Alert! Already too much concentration of information sources

FCC Will Hear Debate On Broadening Media Ownership
February 27, 2003
By HARRY BERKOWITZ, Special To The Courant

In a debate that could overhaul decades of media policy, federal regulators will gather today in Richmond, Va., to hear arguments on whether to remove restrictions on ownership of newspapers and TV and radio stations by media giants.

The debate centers on how much the media landscape has changed in an age of the Internet and cable TV and whether the changes justify loosening or removing many of the restrictions on who owns what.

The issue is heating up at a time when the Federal Communications Commission, which is sponsoring the public hearing, has been fractured by a pair of 3-2 votes last week on a telecommunications issue that put chairman Michael Powell on the losing side.

For the media conglomerates, the possible changes in ownership rules could mean more mergers and more profits even though some of the past combinations have backfired.

One company keeping a close watch is Tribune Co., which owns both newspapers and television stations across the country - including both a newspaper and TV station in several markets, Hartford among them.

Its Connecticut holdings include The Courant and WTIC-TV, Fox News 61, both in Hartford.

For consumer advocates, the proposed changes raise red flags about cutting down on the range of diversity and local input - and about putting too much power over what news and entertainment the public sees and hears in too few hands.

"To the extent that you change the rules, you are going to have a very different media universe," said Blair Levin, a media analyst at Legg Mason in Baltimore and a former FCC chief of staff. "There is a risk that if you deregulate too much, you have essentially allowed too small a group of people to control the information flow."

Much of the focus at the FCC hearing will be not just on the testimony but on how one of the five FCC commissioners reacts to all of it. The commissioner, Kevin Martin, took the spotlight last week as the swing vote in decisions involving discount access to regional phone company lines. Martin, who like Powell is a Republican, voted with the two Democrats on the five-member panel.

"People will be paying more attention to Kevin's every word, comma, pause, wink, nod, whatever he does, than they would have a few weeks ago," Levin said. "He will inevitably sit in something of a swing-vote position, although it is more likely in this case that the difference between him and the chairman on this set of issues will be smaller."

The stakes are high for media companies such as CBS parent Viacom, NBC parent General Electric, Fox parent News Corp. and ABC parent Walt Disney Co., which have generally pushed for looser limits.

"The overwhelming weight of the evidence suggests that today's extraordinarily vast and exceptionally diverse media marketplace provides more than enough competition to ensure that the commission's policy goals will be met," Fox, NBC and Viacom said in a joint filing to the FCC.

One rule, dating to 1941, which a federal appeals court told the FCC to reconsider, limits the stations that one entity can own to 35 percent of U.S. households. Another rule limits cable TV ownership to 30 percent of the cable and satellite TV market. Other rules prohibit owning a newspaper and TV station in the same city. Others limit the number of TV and radio stations one entity can own in a single city.

Tribune is seeking to lift the newspaper-TV station cross-ownership ban - a change Powell and Martin favor - and loosen local limits while avoiding the national-cap debate.

Powell has said that although he is concerned about media concentration the current rules are outdated and he supports changing the national limits on cable and TV station ownership.

Harry Berkowitz is a Newsday reporter.