FCC must embrace the digital age

The loss is heard, watched and read. Substantive news and entertainment have become quaint relics in America, like music on vinyl or news on paper.

The degradation of the press and media was not always so glaring. The ill effects of consolidation took time to work into the lives of readers, listeners and consumers. Once the bottom-line mentality of corporate media became clear, the issue shot to the top of the public's conscience like a bullet.

The failures to protect the press and media are many, the blame widespread. The panicked state of the newspaper industry is attributable to consolidation that happened during the past four decades. Newspapers are no longer beholden to a city or region, but to the number-crunchers of distant chain ownership.

The same is true for television. A handful of media companies dominate local markets across the country.

Independent radio's demise came later, but with lightning speed. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 allowed for massive consolidation. Many cities' commercial radio stations are now saddled with just one or two corporate owners.

Congress and the Federal Communications Commission are the two most culpable entities for creating a broken media model.

The FCC drags itself into Seattle today for its last hearing on media ownership. These hearings are an important chance for the five commissioners to hear from the public.

The commissioners have a problem, though. They do not have enough time to reflect on what they have heard from the six public media-ownership hearings held across the country, the first of which was in Los Angeles last year. Making matters worse, the time crunch is self-imposed. FCC Chairman Kevin Martin wants to vote on media-ownership rules by Dec. 18.

The commissioners cannot possibly take an informed vote on rules so central to American democracy with only a month for internal deliberation.

If the FCC loosens ownership rules, there will be a torrent of opposition. When the commission changed the rules in favor of more consolidation in 2003, about 3 million people flooded the FCC with letters in opposition to the rule changes. Expect more this round.

The 2003 FCC rules were stopped by a federal appeals court, which sent the rules back to the commission. The same appellate court in Philadelphia might as well get ready to hear the case again. Josh Silver, executive director of Free Press, said an appeal will likely be filed by public-interest groups in the same court.

"The basis would be that the FCC didn't follow the court's orders, and that the FCC is violating the Administrative Procedure Act, which requires federal agencies to make decisions based on evidence and reasoned analysis," he said.

Free Press, Consumers Union and the Consumers Federation of America have proved that "reasoned analysis" is lacking at the FCC.

The three groups recently released a joint study of the FCC's studies. The consumer groups' findings confirmed the suspicion that the FCC is marching toward a rash of rule changes that would benefit conglomerates while hurting the alreadyfragile press and media.

The groups analyzed 10 FCC studies used for the media-ownership proceedings. They found that the commission approached the studies with a bias toward media consolidation. The data also showed that concentration hurts local news.

The consumer groups cited a 2006 paper by Leslie Marx, the former FCC chief economist, that said, "this document is an attempt to share some thoughts and ideas I have about how the FCC can approach relaxing newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership restrictions."

The analysis comes at the right time. Congress should be deeply concerned that a federal regulatory agency is ignoring its own data, or worse, using tax dollars for studies that agree with a predetermined outcome.

The loss is not yet total. The age of vinyl has given way to the amazing possibilities of the digital age, and news through broadband is now as important as news off the press.

Americans need Congress and the FCC to create a process that takes into account this new world, and recognizes how far the media have fallen because of bad policy.

Ryan Blethen's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is rblethen@seattletimes.com for a podcast Q&A with the author, go to Opinion at seattletimes.com