CONSUMERS, OTHERS ALREADY PLANNING FOR AFTER JUNE 2 MEDIA VOTE
Holding out little hope that the Republican majority of the FCC will have a sudden conversion on June 2, activists in favor of retaining limits on media ownership are formulating new strategies on how to challenge the FCC’s expected vote. Meanwhile, Commission sources said those activists probably were accurate in their assumptions that the Commission would adopt the proposals sent to the 8th floor in their original form. “All the cuts that [FCC Chmn.] Powell wanted are sticking,” one source said. Our sources say the Commission is likely to push the national ownership cap to 45% from 35%, that duopoly rules will be loosened considerably, that the newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership ban will be eliminated in most markets and that the TV/radio cross-ownership rule will be similarly loosened.
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Consumer groups and media activists we spoke with said they were planning challenges on at least 4 fronts: A petition for reconsideration before the FCC, on the campaign circuit with Presidential candidates and others, in Congress, and in the courts. Call it Phase 2 or the post-June 2 era, they said. “The movement for media reform starts on June 2. It doesn’t end there,” said Consumer Federation of America (CFA) Research Dir. Mark Cooper. He and Center for Digital Democracy Exec. Dir. Jeffrey Chester said they saw a new movement forming as an outgrowth of media deregulation, one that already was bringing together disparate political groups, from conservative children’s advocates, religious groups and the National Rifle Assn. to liberal civil rights groups, labor and free press organizations.
Media Access Project (MAP) Pres. Andrew Schwartzman said the first step from his organization probably would be a petition for FCC reconsideration, although he said he was waiting to see what actually was in the order before drawing up any filings to the Commission. He said he expected the large media groups, seeing they had little to lose, would try to go for broke before the courts, challenging the efficacy of any limits the FCC placed on them. “I'm sure we're going to be in court defending whatever the Commission retains,” he said, but MAP isn’t “going to be running into court instantly” to challenge the rules by itself.
Cooper sees the issue of media deregulation catching fire in the public, much like campaign finance reform did a few years back. “We were worried about media ownership when it wasn’t cool,” he said, and he anticipates that worry soon will become cool as other groups become more involved. “People understand it as a fundamental democracy issue and so I can see a lot of those groups sticking with this issue,” Cooper said. Those groups, including the Parents TV Council, have substantial weight with Congress, he said. What’s more, he said he was hoping to have consumer group representatives at Presidential debates, pressing candidates on where they stood on media deregulation: “I intend to ask every candidate, ‘What are you going to do about media concentration?'” Chester said some of the groups, such as Common Cause, had enough money to produce national TV and newspaper ads and could well translate such muscle into campaign funds.
Cooper sees court challenges on both the basis of process and substance, the process being that the rules, as adopted, weren’t put out for public comment beforehand, and on substance based on what he called “inconsistency.” Specifically, he said, the Sinclair case hinged in large part on a lack of a coherent framework and that allowing a UHF discount in one FCC policy and not another constituted inconsistency. He also questioned the consistency of not allowing one TV network to buy another, but allowing a newspaper to buy a TV network. “They will give me much less protection against concentration under the Communications Act than antitrust laws? Where’s the consistency there?” he asked. “Congress is key here,” Chester said, and he believes the issue in the last few weeks finally may have resonated with the public to the point that it “has some legs.” Schwartzman said he believed the issue had gained so much momentum that in the end, “this is going to cost Powell and the other Republicans a great deal more politically than they probably would have imagined.”