Media Curmudgeon

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November 20, 2007

Moyers’s Media Myths

Bill Moyers is one of my favorite television personalities. Note that I didn’t call him a journalist, even though he bills himself as one and spends much of his time on and off the airwaves defending journalists, defending free speech, slamming the Bush administrating, and bashing big media—all of which I’m wholeheartedly in favor of as an avowed liberal. But I didn’t call him a journalist because real journalists don’t twist the facts to further their own agenda, which, I regret to say, Moyers has.

In a video introduction to the current “Bill Moyers Journal,” Moyers intones in his calm, sincere, Texas drawl that “despite overwhelming public opposition across the country and the political spectrum, the FCC chairman, Kevin Martin, isn’t letting up in his relentless push to allow a handful of media giants to swallow up more of your local media.” Not exactly unbiased, but he doesn’t twist the facts too far out of shape.

On the video, after a reporter does a package showing FCC public hearings in which people are furious at Martin and rant against his plan to loosen some rules (more about those rules later), Moyers states, “It’s the FCC’s charge to insure competition, localism, and diversity in media.” Most viewers probably nodded their heads in agreement, saying to themselves, “yes, that must be true, Bill Moyers knows what he’s talking about.” Not me.

In the 1970s I was a VP of CBS Radio and a VP and general manager of three NBC radio stations in Chicago and New York. At both companies I went to seminars conducted by lawyers who went over FCC rules and regulations in painful detail because general managers are responsible, first and foremost, to keep a station’s valuable FCC license. I don’t remember ever hearing the words “insure competition, localism, and diversity.” The phrase that was repeated over and over and over again in the FCC rules was that radio and TV stations had to operate in the public’s “good, convenience, and necessity.”

In 1996, Congress passed the Telecommunication Act, which updated many old FCC rules in effect since 1934 and, in effect, deregulated the broadcasting industry and allowed companies like Clear Channel communications to own multiple stations in multiple markets. Clear Channel bought over 1,200 radio stations, as many as eight in major markets, and it was supposed operate them in the public’s good, convenience, and necessity.

I Googled the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and searched the over 120-page document for the words “localism,” “competition,” and “diversity.” As I suspected, I never found those words. Therefore, I surmise that the “FCC’s charge” is what Moyers saw in his dreams. He’s creating his own myth—what he wishes the FCC’s charge to be—in order to promote his own agenda.

Throughout his introductory video, Moyers uses phrases such as “runaway consolidation” and “media giants.” Unfortunately, those concepts, too, are not based on the reality of what’s going on today in the media. In fact, as Jack Shafer points out in his article on Slate titled “Big Media Octopuses, Cutting Off Tentacles: Is the age of media deconsolidation upon us?” many media conglomerates are de-conglomerating because they can’t effectively manage big, sprawling portfolios of media businesses, and Wall Street knows it. Shafer nails it when he writes, “…the current round of media deconsolidation isn't driven by politics, media ‘reformista’ activism, or government regulation. It's all about business. In the long run, entrepreneurs tend to have a very hard time making media conglomeration pay off.”

Shafer also notes that, “E.W. Scripps Co. and Belo Corp. are among the most recent media conglomerates to spin themselves apart. Scripps announced plans in October to cleave itself into two publicly traded companies—a newspaper and television stations group and an outfit owning Scripps' cable channels and online shopping properties. In a similar move earlier in the month, Belo divorced its newspapers from its TV stations to create two new firms. Wall Street, which had urged the breakups, rewarded both companies with bumps in their stock prices.” The New York Times Co., News Corp., Clear Channel, and Disney have all shed media assets in the last several years, and most analysts are predicting that Time Warner’s new CEO, Jeff Bewkes, will sell off AOL and perhaps Time, Inc. Shafer and the facts have debunked Moyers’s media conglomerate myth.

Also, this de-conglomeration trend has the effect of increasing competition, not decreasing it. The other thing that is increasing competition is the Internet--it’s killing newspapers and hurting radio--not the FCC. And that competition comes from the marketplace, not from either lack of or too much government regulation. So much for the FCC’s so-called charge to increase competition; that’s the last thing any radio or television station, media-giant owned or locally owned, wants. So, Moyers’s notion about the FCC needing to increase competition is a myth.

Localism, too, is a fuzzy-headed dream. If the government took broadcast stations away from ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, Clear Channel, or Citadel and gave their frequencies to local owners, does Moyers and the media wonks of the Free Press really believe underfunded local owners with little or no broadcast experience or expertise would do any better? Just look what happened when local governments gave cable companies franchises on the condition that they provided local access channels. What went on those access channels? News, information, or discussion of important issues? No, they were filled with self-absorbed, ugly people talking naked or doing other things that were unwatchable. Moyers’s localism is more than a myth, it’s a nightmare.

I’ll continue to watch “Bill Moyers Journal,” but less frequently and with much more skepticism than in the past. He was much more in his element when he interviewed Joseph Campbell in the PBS program “The Power of Myth.”

Posted by Charles Warner at November 20, 2007 09:01 AM

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Media Curmudgeon at November 20, 2007 11:40 AM writes:

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