrum has never been publicly debated in the congress’. Why? Adam?
ADAM: Well I think that when you look at an analogy like that, the timber industry and ownership of these things, well we have newspapers in this country and they buy newsprint to print their newspapers on, we have broadcast television stations who need spectrum to operate on, they could buy that spectrum. Instead we give it away through a very politicized process, in fact we hand it over to them for zero cost, they don’t pay a thing for it and, consequently they don’t give us the best kind of service that we could hope for. Now we say we have a quote unquote public interest standard and paradigm to govern them to hopefully get the best out of them because we have no marketplace. Well the problem with that is that, as you can imagine, those very powerful broadcast special interests come to dominate the political and regulatory process and they never get kicked out of those licenses, and they always get what they want, and ultimately we get a watered down system of the public interest that is not going to satisfy much of anybody. Why not better go with the marketplace scenario and situation and allow them to buy and sell and trade and use their spectrum as they wish, in a free marketplace the same way newspapers and magazines and other types of print media do. And finally I would say on that point, why is it that we have this distinct standard for broadcast television and radio different then the traditional newspaper and … magazines when it comes to the first amendment. We would never think of imposing the type of regulations we’re talking about for the broadcast sector on newspapers such as the New York Times or Washington post or magazines for that matter.
PETER: David what do you think?
DAVID: The question of who owns the most influential industry in the world should be covered more, and really… it’s a tribute to this channel that it’s beginning to focus on it and I hope other outlets will follow your lead, its very laudable. If the question of who owns it generally isn’t covered then the question what happens for example to minority groups and their opportunities for access is virtually invisible. Almost no one in the public domain realizes why it is that only about 1.3 percent of the asset value in this critical industry is owned by minorities. The reason in a nutshell is much like your metaphor. Imagine if we had huge amounts of land and we were giving it out in parcels of 40 acres to farmers and yet we decided that only segregationist would have a preference and would get this land and then it would be passed down generationally. That’s exactly the way that the broadcast licenses were handed out. There was a decision in 1955 that said that a segregationist had the character under the communications act to be a broadcast licensee. And then of course dozens of universities, for instance, that were segregated were given educational licenses that were used to train people then they said you had to have that training to get other licenses. So that’s why the airwaves often don’t present certain voices, even though its public property as Walter Cronkite has said.
PETER: Ok, Jeff…
JEFF: Well the entire US media system is at stake here. It’s not just broadcasting. It’s about what will the democratic nature of our media system be in the early part of the 21st century, the digital age. And what you have are a handful of giant conglomerates really trying to dominate this new media market across broadcasting and cable and newspapers and with online media. And so while we have an opportunity to have a much more diverse system, a system that would unleash the potential for new programming, for the kind of content we see online from what channels like yours. In fact we won’t have that opportunity because of the special interest lobbying that’s going on, because the public is unaware that they should have a voice in how this media is restructured.
PETER: Michael…
MICHAEL: I think it’s best if you don’t talk about the media as this distinct entity or industry. The major networks, four major networks dominate the media universe. The giant banks in America are major shareholders in those networks. Representatives from major corporations such as Ford, IBM, General Motors, Exxon and such, sit on the boards of directors of these networks. These networks not only own broadcast media as you pointed out, they own cable, they own… radio stations, they own newspapers, magazines and book publishing houses. So the media are not close or friendly to corporate America, they are an integrated part of corporate America, and therefore they have that perspective. And that’s a very real ideological perspective that they have, and dedication. It’s one that is dedicated to keeping out certain ideas and promoting other ideas.
PETER: Adam’s position seems to be predicated on the fact that the airwaves are a commodity just like any other commodity and ought to be a free market in commodities…
MICHAEL: that’s because he wants to privatize the airwaves and sell them, and have the corporations to buy the airwaves.
PETER: the question is, no matter which side of this argument you’re on, why has this never been debated publicly? It’s never been debated in congress since 1934, and that strikes me as astounding.
ADAM: Well of course it has not been debated, because for the most part those who benefited from it the most, are not going to shake up the system at all. The status quo works out very well for the large broadcasters and radio stations and other media organizations that already own the spectrum licenses, again, which they receive as a free handout from the public. So if we were to move to a market place system and consider it a commodity, and by the way you say commodity as if it’s a bad thing… what else would we consider it, if it is not a commodity. I think that we can consider these licenses something that can be freely tradable and yes privatized. The same way, again, newsprint is or paper or anything else that we print other forms of media on. So again, what is the rational for continuing to treat this industry diffrently. Spectrum is no more scarce than any other natural resource in this world. And certainly it is not an interference issue, there’s plenty of reasons why we should allow this market place to work like any other. And at the end of the day if there’s a problem, you know where still going to have anti-trust laws, why do we have different business structure regulations for this industry than cars or oil or anything else.
JEFF: Well anti-trust is an insufficient remedy to deal with the kind of corporate media power that we have allowed to be established here in the United States. We should talk about this upcoming FCC decision because it’s very important. Look historically your absolutely right, Peter, there hasn’t really been a national debate since the late twenties, early thirties, when they debated the establishment of the Federal Communications Commission and the communications act. And the media companies have not covered it, the progressive community, for the most part, up until very recently, over the last twenty years the progressive community has really ignored this as an issue. There’s been very little funding, very little advocacy. I don’t think we should go into that right now. What we really need to do is to ensure that the deregulation that is planned is criticized, that your viewers call their members of congress and senators to oppose what Michael Powell has proposed. And to begin talking about what we do next to combat this consolidation and to ensure that the emerging new medium of broadband which can provide many many more channels for access for a whole variety of voices be established in a way that we can have a different kind of media system in the United States.
PETER: We’re gonna get to the discussion of the June 2 meeting. But I’d like to follow up with Walter, a minute and ask if any of you agree or disagree about his assertion that a responsible editor does not give the public what they want, but gives them what they need. And that need is predicated on the necessity to remain informed. David, do you want to take a shot at this?
DAVID: I think he’s right, and the difficulty with that position and it’s always been an… attention issue between publishers and editors in print, in internet and in any kind of medium. Is that at the end of the day, someone needs to meet a certain profit margin. Right now, those profit margins that are expected in broadcasting at the end of the day by investors are as much as 30-35%, and it becomes more and more difficult to attain that and still be journalist in the traditional sense. It’s possible and some of the broadcasters have argued that they could do that better, if they were able to take advantage of certain synergies, for example firing more people by conduct-do back office functions, by owning more channels in the same market. They may be right, but then the difficulty with that is then there are fewer voices.
JEFF: Look Walter Cronkite, I’m afraid, his historical perspective doesn’t really reflect the reality of the history of broadcasting. I mean Paley and Sarnoff were cross-cutters in their day, and indeed Paley did not back Ed Murrow and the attack on McCarthy. Fred Friendly had to take out their own small add in the New York Times. The only times the networks historically, when there were three networks, really did a good job was when there was political pressure and scandal. For the most part I think traditional US commercial media, large cable, large broadcasting in terms of news and public affairs is pretty much a lost cause. Today, fewer than one percent of all broadcast television stations have any investigator reporting. The focus is really on brand awareness, on promotion, on selling advertising. There’s no commitment on the part of the broadcast networks and really the cable networks for serious investigative reporting and analysis. We’re going to have to look elsewhere for that, which is why we have this opportunity now with broadband and broadband cable to allow others that want to do a serious editorial job to be able to speak effectively.
PETER: We’re just gonna take a call… Herb from Ohio, welcome do you have a question?
HERB: Yes I have a question, I really enjoy your show. The question that I had was that it always seems that it comes down to the people’s wishes verses the corporational wishes and I have this funny feeling the corporations and the FCC, the supreme court, all of them are connected in some kinda way. Could it be… will it ever come to… does the people have more rights than the supreme court?
PETER: Do you want to ask that question to somebody in particular or shall I assign it…
Herb: assign it
PETER: let me ask Michael Parenti
MICHAEL: Well of course they do, the people are the sovereign source of the Supreme Court’s power. The Supreme Court is supposed to be serving the people and the public interest. And this whole idea that the media, serve the public interest because they give them what they want is really open to question. I remember that when Marcos was overthrown in the Phillipines, polls were taken and people were saying why have we never heard about this, he was always treated like a hero, and why don’t we know, and what’s going on with the Phillipines, why is this happening, why don’t we know. So people weren’t being given what they want. Furthermore, supply has a way of creating demand. If you keep giving people shock jocks, and you keep giving them these right wing thugs who abuse guests and outdo each other in being as harsh and as ideological as they can be, as left-fashion as they can be… That becomes what the media is, and who says that we all were demanding more of these O’Reilly characters, and people like this. Who said that? There was no big demand for that. That’s what Rupert Murdock and these people have been feeding the people of the country. Their goal is not to give us what we want but to make us want what they give.
PETER: Well do you think there’s a difference between the public interest and the public curiosity? For instance in the months leading up to 911, the dominant story in every American media outlet was the disappearance of Chandra Levy and the Gary Condit story. How does a story like that serve the public interest?
MICHAEL: Well it may be an important story, women are victimized by men. And women have been killed, disappeared, raped, abused in many ways. I don’t brush that off as a puffery story, but it does get to be overload after a while and there are any number of other issues that also have to be dealt with. People don’t have any demand for them because they don’t know about them. How am I gonna ask about what the FCC is up to when that’s the very issue of today’s program? That hasn’t even been covered, the FCC hearings about totally deregulating the media, that itself has not been covered by the major media. There are alternative media people who have gone to the hearings, who have raised all sorts of questions, that itself hasn’t been covered. So you can take any number of issues that have to do with single pay or health care, people are very concerned about health care, but we don’t get coverage, you don’t get a debate about what are the issues involved there. So don’t blame the public and say that they are indifferent, that they just want puffery, they just want sensational stories like Chandra Levy or OJ Simpson, which are not unimportant stories, particularly. But, right, when the media gives 80% of their attention to those things they can do that because they are so busy evading all sorts of other public issues, the news media are.
PETER: Let’s say that the news media are free to pursue their penchant for profit. And they serve to pursue profit over the public interest. That doesn’t mean that the public interest goes away, and let’s not say that profit is bad. But since they’re using valuable public resource, why shouldn’t those profits and why shouldn’t those industries be taxed to set up a non-profit television network that would serve the people’s interest that doesn’t go away. In other words instead of judging the major medium saying your doing profit, just say there’s a job that needs to be done and it’s not being done by profit-oriented media, we need to take some rent from our airwaves and apply it to these….
ADAM: Understood.
PETER: Ok…
ADAM: Couple answers. First of all somebody here needs to explain to me what we mean by the public interest, and how we satisfy that. So much of what we hear that goes on in the debates about media ownership and the media in general, smacks of a sort of cultural elitism. If somebody can define exactly what the public interest is. Who’s going to do that? Well it’s going to be the FCC, it’s going to be a set of regulatory officials who probably are going to end up working very closely with the industries they regulate. Second of all, when we talk about these companies making profits and then maybe not serving the quote unquote public interest, whatever that is, and when the need for non-profit outlets we have non-profit outlets right now and of course we have a lot of other forms of competition out there. I don’t know if anybody has turned on their television lately and seen the shear diversity of the things we have to chose from, but I frankly don’t understand why so many people are bemoaning the current state of affairs when we live in a world of information overload. And the shear cornucopia of choices available to us from cable, satellite, even old broadcast television, old radio and newspapers and now the internet. I mean what is the problem here exactly that we are trying to face? I just don’t understand.
PETER: I want to ask Jeff Chester a question. Is it actually the FCC that’s the appropriate body to establish the public interest or is this not the job of the congress. And haven’t many of these media conglomerates worked very hard to keep these issues out of congress and out of public debate?
JEFF: Yes, I mean the media companies are constantly lobbying, in many ways they control both parties, both the democrats and the republicans, so there’s a tremendous timidity. Let’s remember that the 96 act was blessed by Clinton and Gore. In some ways there’s not much difference between the democrats and republicans as they deal with the media. The FCC has always been a captured agency unfortunately under the domination of the media industries historically. And then again there’s this revolving door… that goes on, but just to respond, I mean there’s a lot to cover…but you know now you have now five companies, you have everybody in Hollywood the writers gild, Barry Diller, Ted Turner, everybody now knows that five companies control eighty to ninety percent of the channels. That independent producers, people with hundreds of millions of dollars cannot even get a show on the air anymore. And now these very same five companies, plus Comcast and Tribune, they wanna go and end the remaining checks and balances over corporate media power, so that those same companies can not only control broadcast and cable national distribution but also buy newspapers own several television stations in the market, merge with cable and have preferential broadband access. That dramatically is a threat to our democracy, reduces the diversity of voices and it’s truly dangerous…
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