Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 18, 1995 TAG: 9506220008
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: TOM SHALES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
There's something for everybody in the package, with the notable exception of you and me. Broadcasters, cablecasters, telephone companies and gigantic media conglomerates all get fabulous prizes. Congress is parceling out the future among the communications superpowers, which stand to get more super and definitely more powerful as a result.
Limits on multiple ownership of TV stations are sure to be eased by the final bill, so that any individual owner could control stations serving 35 or even 50 percent of the country. There's likely to be no limit on the number of radio stations that can be owned. Cable and phone companies in municipalities of less than 50,000 population could merge, killing any chance of competition there.
Broadcast licenses of local TV stations will be extended from a five-year to, probably, a 10-year term and the licenses will be even more easily renewed than they are now. It will become nearly impossible for angry civic groups or individuals to challenge the licenses of even the most blatantly irresponsible broadcasters.
In addition, Congress may repeal the rate controls placed on the cable TV industry in 1992, controls that have since saved consumers roughly $3 billion and brought cable fees down to reasonable levels. Your local cable company will be able to hike those rates right back up again.
Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kan., majority leader and presidential candidate, masterminded the legislation in the Senate. Dole made news not long ago when he took Time Warner Co. to task for releasing violent movies and rap records with incendiary lyrics. Yet measures Dole supports would enable corporate giants like Time Warner to grow exponentially.
``Here's the hypocrisy,'' says media activist Andrew Jay Schwartzman. ``Bob Dole sits there on `Meet the Press' and says, yes, he got $23,000 from Time Warner in campaign contributions, and that just proves he can't be bought . . .
``Meanwhile, he rushes to the floor with a bill that will deregulate cable rates and expedite the entry of cable into local telephone service, and no company is pressing harder for this than - guess who - Time Warner.''
Schwartzman, executive director of the Media Access Project, says the legislation aims to do a lot of ``awful things'' and that the worst of these may be opening the doors to ``a huge consolidation of broadcast ownership so that four, five, six or seven companies could own virtually all the television stations in the United States.''
Gene Kimmelman, co-director of Consumers Union, calls the legislation ``deregulatory gobbledygook'' that would remove nearly every obstacle to concentration of ownership in mass media.
The Newt Gingrich wing of the Republican Party even wants to abolish the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), established decades ago to safeguard ``the public interest, convenience and necessity.'' It's the interest, convenience and necessity of wealthy media magnates that appears to be the big priority now.
One of those is Rupert Murdoch, the Australian-born Fox mogul who has consistently received gentle, kid-glove, look-the-other-way treatment from Congress and even the regulatory agencies. When the FCC got brave not long ago and tried to sanction Murdoch for allegedly deceiving the commission about where he got the money to buy six TV stations in 1986, loud voices in Congress cried foul.
These included Reps. Jack Fields, R-Texas, and Mike Oxley, R-Ohio. Daily Variety's headline for the story: ``GOP Lawmakers Stand by Murdoch.''
As media expert Ken Auletta wrote recently in The New Yorker, ``The big loser in all this, of course, is the public.'' And as former NBC News president Reuven Frank lamented in the New Leader, ``It is daily becoming more obvious that the biggest threat to a free press and the circulation of ideas is the steady absorption of newspapers, television networks and other vehicles of information into enormous corporations that know how to turn knowledge into profit - but are not equally committed to inquiry or debate or to the First Amendment.''
Congress is giving the future away to the biggest of big-business interests. We thought it was going to be our future, too. It appears we were wrong.
- Washington Post Writers Group
Tom Shales is TV editor and chief TV critic for The Washington Post.
by CNB