Response To Cato - Regarding Big Media And FCC

These are my initial thoughts and ideas in response to this article on Cato's website. The sloppy bunch of so-called libertarians on this site are giving libertarian ideas a bad name. You can bet that I will incorporate the best of these into my main arguments over at Freedom Century, and unleash a devastating and demoralizing blow to the useful allies of the media barons. Arguments in italics are from the article.

A heated debate over the relaxation of media ownership rules that artificially restrict media business activities is set to culminate in a June 2 ruling by the Federal Communications Commission. Consumer groups already decry what they see as growing media concentration or even monopolization, and caution that our democracy is somehow at risk of being dictated to by a handful of media barons. How real are these fears?

There has been no heated "public" debate. Practically no coverage of the issue.

In reality, the media are less concentrated and more competitive today than they were 30 years ago. And consumers are unambiguously better off.

Notice the blanket assuredness of these statements. The media is less concentrated, in the sense of all media, and consumers are "unambiguously" better off.

Consider two families, circa 1973 versus 2003, and the media and entertainment options available to them. The 1973 family could flip through three major network television stations, or tune in to a PBS station or a UHF channel or two. By comparison, today's families can take advantage of a 500-plus channel universe of cable and satellite-delivered options, order movies on demand, and check out a variety of specialized news, sports, or entertainment programming -- in addition to those same three networks.

Notice that this evidence is restricted to television. In 1973, there were only 3 network news options, but people were much less likely to get their sole information from the network news. The network news was competing with newspapers and radio, each with owners single-mindedly seeking their self-interest and the interest of getting the media message out. Also, PBS was around to assure another balanced perspective, and has it ever been accused of being the voice of the democratic majority?

In today's world, 500-plus channels are almost entirely entertainment-based, also with many educational offerings. This is not to be decried. But it does not mean that meaningful diversity of viewpoints and ideas, especially those of the political variety, and supportive of democracy, is or will be part and parcel. If anything, there is very little diversity of cable news production, each station generally carrying the same content, breaking around the same time, with the same "framing" for the most part, with the notable exception of highly partisan Right-wing pundits emerging ahead of the pack in talk and analysis with less than classically democratic attitudes or ideas (i.e. playing on hate, misunderstanding and fear).

Or, these hypothetical families could just listen to the radio together. Seven thousand stations existed in 1970 nationwide to choose from. Today more than 13,000 stations exist and subscription-based music services are delivered nationwide and uninterrupted via digital satellite.

What families listen to radio together? Sounds odd. Regardless, the 7,000 stations of yesterday are not meaningfully different than the 13,000 today; in fact, there is far less diversity today. Radio used to be very local, with lots of requests and call-ins, but the trend today is standardization Clear-Channel style, with set playlists that vary very little, if at all, and when they do more by regional marketing analysis than actual requests and call-ins. Local news and programming is rapidly becoming non-existent.

As for subscription-based music services, more power to them. This is a great development, but has absolutely nothing to do with the FCC's decision on Monday. In fact, we need to make doubly sure that arguments being made now are specific to the decision on Monday, and not just cherry picking positive developments in media while defending a specific action by the FCC.

And then, of course, there's the Internet and the astonishing cornucopia of communications, information, and entertainment services the World Wide Web offers today's families. In the media Dark Ages of 1973, it would have taken a great deal of time and money to publish your own newsletter. Today, the Internet gives every man, woman, and child the ability to be a
one-person publishing house or broadcasting station, and communicate with the entire planet. Instead of going to the library to retrieve information, as our hypothetical 1973 family might have done, today the library comes to us as the Net puts a world of information at our fingertips. While the 1973 family could read the local newspaper together, today's families can view thousands of newspapers from communities across the planet.

So again, this has nothing to do with the FCC, and their decisions 30 years ago or to be made on Monday. Yes, the web is a great source of information, but already 1 in 5 people log on through Time Warner (see Bagdikian post in my blog from last week). This medium could be corrupted, and filtered, and censored, as well as any other, given more time to develop such methods. It's at least possible. We can say in a neutral way that we have more media choices today than 30 years ago, but many of these are active, not passive, or merely expansion of entertainment options, and people are most influenced by news and push media in a passive way. We must recognize this, and realize that passive consumption of news has probably not changed much in the last 30 years.

And the list goes on: video recorders, DVD players, interactive TVs and cell phones, MP3 players, and a seemingly endless array of other portable/wireless computing and communications devices are available to us today that the families of 1973 only dreamed of, or saw in a "Star Trek" episode.

More entertainment. More choices. Less meaningful communication and information about timely issues of great importance to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And harder to find, or even to determine to seek, when besieged with endless choices of less than mindful entertainment.

But while America's mass media marketplace is evolving rapidly, the same cannot be said for the regime of rules that govern it, which are stuck in regulatory time warp. Federal regulations that limit how much of the national market can be served by broadcast and cable companies, or prevent a company from owning a newspaper and television station in the same market, or prohibit a television network from buying another network, should be abolished. Why should media companies be forced to play by a distinct set of random ownership rules that we impose on no other industry?

Here we have the first elaborate ruse. Having established a media 'evolving rapidly', the rules are criticized for not having done the same. Yet, rather than criticize this static nature of the rules by advocating sensible rules that could have represented 'evolving', it is determined that the rules should be done away with altogether. 'Abolished'. Why? Since no other industry must follow such onerous and 'random' ownership rules. So they have gone from the specific to the general, rules should be standardized across industries regardless of individual pecularities, and the implicit and sometimes explicit reference is that all of these rules should be abolished, that they are harmful to private industry. This is ideology pure and simple, and completely discredits the buildup specific to the media industry the argument had been taking.

These rules have become historic anachronisms that ignore new market conditions and the intense competition for our eyes and ears. Indeed, far from living in a world of "information scarcity" that some fear, we now live in a world of information overload. The number of information and entertainment options at our disposal has almost become overwhelming and most of us struggle to figure out ways to filter and manage all the information we can choose from in an average day.

This is actually a minority of people who suffer from information overload. Most people are not that connected to the 'active' principle of news gathering yet, to 'pull' media, and many of us on the Internet are. And I have no trouble filtering out excess information. It's taken some time, but it was really just a new and chaotic environment, which I had not mastered, that caused this feeling of overload, not the availability of the information itself. There is no 'overload' of push media and information in the world, at least in terms of meaningful news and political information. It's mainly entertainment and marketing/advertising push media options that crowd people's heads. And people generally have no problem finding a radio station or band they like to hear and listening to them.

A far greater number of people feel they don't have the information, or are not competent or smart enough to understand the information, that would give them a better sense of how the world and politics works around them. This feeling of helplessness as our society becomes more 'technic' and run by technicians and experts is compounded by endless marketing proposals and advertising messages craftily hitting emotional triggers of fear, sex, scandal and the like. Big Media, in the form of media consolidation and large scales with lesser owners, ensures a consistent presentation of advertising more than anything else. Only those who can pay to play to advertise on these Big Media outlets will be responsible for overload, and it will not be educational in the normal sense. What gets peddled and sold will be standardized from place to place, region to region, medium to medium.

It is important to keep such facts in mind when debating changes to the archaic media ownership rules that the FCC is considering revising. Even as the underlying business structures and relationships in this industry continue to change, the one undeniable reality of our modern media marketplace is that information and entertainment are commodities that cannot be monopolized. Accordingly, the FCC should relegate these outdated media ownership rules to the dustbin of telecom history.

Nothing in this essay, which has traced the development of media, 'undeniably' proves in any way, shape or form that information and entertainment 'cannot be monopolized'. This is pure rhetorical showboating. The conclusion that the 'outdated media ownership rules' should be 'relegated...to the dustbin of telecom history' is wholly unsupported, as showing the media options are expanding rapidly is not ipso facto an argument that monopoly can never occur, and that ownership restrictions aren't in the public's best interest. Further, since these 'archaic' rules have been in place, and this dynamism and innovation has been taken place, there is certainly no alarm that needs to be raised about negative impacts of the current rules. If anything, they have not impeded the growth of media options, while trying to accomplish just such a mission of ensuring such options. It doesn't mean that the FCC's rules are necessarily working either, but certainly nothing is broken. So why change the rules? What's the big deal, the mojo that drives this, the reasoning to shake things up?

Finally, the characterization of the older FCC ownership rules is deceptive. Alternately described as 'stuck...in a time warp', 'historic anachronisms', 'archaic', and 'outdated', the FCC's rules 'regime' is demonized as backwards, while the media reality and options today are described as a 'plethora', and 'astonishing cornucopia'. How has this 'astonishing cornucopia' happened with the onerous influence of 'archaic' media rules which hinder media busines interests? By my watch, pretty dang good. There's no need to change the rules at all. At least I haven't heard a reason yet. These rules are only 30 or so years old...how old is the Constitution? Is it "archaic" and "outdated", especially since the world has changed so much, become so much more dynamic, and we no longer are an agricultural nation?

So let's recap. We get a history of media from 30 years ago to the present, get a confusion of 'data' overload and 'information' overload (information being meaningful data, in this case the meaningful data which concerns us is viewpoints and opinion, not advertising and entertainment), get hit with a sneak ideological attack on all rules that 'artificially' limit business activity, and get blind-sided with a plethora of absolute and unsupported usages of 'undeniably', 'unambiguously', 'undeniable reality', and so on. I'm so glad we don't have to debate this issue, since there is no controversy, and it is clear that media options are endless, and thus we should throw out all rules that have been in place as these media options enjoyed their great expansion.