Category: FCC

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Net Neutrality’s Poison Petition

For those in the communications policy business, perhaps the most jaw-dropping datum to issue from Tuesday’s elections is this: Of the 95 candidates for the House and Senate who signed a petition encouraging “net neutrality” regulation, all of them lost.  Not some of them.  Not most of them.  All of them.

It’s really quite remarkable.  Not even the Black Death killed everybody.  But there it is, a new world record for political toxicity.  The humorous aspects of this debacle aside, there is a serious lesson here: There is no appetite in this country for regulatory schemes whose effect is to promote government (and a few companies) at the expense of private-sector investment generally.

Yet this is precisely what net neutrality regulations, whether Lite or industrial strength, would do.  Intended or not, codified regulations would inevitably lead to government meddling in this freest part of the communications industry, and frustrate the kind of investment in the broadband infrastructure without which there can be no growth in this vital sector of the economy.

And for what?  As mentioned here, net neutrality is the condition that obtains today!  Nobody is being deprived or disadvantaged of anything worth talking about.  Indeed, a quick look at the kinds of organizations that have been promoting net neutrality pretty much says it all.

On the one hand we have groups like Free Press, whose interest in the subject is precisely because of the potential in governmental oversight to yoke communications companies to the agenda of the nation’s “progressives.”  While on the other you have a company like Google that, in the best tradition of crony capitalism, wants to tilt public policy in a direction that benefits its private interests.

It is widely believed that FCC Chairman Genachowski  would like the FCC to be relieved of the responsibility of taking on the task of codification of the net neutrality rules.  He is to be commended for his reservations, especially since he is under great pressure from the net neutrality lobbies to act.

The wise course now would be to let the clock run out on any kind of FCC action.  If the Republican gains in Tuesday’s elections don’t speak clearly enough about the matter, surely the fate of the hapless signers of the net neutrality petition does.

[Updated 11-4-10, 1:50 p.m. EDT, to reflect latest election results.]

                                                   

               
The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and not necessarily of The Media Institute, its Board, contributors, or advisory councils.
 

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Shedding Light on Title II and the First Amendment

Now that FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has proposed what Broadcasting & Cable’s John Eggerton artfully calls a “Title II Lite” approach to broadband regulation, it’s a good time to take a second look (or maybe your first) at a recent paper by Robert Corn-Revere.

Bob wrote a Perspectives policy paper for The Media Institute titled “Defining Away the First Amendment,” which we released May 4.

This noted First Amendment attorney makes a crucial point – but a point that has not received adequate attention: “The FCC’s current ability to change the level of First Amendment protection for a medium simply by changing its regulatory definition is quite limited, if not nonexistent.”

Whoa, you mean there’s a First Amendment dimension to this reclassification debate?  You’d never know it by listening to the FCC, or to “net neutrality” supporters like Free Press.  Maybe that’s not surprising, since the First Amendment could very well prove an unwelcome stumbling block for Chairman Genachowski and his net-neutrality ilk.  Easier for them just to ignore it.

But, I would suggest to you, the First Amendment is far too important to ignore here.  In his issue paper, Bob Corn-Revere has shed some much-needed light on a pivotal concern that the FCC has tried to keep in the shadows.  Taking a “lite” approach to Title II reclassification doesn’t absolve the FCC of its constitutional obligations.  If anything, we need more “light” from Bob and others who are willing to hold the FCC accountable for the First Amendment ramifications of its regulatory agenda.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Cute as a Button: The Schemes and ‘Confessions’ of Reed Hundt

Sorry to say, there are people in public life who, were hubris a lubricant, could forego ambulation and just glide on down the road.  Reed Hundt, the former chairman of the FCC, is one such person.

Hundt is back in the news these days because policies he clandestinely pursued while chairman are now thought by some (including Hundt himself) to be coming to fruition at the hands of his former FCC aides and confidantes, one of whom, Julius Genachowski, is now chairman.

This, and more, was revealed in a speech Hundt gave last month at Columbia University.  The subject of his address was the national broadband plan, then set to be released by the FCC just a week later, and what he characterized as a “confession or admission” of the role he played, years earlier, in using his office as chairman to systematically elevate broadband, at the expense of broadcasting, as the “common medium.”

To quote the great man himself: “The choice to favor the Internet over broadcasting was initially made in first-draft form by some of the people who are now running the FCC.”

One can only imagine how happy this revelation must have made the current FCC chairman since, if we’re to believe Hundt, not only was Genachowski a co-conspirator, so to speak, he was just a tagalong – the horse to Hundt’s Lady Godiva.

Lest you think for even a minute that the gentleman feels remorse about any of this, be advised: He doesn’t.  Quite the contrary, Hundt is pleased as punch with the way he handled things, amused even, and he wants you to see it the same way.  Rather like a school boy pulling a prank on the headmaster, Hundt sees his scheming not only as smart and justifiable but as positively cute in the way it confounded all but those few in the know.

How else to explain his characterization of his efforts to suppress broadcasting – by delaying, for instance, its transition to HDTV – as “a little naughty?”  Or his boast, re the ability of people to use the telephone network, for free, to connect to the Internet, as a case of the government “stealing the value from the telephone network and giving it to society?”

Not everyone sees the humor.  One who is particularly unamused is Gordon Smith, formerly Senator Smith, and now head of the National Association of Broadcasters. As reported in Broadcasting & Cable, Smith had this to say when asked what he thought of Hundt’s speech: “Frankly, I was rather offended, as a former member of the Senate Commerce Committee, that his secret musings were never shared with the elected representatives of the American people.”

Actually, Hundt’s Columbia performance isn’t the first time he’s spoken (what shall we call it?) “candidly.”  Years earlier there was the book, You Say You Want a Revolution, that he wrote not long after leaving the FCC.

Sandwiched between characterizations of some of his fellow commissioners as the “Gang of Three,” and innumerable accounts of the commercial rabble with whom he was obliged to spend time, Hundt wrote some things that are of a piece with his Columbia speech.

One of these describes a meeting he had in 1995 with Bill Gates. Hundt writes:

We had come to appeal to Gates’ self-interest.  As everyone on the West Coast knew, computing was heading directly toward communications….  With Gates as commander-in-chief, the entrepreneurs could win a lobbying war even against the powerful broadcasters….

I wanted Gates to go after the spectrum, because the auction was such a pure and sensible goal.  Later, depending on how the meeting went, we would ask for his help in connecting every classroom to the information highway….

If those who bought the spectrum at an open auction could ignore the networks’ deal with Congress and abandon high-definition television, they could transmit digital information to PCs….

Gates rocked in his chair.  His eyes magnified by his glasses, he stared at me, and asked urgently, "Does anyone else know about this?"

Elsewhere in the book, Hundt describes his attendance at a meeting hosted by the Gores (Tipper and Al), also in 1995, on the topic of Families and the Media:  

Then the President and Vice President each said they would support the children’s television initiative.  I had become part of the Administration’s political agenda – perhaps the first time in history that FCC issues were in the center ring of the political circus.  Al singled me out in the crowd.  I stood up.  The auditorium applauded.  The event made the national news.  It was intoxicating; it was much more important to be there in Nashville than at, say, an NAB convention.

Many people would agree that the Internet already is, or will become, the “common medium.”  And in an age when Saul Alinsky is held up as a role model, and the ends justify the means, views and acts like Hundt’s will almost certainly escape widespread censure.  But there’s this one small problem with the government picking the industrial winners and losers: What happens if they’re wrong?

Of course we know that governmental estimates and projections are never wrong.  But imagine that sometime in the future it happens.  Wouldn’t that be something?  Because, you know, in that case the government would not only have distorted the marketplace, it might have created problems it hadn’t even considered.

As it happens, there’s a claim in Hundt’s book that hints of this very problem.  In the same chapter in which he wrote of his meeting with Bill Gates, Hundt claimed that “big-screen televisions would cost so much that less than one percent of Americans would buy them.”

Imagine our surprise, then, when we check now with people at the Consumer Electronics Association, and are told that, in 2010, almost half (about 47 percent) of all TV sets sold are big screen.  Could this mean, Hundt’s furtive schemes notwithstanding, that the Internet won’t be the only common medium?  Go figure.

Cross posted at Huffington Post, April 21, 2010.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

D.C. Circuit’s ‘Net Neutrality’ Decision

The D.C. Circuit Court’s decision, while obviously correct, will not slake the thirst of anyone looking for intellectual arguments for or against the FCC’s proposed regulation of the ISPs’ network-management practices. Because the court ruled that the FCC lacked the "ancillary" authority it asserted, the body of the decision amounts to little more than a refutation of the respondents’ argument that earlier Supreme Court decisions provided precedent for the FCC’s claims.

The "legalistic" nature of this decision aside, there is something important here. It is widely surmised (and feared) that, thus rebuffed, the FCC will attempt to get to its desired result – network neutrality, as it’s called – by attempting to regulate ISPs, like phone companies, under Title II of the Communications Act.

But look what’s happening here. On the basis of claims of abuse so slim they’re very nearly invisible, the FCC has proposed to expand and codify that agency’s "Internet principles" in a way that guarantees its regulatory oversight of the freest, most democratic, and fastest-growing communications medium in the country. And for what? Because of fears that Internet providers might look for ways to insulate everybody else from the negative consequences of the actions of a relative handful of bandwidth hogs?

One of the intervenors in this case – Free Press, whose sole reason for being is the subjugation of the commercial media and communications companies to the yoke of government – coined the phrase "Net Neutrality: The First Amendment of the Internet." The reality, as someone put it, is that codified net neutrality is more nearly "The Fairness Doctrine of the Internet."

For now, nobody knows for sure what will happen next – whether the FCC, or Congress, will push ahead in the conviction that this too is an issue of such "transformative" importance the only thing that matters is getting it done. But in this, as in so many things, the wiser course would be to rethink the matter entirely. It rarely happens that government acts more efficiently than the marketplace, and net neutrality is almost certainly no exception to that rule.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

The Intrinsic Menace in ‘Media Reform’

Christian theologians refer to the first three books of the New Testament as the synoptic gospels.  This, because of their similarities in content and order.  The new religion of “media reform,” whose principal tenet is that government needs to “save” journalism, is developing its own synoptic gospels – the gospel according to the Knight Foundation, Free Press, and just now rounding into view, the FCC.

For those who, until now, have enjoyed the luxury of knowing little about the handiwork of this threesome, a few words are in order:

The Knight Foundation (the vestigial remains of the defunct Knight-Ridder newspaper empire) is one of the country’s largest grant-giving foundations, with assets in the neighborhood of $2 billion.  Like Glenn Close in "Fatal Attraction" ("I won’t be ignored, Dan"), the Knight Foundation is not going away.

Through its gifts to educational and nonprofit organizations, the foundation funds journalism programs as its “signature work.”  It recently joined forces with the Aspen Institute to create the Knight Commission, the product of whose labor is the recently released report on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy (not to be confused with the information needs of community Democrats), an opus that, as reported here, is trivial and irrelevant, about 50-50.

Free Press is the absurd name of a paleoleftist organization that sees government influence over the media as a way to advance its larger political views, a point made both explicitly and inadvertently in the published opinions of the group’s founder and Maximum Leader, Professor Robert McChesney.  Free Press (or its lobbying arm, the Free Press Action Fund) convenes national “media reform” conferences; encourages laws and regulations that aim to increase the role of public media and reduce that of the commercial media; and coins amusingly infantile slogans like “Net neutrality: the First Amendment of the Internet.”

The FCC, of course, is the regulatory agency with sway over the affairs of the media, which, under chairman Julius Genachowski, has embarked on a number of “media reform” initiatives that parallel, if they aren’t in actual collaboration with, those of Free Press and the Knight Foundation.

Genachowski, for instance, was presented with a copy of the Knight Commission report at a publication ceremony at the Newseum, and in an interview with Broadcasting & Cable, the head of the FCC’s Future of Media initiative made explicit reference to the Knight Commission in answer to a question about what form his recommendations would take.

So what “media reform” policy positions do these organizations share?  As shown in their own comments or testimony, that of groups they fund, and/or that of others writing about them, at least three items can be identified.  They favor “net neutrality,” increased funding for public media, and an expanded role, through explicit tax breaks or other changes in the tax laws, for nonprofit organizations.

Looked at one at a time, and from a distance, none of these may seem like an unreasonable objective.  But taken together, and examined closely, they constitute a profound assault on some of our most cherished ideals about the media and its role in our national affairs.

Take “net neutrality,” for instance.  In both the literal and figurative sense of the term, network neutrality is the condition that obtains today.  Nobody is being favored or denied by ISPs of anything worth talking about.  But the proponents of net neutrality don’t want to leave well enough alone.  At the prospective cost of a reduced build-out of the broadband infrastructure (and the guaranteed intrusion of government into the affairs of the hitherto unregulated Internet), Free Press, the Knight Foundation, and the FCC want to codify and extend the Commission’s so-called Internet principles.

But by putting the camel’s nose of government under the tent of the Internet, codified net neutrality regulations would threaten the independence of the freest communications sector in the country, and thereby pose a direct challenge to both the letter and the spirit of the First Amendment, as well briefed by constitutional scholar Lawrence Tribe.

Proposals to change the tax laws so as to permit for-profit media companies to operate, in whole or in part, as nonprofits, or to explicitly authorize gifts to commercial media from nonprofit grant-giving foundations, or (as the Knight Commission recommends) to provide tax credits for investigative journalism, are similarly problematical.

As with net neutrality, the threat in amending the tax laws along these lines is that by doing so one lets the fox in the hen house.  How, for instance, would it be possible to insulate the media from charges of bias, and the concomitant threats to their tax-exempt status, when their political coverage offended one party or the other?  Might this not have the practical, if not the intended, effect of reducing the amount and kind of political coverage, like candidate endorsements?

Calls for greater funding of public media like NPR and PBS, through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, are not so much constitutionally objectionable as they are ludicrously untimely.  Here we are as a nation, teetering on the brink of insolvency and with millions unemployed, and the recommendation is that we spend more taxpayer dollars on… public broadcasting?  Even without obliging PBS stations to commit suicide by requiring them to reorient their news programming toward local news (as all of the media reform advocates recommend), surely this idea is going nowhere soon.

Nor should it. News coverage by the public media in the United States represents a tiny, and because of that tolerable, adjunct to the vastly more important commercial media, whose independence from government is the sine qua non of its editorial independence.

Whatever one’s qualms or fears about the media of the future, the importance of independent (read: commercial) media is clear.  For this reason, the crisis in “medialand” is no cause to throw the baby out with the bath water, particularly where the “solutions” offered – like those of the media reform crowd – ignore decades of experience in the way the world works.

There are some people who understand this and some who don’t, but should.  An example of the former is FCC Commissioner McDowell who, in obvious discomfort by the direction the agency’s media initiative appears headed, has questioned the “constitutional, legal, and policy implications” of any government effort to “preserve or change journalism.”

Those who, in large numbers, do not get it include much of the “netroots nation” and progressives generally.  But here’s an exercise that might provide a cure for this.  Imagine a time, not too many years in the future, when the GOP controls the presidency, the House, and the Senate.  The Republican president has appointed a majority of the commissioners at the FTC and the FCC, and has, like all presidents, substantial influence with the independent agencies.

In this environment, how confident would progressives be that the Republicans would not attempt to use the FCC’s oversight of the Internet, as established through the years-earlier codification of net neutrality rules, or sway over the committees of Congress (and through it of the CPB), to influence the content of the media, commercial and public?

It is, of course, a rhetorical question.

First published here on The Huffington Post, Feb. 22, 2010.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Net Neutrality in Retreat?

If you’re a “net neutrality” critic, and dabble in schadenfreude, things are looking up!  First, there was oral argument in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals (Comcast v. FCC), during which the panel clearly appeared to reject the notion that the FCC had authority to pursue its ambitions in this regard.

Then, just last week, there was the White Paper filed at the FCC on behalf of Time Warner Cable by constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe, arguing that net neutrality as proposed is likely unconstitutional under the First Amendment.

Last but not least is the report, debated but out there, that the Administration is cooling on net neutrality because it fears that it might depress the amount of capital the private sector invests in broadband deployment — an argument also made here — thereby defeating the goal of ubiquitous broadband access and stunting job growth as well.

One can only imagine the anguish such a turn would engender in the net neutrality crowd.  A conflict between Free Press and the Administration?  How could they reconcile it?  What manner of prose could they summon to express their innermost feelings?  The “vituperative retreat” perhaps, or maybe something more stylish, like an Olbermannesque commentary.  Perhaps they’d initiate, simultaneously, 100 diary threads on DailyKos.

Well, we don’t know for sure but we can dream.  What we do know is that Chairman Genachowski’s plan of extending and codifying the FCC’s "Internet principles,” announced with such confident fanfare not so long ago, is now coming under heavy fire from lots of quarters.

Laurence Tribe’s brief is particularly noteworthy, both for its line of argument and for the road map it lays out for a court challenge on constitutional grounds, should net neutrality be formally adopted.  To quote just one of several poignant passages therein:

Net neutrality proposals rest on the mistaken premise that the constitution gives the government a role in ensuring that the voices of various speakers receive equivalent attention and that audiences receive equal access to all speakers.  In fact, a central purpose of the First Amendment is to prevent the government from making just such choices about private speech, including decisions about what amount of any given kind of speech is optimal.

That Tribe was an active supporter of the candidacy of President Barack Obama, and served as a judicial adviser to Obama’s campaign, suggests that he has the Administration’s ear on such matters.  This, coupled with speculation about the reason for the departure of Susan Crawford, a strong proponent of net neutrality, lends weight to the notion that the Administration may be reconsidering its erstwhile support of net neutrality regulation.

If so it would just be another example, as H.L. Mencken put it, that for every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Stuart Benjamin: The FCC’s ‘Spectrum Reformer’

Amid their other problems, broadcasters now have a new one: the FCC’s recently appointed Scholar in Residence, Stuart Benjamin, a law school professor at Duke University.  According to an FCC press release, Benjamin will work on “spectrum reform,” among other issues.  The problem that broadcasters have is with some articles written by Professor Benjamin, earlier this year, on that very subject.

One such, “Roasting the Pig To Burn Down the House,” seeks to answer the question being asked by all fair-minded people: “Should we welcome new regulations on broadcasters that will make broadcasting unprofitable?”  And the answer, according to Benjamin, is “yes.”  Or, as he puts it: “Some regulations that would be undesirable standing on their own will be desirable once we factor in the degree to which they will hasten the demise of over-the-air broadcasting.”

In the same piece Professor Benjamin happily acknowledges, in passing, something that broadcasters have argued – namely that some new administrative regulations, like the so-called advisory boards, “could prove fairly costly.”

A few months later, whilst opining on the Volokh Conspiracy blog site, Benjamin gleefully commented on another rueful development, a Supreme Court decision on indecency regulations (FCC v. Fox) that, as he puts it, “makes life worse for local stations” that can’t afford tape delay systems.  As with the added expense of advisory boards, Benjamin sees this too as a good thing.  “Local television broadcasters,” he says, ”have a new disincentive to airing live local events – and viewers have less reason to watch local broadcasters.”

Never mind for a minute that Benjamin’s comments are informed by what he sees as the inevitable collapse of broadcasting (he gives it only about 20 years to live, even without a nudge), and that he sincerely believes that broadcast TV is not the highest and best use of the spectrum.  The remarkable thing is why the FCC would bring aboard, and give this particular portfolio to, someone with Benjamin’s baggage?

It would be funny if it were a joke.  But as one long-time broadcasting executive put it, it raises real questions about the kind of personnel vetting that’s going on at the FCC.  If views like those that Benjamin has published aren’t enough to disqualify him from appointment to the position he’s just been given, what would it take?  A manual on how to poison station managers?

The dust has barely settled on the government’s years-long campaign to engineer TV’s digital conversion – a conversion that many broadcasters think holds great promise for their industry – and along comes this character, as out of some film noir production, whose ghoulish fantasy is to put broadcasters out of the broadcasting business.

Not to worry, though.  Once broadcasting has been polished off, the FCC can focus all its energy on regulating the Internet.

Posted on By Richard T. Kaplar

Net Neutrality: Whose First Amendment?

It shouldn’t come as any great revelation that when the government proposes regulations affecting the media, there very well might be implications for the First Amendment.  Raising such concerns, and then examining their validity, is a normal part of the regulatory process.

Kyle McSlarrow did just that last Wednesday in a speech to a Media Institute luncheon audience.  As president and CEO of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association,  McSlarrow was rightly concerned that the FCC’s proposed regulatory enforcement of “net neutrality” would impair the First Amendment rights of Internet service providers, especially to the extent that they offer other types of programming services apart from Internet access.  He also noted that such rules could impair the free speech of start-up content providers who are willing to pay extra for priority distribution of their content to better compete with established entities, and for others who use the Internet.  

The response to McSlarrow’s speech by many proponents of net neutrality regulation was nothing short of remarkable for its rancor.

The underlying assumption of this net neutrality crowd and their ilk was the tired old mantra: Big media are bad.  Corporations are bad.  Corporations don’t deserve First Amendment rights.  The bloggers from this camp (including a former Free Press lawyer) seemed at once incredulous and offended that anyone (except maybe Washington lobbyists) could assert with a straight face that media companies are speakers with First Amendment rights.  

The other underlying assumption involves the revisionist view that the First Amendment is a tool the government has an obligation to use affirmatively to promote diversity of speech, rather than what it was created to be: a protection against government censorship of speech.

It would be bad enough if the reactions to McSlarrow’s speech suffered only from flawed assumptions like these.  That wouldn’t even be so terrible, because one can always challenge another’s assumptions and hope to engage in something resembling a serious debate.

It’s possible to do that, for example, with the response offered by the ACLU, which noted that ISPs do have First Amendment rights when they’re providing their own content, but should function as common carriers (like phone companies) when they’re carrying the content of others.  Whether tiered pricing for different levels of service amounts to discrimination and implicates free speech is at least something that can be debated.    

But the level of vitriol is running so high among many in the net neutrality crowd that some writers are totally twisting what McSlarrow said, and attributing to him words he never uttered and positions he never (and I believe would never) take.  For example, blogger Marvin Ammori (with the Free Press connections) wrote: “According to the NCTA’s Kyle McSlarrow … Americans (like you) don’t have rights to access or upload content on the Internet.”  FALSE.  McSlarrow never said any such thing.  Ammori calls McSlarrow’s reasoning “silly” and “offensive.”  But if anything is silly and offensive, it is Ammori’s fabrications.  

One is reminded of the Cold War, when the Soviet propaganda machine excelled at “disinformation” – false information which, if repeated enough and eventually picked up by a credible outlet, would be regarded as true.  Ordinarily I wouldn’t bother commenting on the more egregious responses to McSlarrow’s speech, because they’re just not worthy of serious comment.  But I’m taking the time because so much of what has been written needs to be identified for what it is – disinformation – that will only stifle meaningful debate and do a disservice to the First Amendment.   

And while we’re talking about this constitutional guarantee, let’s not forget the big picture, which can easily become obscured by the details (and heat) of the moment.  Do we really want the FCC regulating a whole new realm – the Internet – which heretofore has been a safe haven for free speech?  Virtually everyone in the net neutrality camp seems to think this is a great idea.  I do not.  In fact, I think it’s a terrible idea.  For speech to be truly free, government regulators should be kept as far away as possible, whatever the medium.  Maybe this is where the real debate over net neutrality and the First Amendment should focus.       

Posted on By Richard T. Kaplar

Dueling Philosophies on Minority Ownership

What happens when you invite the FCC’s two veteran commissioners to speak about the media at a Rainbow PUSH Coalition symposium?  When one of the commissioners is Michael Copps, and the other is Robert McDowell, you get two very different views of where things stand and how they could be improved, as we saw on Nov. 20.

Copps, a Democrat, is a long-time foe of large media companies.  So he uses phrases like “excessive media consolidation,” “big media run awry,” “tsunami of consolidation,” and the punchline: “Minorities have suffered greatly because of consolidation.”  

One of his proposals to “put some justice back into our ownership policies” would involve a “public interest licensing system for broadcasters.”  Copps would like the Commission to “go back to having some guidelines to make sure stations are consulting with their audiences on what kinds of programming people would like.”  But wait, I think we already have such a system.  It’s called “ratings.”

Copps also favors something called a “full file review,” which would have the Commission award certain broadcast licenses by considering an applicant’s “experiences in overcoming disadvantages,” including race and gender discrimination.  (This sounds like a lawsuit waiting to be filed, but that’s another story.)  In other words, Copps views the FCC as the referee in a fight between “big media” and the little guy, where the solution is a tight rein on ownership regulations.
    
Robert McDowell sees things differently.  For minorities to get ahead in broadcasting and other media, Republican McDowell is quite clear about what is needed: access to capital.  “An important priority for me in my three-and-a-half years on the Commission has been to help create a competitive environment that allows minority entrepreneurs and other new entrants a real opportunity to build viable communications businesses,” he told the Rainbow PUSH group.
    
McDowell noted that he enthusiastically supported the Commission’s 2007 Diversity Order, which contained nine measures to help small entrepreneurs acquire capital or use their financial resources more efficiently.  He has also called for a tax certificate program to help disadvantaged businesses.  
    
At the same time, McDowell is keenly aware of the unintended and hurtful consequences of regulations (of the sort favored by Copps) aimed at helping small, local media owners  – like a “localism” proposal to reinstate a 20-year-old rule requiring stations to be manned throughout their broadcast day (technology notwithstanding), or onerous “enhanced disclosure” requirements so complex that they could require the hiring of additional employees.   
    
In short: On the question of disadvantaged minorities, Copps sees the culprit as large media companies.  From his perspective, the FCC must be a strict regulator of media ownership.  McDowell sees the culprit as the lack of access to capital.  He would envision the FCC as a facilitator, creating policies to generate financial opportunities for entrepreneurs.
    
Whose view is more accurate and whose solution is more likely to succeed?  On both counts, my money is on McDowell.   

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Commissioner Michael Copps and Media Ownership

Owing to his earnest and mild-mannered (if intellectually scruffy) ways, FCC Commissioner Michael Copps has rarely inspired anger.  No matter how wrong-headed his views – and he’s been wrong about virtually everything for the whole of his time as a Commissioner – he’s been accorded that kind of tolerance that people bestow on those seen to be sincere and to mean well.

That’s about to change.  In the midst of the worst economy – and potentially fatal problems for that part of the economy occupied by American newspapers and broadcasters – Copps is saying and doing things that infuriate.

The most recent, and onerous, examples occurred just yesterday and today when, according to stories in Broadcasting & Cable, Copps demonstrated, yet again, how insulated he is from the world of fact and logic.

Presiding (alone) over an FCC workshop convened to hear the views of academics on the subject of media ownership on Monday, “Copps warned against putting too much stock in the doom and gloom scenarios about the health of TV and newspapers, suggesting that trying to ‘save’ the media should not translate to a lighter re-regulatory hand.”

Then today, at yet another workshop, Copps expressed the opinion (as reported by B&C) that “if the FCC can’t rejuvenate shuttered newsrooms, put the brakes on ‘mind-numbing "monoprogramming"’ and otherwise turn the tide … of consolidation, then ‘maybe those who want the spectrum back have the better of the argument after all.’”

And so there you have it.  The parlous state of the TV and newspaper industries, according to Michael Copps, is nothing to be worried about.  It’s just a rumor.  No need to lighten the regulatory load.  In fact, if broadcasters don’t start programming the way Copps would like, maybe we’ll just take their spectrum away from them.

The series of workshops in question have one more day to run. Plenty of time, in other words, for Copps to give us the benefit of even more of this stuff.