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Media Consolidation Is YOUR Problem: An Interview With Author Eric Klinenberg (Part 1) |
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Media consolidation affects us all, but we might not realize it. The fact that 80% of the television market is controlled by just five companies hardly registers as more than a factoid for most Americans, but it touches their lives more than they know. Think about it: The most popular source for news and information in America is through broadcast or print media. This means that to a large extent, media companies control what Americans know about, what they talk about, and what they care about. If the media doesn’t report on a story, it won’t become part of our national discussion. A free and independent press has long been recognized as a cornerstone of democracy, yet as media companies have grown from local outlets into national conglomerates, they have begun to lose sight of the average citizen they once existed to protect.
Eric Klinenberg wants to bring this story to life. As a professor of sociology at New York University, Eric tries to “think about cases where the public [system] is broken down,” and put turn those cases into human stories that we can all relate to. He uses this very technique in the opening of his new book on media consolidation entitled Fighting For Air: The Battle To Control America’s Media. The opening chapter reads like a thriller novel:
At approximately 1:39 a.m. on January 18, 2002, a 112-car Canadian Pacific Railway train carrying hazardous chemicals derailed just outside of Minot, North Dakota, the fourth largest city in the state. According to the operating crew, the train had been travelling at forty miles an hour, and the accident happened when they attempted to slow down after hitting a rough spot on the tracks. Thirty-one cars jumped off the rails, and several burst open, spilling about 240,000 gallons of anhydrous ammonia, a toxic compound commonly used as fertilizer, into a woodsy neighborhood called Tierrecita Vallejo, “Lovely Land of the Valley.”
Eric goes on to describe how, after the the 911 call was made, local officials tried to use the Emergency Broadcast System to preempt local television and radio broadcasts to tell residents to stay inside and seal their doors and windows to prevent inhalation of the toxic gas that was quickly spreading through the town. The system failed, so town officials did the next best thing and tried to contact radio and T.V. stations directly. They called the stations but nobody answered, because nobody was in the station at the time. Every station in Minot was owned by Clear Channel Communications, which piped in news and music broadcasts created in centralized studios thousands of miles away. There was literally nobody home to spread the word about the emergency.
…KCJB, and every other radio station in town, were not reporting any news or information about the anhydrous spill. Instead, all six of Minot’s name-brand stations - Z94, 97 Kicks, Mix 99.9, The Fox Classic Rock, 91 Country, and Cars Oldies Radio - continued playing a standard menu of canned music, served up by smooth-talking DJs trading in light banter and off-color jokes while the giant toxic cloud floated into town.
Without proper information, over 1,000 people were injured from anhydrous inhalation and one man died from exposure. As Eric astutely notes:
It is impossible to know how many would have escaped harm if the local media had sounded a warning, telling residents what was happening and how they could stay safe…their radio system broke down - not only because a new technology malfunctioned, and not because the broadcasters were biased - but because the company that had established a monopoly over Minot’s commercial stations had pulled valuable human resources out of the community, leaving no one available or alert enough to issue a warning when the public needed them most.
Fighting For Air is about making the battle over media consolidation human. It is about convincing the average American that this issue affects their lives, too. Mixing anecdotes and hard statistics, Eric convincingly lays out the case for rolling back media consolidation in America through the use of careful regulation.
I went to see Eric speak at Northwestern University in May. He is a consummate public speaker, able to weave together complex arguments and a myriad of statistics into a complete picture that makes the problem of media consolidation really hit home. Yet, for all his eloquence, both as a writer and a speaker, he said he had found it hard to publicize his book. Calling the journalistic coverage of media consolidation “abysmal,” he said his editor was told by media outlets that they couldn’t touch his book. He said, “She was floored. She told me. ‘I don’t get that when I do Noam Chomsky!’ ”
Yet, he says people care passionately about this issue. He has witnessed average citizens spend hours in line, and hours sitting in a crowded auditorium, for their chance to say one thing to the commissioner of the FCC. Everywhere Congressional officials have media discussions, hundreds of people show up to discuss issues relating to consolidation such as cable choice, media bias, minority ownership, or decency standards. Eric feels the American people are with him on this issue, and that media reform is already starting to happen.
I got a chance to ask Eric some of my questions about his book and media consolidation, as well as relay some questions posed by Seminal readers on the issue. What he had to say was fascinating to me, and I think is of interest to all Americans.
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J-Ro: First, radio has never been a vibrant media outlet for me; I don’t even feel interested in a lot of what NPR puts out. How do you think local radio broadcasts can win back listeners such as myself, especially from the younger generation? How would your ideal radio station be programmed?
Eric: Well, they have to be interesting; they have to make you want to listen. I think that means providing you some kind of news or entertainment that you can’t get in any other place. Terrestrial radio companies have a built in advantage: Although you don’t listen to it yourself, they have massive listenership. The radio remains very popular. It’s less popular, especially with young people, than it was a generation ago, but it is not a dead technology by any means.
A lot of people wake up to the radio on their alarm clocks, people have radios in their bathrooms, they can listen to it in the shower. I think for millions of people the most popular way of listening to the radio is in the car on the way to work. A lot of people listen to the radio at work, especially if they work in some kind of office environment where there is some kind of common source of the music or entertainment, so I think radio is hardly dead.
I think that one thing that the radio conglomerates recognize is they couldn’t put 20 minutes of commercials up for every hour of broadcasting. When local radio markets got less competitive, I think a number of the big conglomerates thought, “Well, we can just force feed our listeners commercials, and they’ll have nowhere else to go.” However, they’ve found that people turn the radio off and actually did find other places to go, whether it was satellite radio, which emerged in the 90’s, or iPods and mp3 players, or Internet radio. That was a disaster, and so commercial radio stations typically have to do much less commercial time than they had in the past.
I also think the added value of a great DJ is having someone who is listening for distinctive sounds that you’re not hearing in other places and breaking them for his or her audience. I’ve seen statistics showing that the majority of music that Americans buy is not played on the radio, which is really striking. There’s a market demand for music that you just can’t find on the radio, and so I think a good local radio station should try to fill some of those gaps.
J-Ro: Do you think we’re seeing some sort of backlash from the experiments that happened after the 1996 Telecommunications Act was passed [that ushered in the age of media consolidation]? Have some of these radio stations found that maybe the formats and increased advertising that they thought would work wasn’t really working for listeners?
Eric: Absolutely, absolutely, I wrote about this in the book. It’s a part of my book that I think very few people have picked up on, but the story I tell is one where these experiments in centralization really failed. Clear Channel has tried very hard to at least promote itself as a more locally oriented company than it has been in the past, and I think it’s true. Clear Channel realized they had gone to far with the voice tracking and with the fake local broadcasts; they don’t want to be doing that. They clearly mishandled several cases where there were disasters and the emergency communications was not what it needed to be, or the communication after the disaster was not what it needed to be, and so they worked really hard to make sure that they got something on the air that was useful.
If Clear Channel is our real giant that we’re focusing on here, clearly in its case it has tried to do something to be more local, to be more responsive, to have more time for local bands. We’ll see whether this is successful or whether it’s too late. You know there was just an agreement in this payola settlement that the FCC struck with a lot of the large broadcasters, and an agreement on the “rules of engagement.” If the big radio companies actually followed the rules of engagement and provided the kind of time for local programming they say they’re going to, it would be a sea change in radio.
As to whether they are really going to be able to attract back a younger generation that sees radio as irrelevant, I just don’t know. I’m optimistic that young people who walk to school or take the bus to school will find terrestrial radio a lot more relevant when they begin driving for their commutes, but that’s a long time to come. Radio stations will get more listeners from your generation as you age, and the question is whether they can keep you.
J-Ro: Moving a question about print media, I understand your main argument in favor of radio and TV regulations. The airwaves these outlets are using are a public resource, and in exchange for making money off that public resource, broadcasters have to give back to communities and the public in various ways. I would say that this argument doesn’t apply to newspapers in the same way. How do you reconcile the right of a newspaper business to make money with the perceived duty of the press to serve the public and the role that it has traditionally played in our democracy?
Eric: First, that’s not my argument by the way, that’s federal law. I’m correcting you only because, I’m amazed by how few people I speak to recognize that this the contemporary policy. The FCC, at least at a formal level, did not abandon its public interest mission. They have loosened the obligations that broadcasters face, but the FCC is still the federal agency that is charged with serving the public interest, not the corporate interest. I find even sometimes people at the FCC seem to forget that very simple fact. Anyways, onwards to newspapers.
The only kind of policy issue that I really deal with in the book having to do with newspapers is also a broadcasting issue, because it concerns the newspaper, broadcast, television cross-ownership ban. So essentially, the issue is whether it remains the case that if one company owns a newspaper and a broadcast television station in the same market, they could potentially develop such a powerful voice that it would be unhealthy for democracy and would develop an arrangement that would reduce the diversity of viewpoints that citizens have access too. My argument in the book is that when the FCC passed the ban in 1975, they did so because the local newspaper and local broadcasting were the two most popular sources of local news and information, and it seemed like it would be a bad idea to let one company control them both.
Today my argument is, despite all the new media that we have, local newspaper reporting and local television broadcasts remain by far the most popular sources of local news and information, so the same condition that the FCC was concerned about [in 1975] applies today. I have not been persuaded by the evidence that there are enough new sources of original, local reporting coming from the new media outlets that we no longer have to be worried about this issue of viewpoint diversity. I think the 3rd Circuit Court, although it expressed some sympathy for the FCC’s interest in repealing the cross ownership prohibition, said the research it had considered (pdf) showed that by far the overwhelming majority of local Internet content is stuff like restaurant ratings and movie listings. It might be useful, but it’s not the kind of content we should have in mind when we are talking about diversifying information and making sure that there are a lot of different perspectives. The big issue for newspapers, is at the regulatory level, a question of whether they should also own broadcast stations. There, the same set of interests apply.
There is one thing I think we need to be clear about. The newspaper industry is going through this incredible transition right now, and the managers at newspaper companies, and newspaper executives, face extraordinary pressure; I can’t emphasize this enough. They are trying to deal with a market situation where you have paid circulation levels going down, and they’ve been going down for a long time. You have the stock values going down, and you have these organized investors and financial analysts demanding that newspaper companies generate these profit margins that dwarf those in other industries and would be very difficult to sustain in the new media environment. So the Times reports today that Ganette’s 2006 profit margins for its newspaper division are something like 24%, the Tribune Company profit margins were upwards of 18%, and the typical Fortune 500 company has 5 or 6% profit margins. We need to recognize that although the newspaper industry is changing and the managers are facing a lot of pressure, this is not a industry that is losing lots of money, it’s just not as profitable as some financial analysts want it to be.
While I am sympathetic to those newspaper executives who have to deal with the financial analysts, I don’t think the FCC and Congress should be changing the law to help the financial analysts get the profit margins of 20% or 30% that they want; that’s not the FCC’s job. The FCC’s job is to promote the public interest, and it seems to me that unless we get more compelling evidence that removing the cross-ownership ban would genuinely be good for democracy and for journalism, we should not be doing it.
I recently testified at the FCC hearing in Tampa, that should be available online soon (mp3), and one of the points I made is we actually have a number of cities in the US where we already have cross-ownership arrangements, and the cities include places like Chicago, Tampa, and L.A. For the Tribune Company to say we need cross-ownership so we can sustain our investment in journalism, and then to have on its own record a history of destroying the editorial division of the L.A. Times after it got a cross-ownership arrangement, this seems to me pretty damning.
J-Ro: It strikes me that the fight over cross-ownership and ownership caps is a proxy battle. You had mentioned in your talk at Northwestern the regulation that the FCC imposed when FM radio was first introduced. Broadcasters were not allowed to simply replicate their existing AM programs on the new FM band, they were required to fill FM stations with 50% original content. This regulation basically was responsible for the invention of the music radio format we have today. That kind of regulation seems to sit much closer to the heart of the issue here.
To me, as a consumer, it doesn’t really matter who owns the media and how many stations they own, as long as they are upholding good journalistic values and they broadcast local content that is fresh and interesting. I don’t necessarily see why a big conglomeration can’t give the public that kind of material. It would seem to me that the proponents of regulations over ownership are hoping that with more diverse ownership you are going to get more diverse journalism. I’m wondering if you’d support more regulations that get closer to the heart of that issue?
Eric: Well I think ownership regulation does get to the heart of the issue, actually. For instance, let’s say you’ve got a city that’s got one newspaper, and a company owns that newspaper and also owns one of the three most popular television news sources, and could also own the most popular cable news program, and the most popular local news website. So, it could own all the newspapers, it could own Spanish language newspapers, it could own a weekly newspaper, it could own the cable system. It could own the city magazine, it could own the big sports franchise, it could have a really tremendous influence in the town.
Now let’s say there was some piece of legislation that involved development of a stadium that the company would use, and there would be public money involved, and the public would take on a lot of risk in subsidizing the stadium. It might not be a great use of public resources in some people’s minds, it could be a very expensive use of public resources; many cities have had very high pitched and high stakes battles over development of sports stadiums and the complexes around them. If you’ve got one company that’s self interested and controls that much of the media, they might not actually report on the issue very well; they might give a very biased kind of reporting on it.
There is no kind of legislation that guarantees that all viewpoints and perspectives are going to get a real hearing. There is no way to do it with any certainty. The idea of the cross-ownership ban is based on the concept that if you have a number of different owners you are more likely to get a diversity of viewpoints on contentious and significant local issues. You might not care about this during the everyday life of your city, and it might seem that in most cases it doesn’t matter, but in cases where it does matter, it can matter very significantly. Let’s say you live in a swing state, or let’s say you live in the big city of a swing state, and there’s an election coming up. Say a media company has a strong record of endorsing one political party, and they use their resources to press the case for that political party, and they try and influence the vote in that way. If you live in Ohio or Florida, and you’re in a situation like that, that might be something that you get concerned about.
My argument here is that we really do care about these issues of viewpoint diversity, and that a big media company at the local level can dominate a marketplace.
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In the next part of this interview, Eric and I discuss the free market, appropriate media regulation, independent music, and ways to get involved. Stay tuned for part 2, coming tomorrow.
DISCUSSION
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