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Consumers Lose If Media Owners Have Their Way

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: December 3, 2007

The Tribune's recent article ("FCC: Let Papers Buy Local Radio, TV Stations," Nov. 14) on media consolidation missed the bigger story about Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin's bid to annex what is in effect legislative authority through a questionable interpretation of a dusty 1980s legal clause: It could help him push through an anti-diversity agenda that would devastate opportunities for minority media ownership.

For starters, some FCC bureaucrats continue to push new a la carte regulations, in which the government would mandate a per-channel charge to consumers for every cable channel. Nearly every civil rights organization and virtually every single study has said that these regulations would destroy opportunities for new minority and other programmers by depriving them of the scale, market penetration or advertising achieved on the tiered bundle.

Moreover, some FCC commissioners also want to extend the so-called "multicast must-carry" government rules by giving each local broadcaster as many as six channels that cable carriers will be required to carry. This giveaway for well-heeled television station owners would effectively squeeze out channel space on cable TV that could otherwise be used for emerging new minority programmers.

And the consolation prize suggestion that minority programmers lease a portion of these multicast must-carry channels from the large, mostly non-minority broadcasters prompted one FCC commissioner to deride the idea as "media sharecropping." The other so-called leased access proposals also do little more than squeeze out budding minority and religious programmers for whom there is a demonstrated market value.

There is virtually no political support from either Democrats or Republicans on this anti-diversity agenda. Yet, it seems that some bureaucrats inside the FCC are dead set on using a proceeding called the 70/70 rule to implement wholesale policy changes that hurt consumers and hurt minority television programmers. Congress needs to step in and provide some supervision.

The Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, Sr. is founder and president of RainbowPUSH Coalition, Inc., an organization devoted to equality, human rights and social change.

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