JACKSON - Most Americans don't realize it, but control and ownership of the nation's broadcast media is being consolidated in the hands of a few powerful radio and TV mega-companies.
It started with enactment of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, and is now about to be expanded by the Federal Communications Commission.
Already Mississippi, though not considered a prime commercial broadcast media market, has seen the largest radio behemoth in the nation buy up a huge chunk of stations around this state.
When the FCC meets next Tuesday, media-watchers warn, it will even broaden its ownership rules, opening the way for more monopolization of what the listening or viewing audience will get to see or hear.
A longtime FCC ban on newspaper-television cross-ownership is expected to be ended, and the commission will allow further domination of local television markets in larger cities.
While the Bush administration has not been directly identified behind the FCC media power grab, there are certain linkages which suggest administration backing.
One is that the commission has a 3-to-2 Republican majority. And as it turns out, Michael Powell, the son of Colin Powell, is the FCC chairman and is the strongest proponent behind the proposal for more media consolidation.
Under the 1996 Telecommunications Act - a measure U.S. Rep. Chip Pickering had boasted as having helped to draft while he was a Senate staffer - the FCC has opened the gates to monopolization of local radio, the prime source of news or opinion for a great many Americans.
Pickering and his then-employer, U.S. Sen. Trent Lott, had hailed the 1996 act as a deregulatory measure. One of its strongest backers down here was then-WorldCom CEO Bernie Ebbers, who utilized the new law to further extend WorldCom holdings. And while most attention was then focused on its long distance implications, little attention was given to radio station mergers.
Since the 1996 act was passed, the FCC has lifted its cap of 40 radio stations that any one broadcasting company could own and permitted multiple ownerships. As a result, three companies now own half the radio stations in America.
The single biggest company is Clear Channel Communications, based in San Antonio, which now owns 1,240 radio stations around the country.
Clear Channel, significantly, has 25 stations in Mississippi, six alone in the Jackson metropolitan market.
Since the FCC allowed monopolization of radio ownership around the country, local news coverage by stations has sharply shrunk, and they have added a heavier dose of nationally syndicated, mostly right-wing, commentators. Plus, listeners are being fed a largely homogenized diet of musical offerings.
Many critics have focused on the power that Clear Channel and other big radio chains hold over recording companies and artists. The latter subject has brought a hefty lawsuit against Clear Channel from recording artists.
Evidently, many Clear Channel stations have used their local clout in a political way. Recently, during the national debate over whether to launch an invasion of Iraq, Clear Channel stations were beating the drums for war and hawking support of the Bush administration.
Most of the pro-war rallies around the country, several media critics have reported, were organized by Clear Channel outlets, coordinated under the name Rally for America.
There's more than political choice that binds Clear Channel's ownership to President Bush. It happens that there have been major ties between Clear Channel owners that go back to Bush's days as governor of Texas.
Tom Hicks, the vice-chairman of Clear Channel, made Bush a multimillionaire in a 1998 deal when Hicks purchased the Texas Rangers baseball team, at a time Bush was the major owner of the ball club.
Even prior to that, Hicks as chairman of the University of Texas Investment Management Company, called Utimco, had placed much of the university's endowment under companies with strong Republican or Bush family ties.
Besides the stations Clear Channel owns in the Jackson area, it also owns six stations in the Laurel and Hattiesburg area, as well as stations in Tupelo, Meridian and Booneville.
Ironically, while the two Democratic members of the FCC are leading the opposition to broadening of the multiple media ownership rule, opposition has also come from some leading conservative voices, including that of William Safire of the New York Times.
Safire charged in a column last week that the concentration of power, "whether political, corporate, media, cultural - should be anathema to conservatives."
In an op-ed piece in the Denver Post, conservative Republican U.S. Sen. Wayne Allard of Colorado charged that the latest media consolidation move by the FCC threatens local access, "making it easier for large media corporations to gobble up an even greater share of local media … ."
Media giants such as Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp. owns the Fox network, are among the strongest advocates of the expanded media ownership rule. They, according to The Center for Public Integrity, have been among those lobbying the FCC members with free trips to lovely and expensive places all over the world. Last year Public Integrity reported $2.8 million was spent by the big media companies wining and dining and paying for trips by members of the FCC or the commission staff.
Of note is the fact that none of the four major commercial television networks (CBS, ABC, NBC and FOX) which are owned by conglomerates, has touched the story of the proposed FCC action to expand media ownership. Only Public Broadcasting and some newspapers have raised their voices against the move.
By the way, if the new FCC rule is adopted, it would also mean that Clear Channel and other radio mega-companies could get into television ownership in the markets where they already operate radio stations.
Thane Peterson recently wrote in Business Week: "The U.S. needs greater concentration of the media market like a fast-food junkie needs more fat." He's got that right.
What democracy in America is all about is choices. Eliminate competition and diversity, especially in a powerful medium that so vitally shapes our culture and opinions, and democracy suffers.
