Vote community standards off the island

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Viacom president Mel Karmazin and others testified before a Senate committee today on loosening media ownership rules, something the FCC is currently considering. Here’s a novel argument for strict property control:

James Goodmon, president of Capitol Broadcasting Co., which owns and operates five TV stations in North Carolina and South Carolina, told lawmakers that raising the cap [of stations a network can own] will allow networks to gobble up more smaller broadcasters. He said network-owned stations would lack the local control that allowed his company to refuse to run several reality programs, including Fox’s “Married By America.”

“We said we’re going to stop at demeaning marriage and the family,” he said. “There’s never been a network-owned station that pre-empted a network station for content reasons.”

Owning five stations in two states doesn’t seem that small to me. I also don’t understand why small broadcasters will be “gobbled up”. Is anyone going to put a gun to their head to make them sell? Or do they consider a very big cash offer a form of force? I’ll tell you who does have gun to their heads right now: media companies who are forbidden from making the offer.

But more importantly, doesn’t the ultimate control reside with the viewer? Can’t he turn off “Married by America” if he finds it demeaning? Or better yet, switch to one of the other 500 channels? Or best of all, vote to pair Billie Jean with Kevin? Or are Goodmon’s customers so stupid that he has to make those choices for them?

Go Clay! You’re standing up for all us skinny, effete types!

May 13, 2003 | Comments

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3 comments posted

  1. Posted by Amy Phillips - 05/15/2003

    The only real problem that I have with the deregulation scheme currently being discussed is that it doesn’t do anything about the problem of the government monopoly over the airwaves. The way that deregulation works requires that anyone with the capital to do so can get into the game. Then, competition can weed out the bad ones and allow the good ones to thrive. That’s simply not the case as long as we insist that the airwaves belong to the “public,” and so the government should get to decide who gets to have a radio station. It means we’ll be constantly subject to people like this guy trying to force viewpoints they don’t like (like, for example, those that don’t exalt the heterosexual family) out of the marketplace. It’s a very dangerous situation.

  2. Posted by Jerry Brito - 05/16/2003

    Amy, I agree completely. I would love to see property rights in spectrum, but that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon. Nevertheless, there might be technological workarounds to the government’s monopoly of the airwaves. Over-the-air TV and radio inefficiently hog huge swaths of spectrum. Satellite TV and radio use spectrum much more efficiently, and cable offers tons of bandwidth using no spectrum. New technologies (like ultrawideband and time division duplex) continue to increase the amount of bandwidth that can be squeezed out of existing spectrum. Eventually, these technologies will make the government’s power to decide who gets a traditional over-the-air radio or TV station license irrelevant because there will be other preferred methods of reception.

    These technologies have the potential to make over-the-air obsolete. Ultimately, there will be so much money to be potentially made by more efficiently reassigning misused spectrum that the corporate pressure on the FCC will be unbearable. Maybe then it will auction of assignable spectrum licenses (if not property rights) to the highest bidders–probably for wireless services we can’t even imagine today.

  3. Posted by Aaron Stanley - 05/16/2003

    It looks like there are a lot of reforms going on over at Powell’s FCC. They’ve already agreed to allow certain spectrum owners to trade/lease the portions of the spectrum they own. It doesn’t affect TV/radio, it seems, but it is a step in the right direction.

    link: http://dc.internet.com/news/article.php/2208021

    I hope that there will be some more radical changes going forward, but even if there aren’t the media ownership rules are crummy right now. As you’ve said, Jerry, there’s nobody forcing small broadcasters to sell their stations, they choose to because it’s difficult for them to make money. This is unfortunate, but it’s not a market failure that needs to be corrected by the FCC, it’s a change that the consumers need to affect.

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