Bad Idea
by Charley Reese
About 10 or 12 mega-conglomerates control about 75 percent of the communications in the United States, and the Federal Communications Commission is about to pass a rule that will allow them to gobble up the remainder.
This is not good.
For a land that is supposedly the bastion of free speech, we have fewer competing newspapers than most other industrial countries in the world. Catch the news on ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, Fox and CNN, and you get essentially an identical picture of the world, one that bears only a limited and superficial resemblance to the real one. We are nation of 268 million people and there are only, as of 2001, 1,480 daily newspapers — most of them owned by these few mega-corporations.
Don't be fooled by all the talk about choices. Sure you have a choice between America Online and CompuServe. Guess who owns CompuServe? AOL. The big conglomerates own most of the cable channels. The producers of most of the programming are likewise relatively few.
Every city and town in America needs an independent, locally owned newspaper, radio station and TV station. Darned few have them anymore. Some of these big conglomerates own newspapers, radio stations, TV stations, book publishers, magazines, cable channels, movie studios and TV networks. You name it, they got it. And they want what they don't already have, and the FCC is about to give it to them by loosening present restrictions on ownership of properties in the same market.
You should also not be fooled by the blarney that owners don't tell employees what to write or say. They don't have to. They don't hire people who disagree with them on what they consider to be the really important issues. You've got to be a pretty dumb employee not to figure out what the boss likes and dislikes. And if you don't, you won't be around that long.
Ego and pretentiousness notwithstanding, journalists are blue-collar workers in information factories. There aren't many willing to tell off the publisher or the news director, and those who do are out the door.
I used to get a laugh when I was working for a daily newspaper and the paper was crusading for some pet project. Inevitably, somebody would call and say, "Why don't you write a column and tear their arguments apart?"
"Well," I would reply, "for starters, my name is Reese, not Rockefeller. This newspaper you want me to attack is the one that pays my salary. Aside from my interest in not being unemployed, as long as I take their money, I owe them loyalty."
Sure, I used to take positions that differed from those of the newspaper on some issues, but if it was an issue the publisher and editor really cared about, I either supported it or, if I couldn't honestly do that, just wrote about something else. That's the way the world works. And as an old Buddhist sage once observed, "If you understand, the world is as it is; if you do not understand, the world is as it is."
In all seriousness, the foundation of our great idea of self-government is that if the people know the truth, they can make the right political decisions. In our time, we depend on commercial communications for most of our information. To allow so few hands to control so much of our communications is dangerous.
I'm not suggesting that the owners of these conglomerates are conspiring to control our thoughts. Most of them are just in business for the money. But in a free country, a thousand voices are better than four or five and are much more likely to arrive at the truth. Most executives who work for conglomerates will have their eyes on the headquarters. From there will come their promotions. Whatever town or city they happen to be in is incidental. On the other hand, an independent owner will care about the place because it's not only his place of business but also his permanent home. I'll take a little less glitz any day to have a home-owned, independent newspaper, radio or TV station.
Write to Michael Powell, Chairman, FCC, 445 12th St., S.W., Washington, D.C. 20554 or send e-mail to www.fcc.gov and say, "Bah, humbug to your proposed rule regarding media ownership."
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