Common Dreams - The FCC Seeks to Hinder Female and Minority Broadcast Ownership for Policies Favoring Concentrated Corporate Ownership

Daniel Hanley, policy analyst at the Open Markets Institute, and Beth Brodsky, former Louis Brandeis Law and Political Economy Fellow at the Open Markets Institute, write in Common Dreams showing that the FCC’s push to restructure America’s broadcast communication ownership would be a crushing blow to the already deficient levels of female and minority ownership in the broadcast industry.

Over the last 17 years, the Federal Communications Commission has abandoned its Civil Rights Era stance and policies on female and minority broadcast ownership. As a consequence of its actions, the agency is handing control of media ownership outlets such as radio and television broadcasting stations to multimillion-dollar companies.

Last week, the FCC sought the Supreme Court’s endorsement to radically restructure America’s broadcast communication ownership, a move sure to be detrimental to women and minorities. The agency based its justifications on a flawed analysis and a distorted view of its historical mission. The Supreme Court should reject the agency’s deregulatory attempts, and the incoming Biden administration should develop a policy to improve economic equity and elevate women and minority ownership in the broadcasting industry.

The FCC is the national telecommunications regulator. Congress created the agency during the New Deal in 1934 and endowed it with broad structural powers to manage the entire communications sector, including the radio, telegraph, and television industries, and eventually the satellite, cable, and internet industries. With its broad structural authority, the agency is supposed to ensure that broadcasters serve the public interest. However, an agency without policies to ensure equity in ownership is not acting in the public interest.

The lack of diversity among broadcast station owners leads to a lack of diversity among reporters, editors, and others who decide what is news, what content is broadcasted, and how different demographic groups are depicted in the media.

Soon after its inception in regulating a burgeoning new industry, the FCC created policies to further its public interest mandate by deconcentrating communications markets. The FCC specifically chose to operate in line with an anti-monopoly framework to prevent any individual corporate entity from obtaining unchecked and undue power over America’s communication systems. For example, the FCC in 1941 required NBC to divest its “Blue Network,” which subsequently became ABC due to the agency’s concern that NBC held too much power in the radio industry. In 1975, the FCC developed cross-ownership rules to encourage local ownership, and to prevent a single corporate power from becoming the sole voice of a local community through owning and acquiring multiple television, radio, and newspaper outlets.

Read the full article on Common Dreams here.