mediacrit.com

It’s hard for a regular citizen to keep tabs on the Federal Communications Commission. The FCC is located in a relatively nondescript government building two blocks south of the National Mall in Washington—a short walk from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, but not a regular stop on summer vacation tours of the nation’s capital.

The FCC deals in the kind of regulations that are so interminably complicated they can put a reader to sleep in a matter of minutes (I recommend anything having to do with electronic spectrum testing).

But, these regulations—covering a wide range of activities including the cell phone industry, the introduction of high definition television broadcasts, enforcement of broadcast indecency standards—do affect our daily lives.

Right now is one of those times to pay attention.

In June, the FCC announced that it would be again reviewing media ownership rules that govern things like how many TV and radio stations a company can own, and the present cross-ownership ban between newspapers and broadcasters.

The last time the FCC tried to change media ownership rules back in 2003, they tried to do it on the sly, and ultimately raised the ire of the public, Congress, and the courts. Back then, Michael Powell (Colin Powell’s son) was the chair of the FCC, and he treated rule changes as an opportunity to reward political friends at big media conglomerates like Viacom (then owner of CBS and UPN) and the News Corporation (owner of the Fox network).

Powell’s idea was to quietly propose deregulation suggested by big media corporations, hold few public hearings, and then force them through with his majority on the divided commission.

Dissenting FCC commissioners Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein charged the proposed rules undermined media localism, competition, and diversity, and the two ended up holding several public hearings around the country while Powell and the rest of the FCC board stayed in Washington. When people finally understood what relaxing ownership rules would mean, a record three million citizens contacted to complain to the FCC. The Senate—realizing that people cared about the ownership of their media—ended up voting twice to overturn the rules, and a majority of House members would have done so, too (had the now-deposed Tom DeLay let the issue to come up for a vote). Federal courts ultimately ruled against the FCC’s stealth rule changes, and sent it back to the FCC to re-do.

Now, we need to make sure Powell’s successor, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin (no relation to me) won’t try to pull another fast one on the American public. To learn more, see www.fcc.gov, or check StopBigMedia.com, the nonpartisan coalition that has a direct link to send comments to the FCC.

Changes at KWWL

You may have already read that KWWL’s corporate parent Raycom recently sold Channel 7 to Quincy Newspapers, Inc., a family-owned business based in Illinois. QNI’s other properties include KTIV (NBC affiliate in Sioux City, Iowa), KTTC (NBC affiliate in Rochester, Minnesota/Mason City, Iowa), and WGEM-TV (NBC affiliate in Quincy and Keokuk /Ft. Madison/Burlington, Iowa). Let’s hope this locally based, private owner does a better job than Alabama-based Raycom, which fired several popular long-time KWWL staffers in recent years to cut costs.

Raycom exits KWWL just after surviving a challenge to renewing its license for another seven years. On June 23, the FCC dismissed a challenge by Richard C. Young of Waterloo to KWWL’s license renewal application. Young had objected to two KWWL editorials that he claimed were motivated by the station’s financial interest. One editorial on September 30, 2005 advocated maintaining the current 2009 deadline for the complete switch from analog to digital broadcasts. Young argued that the station had a financial interest in not extending the deadline, since it would have been more expensive for the station to maintain both types of broadcasts.

A November 7, 2005 editorial advocated the rejection of the Waterloo ballot issue to authorize the formation of a municipal telecommunications commission. Young argued that KWWL had a financial relationship with the existing cable provider, and moreover, aired the editorial the night before Election Day, thus preempting any chance of a rebuttal.

The FCC decided that KWWL’s interests weren’t necessarily against the public interest, and that because the Fairness Doctrine (which required stations to air opposing viewpoints) was eliminated in the FCC deregulation of the late 1980s, KWWL “was under no obligation to provide time for a rebuttal of the ballot measure editorial.”