Kay McFadden / Times staff columnist
Red, white and blue in the face: We must rein in FCC

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TV viewing is essentially passive. But even couch potatoes can sprout buds, and so I'm asking you this Fourth of July weekend to do your bit for the First Amendment.

It's easy. You just need to get your hands on a computer, then demand your right as a citizen to make the Federal Communications Commission hold hearings on new media-ownership rules.

At the end of this column, I'll explain how. First, the why.

You must do this because you cannot rely on donation-fatted politicians running for office to do it. You cannot trust the federal agency appointed to protect your interest.

Luckily, you already are on a grass-roots roll.

The FCC got a well-deserved kick in the pants on June 24 when the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia threw out the commission's attempt to relax ownership rules.

The new FCC rules would have let corporations buy more radio and television stations in the same market. It also would have allowed cross-ownership of newspapers in the same market where a company already owns TV and radio, and vice versa.

Full disclosure: The Times has a publisher. His name is Frank Blethen. He is adamantly opposed to the FCC's media-expansion rules. He did not ghostwrite this column. In fact, he'll be reading it for the first time the same time you do.

Blethen or no Blethen, the court's decision was widely called a victory for the more than two million Americans who inundated the FCC with outraged letters, e-mail and faxes protesting the regulations and the hasty way in which they were overhauled.
 
Their concern was justified. Here are some reminders of what happens when big media runs amok:

• Sinclair Broadcasting blocks its ABC-affiliated stations from airing "Nightline" because the company's executives don't care for Ted Koppel reading aloud the names of those who died in Iraq to make it free.

• Clear Channel Communications drops Howard Stern from radio stations it owns under the guise of indecency concerns — or perhaps because the formerly pro-Republican shock jock had begun criticizing President Bush's conduct of the war.

• Cable rates have become astronomical under rules that make it virtually impossible for satellite TV and other rivals to compete on an equal footing in the same market.

• Since 1975, two-thirds of independently owned newspapers have vanished. According to figures from the American Newspaper Publishers Association and the Writers Guild of America, only 281 of 1,500 papers remain in nonchained hands.

• Local radio is becoming extinct. A handful of companies now dictate the same playlists, the same meager headline news and in some cases, the same animatronic on-air hosts across America.

• Into the void of radio news has stepped one source: National Public Radio. It is the origin of more than 90 percent of the public-affairs programming that radio listeners get: a virtual monopoly.

These trends are ominous. They point to a homogenized culture in which a diversity of ideas will be stifled.

Yet such is the influence of big media in Washington, D.C., that FCC chief Michael Powell held one public hearing — just one — before ramming through the new rules.

It was the five-member FCC's two Democratic commissioners who instigated a whistle-stop series of unofficial hearings, including one in Seattle. The actions of Jonathan Adelstein and Michael Copps exposed the FCC's attempted sneak, even though the new rules eventually were passed by a 3-2 vote.

Thereafter, the issue quickly become more democratic than Democratic. A rare coalition of liberals and conservatives, including the Parents Television Council and the American Civil Liberties Union, arrayed itself in opposition to the relaxed rules.

A good thing, too. Because we the people could not rely on our elected officials to represent our best interests in the run-up to an election year.

Amid the furor over FCC rules, lawmakers passed legislation allowing broadcasters to increase their size by raising the percentage of stations owned from 35 to 39 percent.

That's 39 percent of all TV households nationwide — or about where Viacom, parent of CBS, UPN and MTV Networks, and News Corp., owner of Fox, currently stand.

On the other hand, the FCC had tried to raise the ownership cap to 45 percent. Such is the slim debt we owe to Congress.

The 3rd Court's ruling did not address this topic, saying the subject was "moot" because of the new law.

That brings us up to the present.

The FCC has been instructed to return to the drawing board. Among the court's directives are that the FCC come up with a better "market-diversity" formula for judging the impact of raising ownership caps of TV stations.

The court was less critical of the FCC's lifting of radio-market ownership restrictions and of the newspaper-broadcast ownership ban, but it still wants better justification.

Wednesday, FCC commissioner Copps said the agency could consider tightening ownership rules to satisfy the court.

But history already has proven that the FCC requires a loud shout from the public.

Here's where you come in, little potato.

Go to www.freepress.net and click on "Media Ownership Rules." Right on the page will be a petition requesting the FCC to do what it should have done the first time around: allow the citizens of this country a voice in the airwaves that by right belong to all of us.

Kay McFadden: kmcfadden@seattletimes.com