Media Put on a Show to Change FCC Rules

One of the guilty pleasures of covering business comes from hearing executives try to defend some openly venal and self-interested strategy as being all about the public interest.

Often the strategy in question is aimed at exterminating rivals -- naturally described as a means of enhancing competition. This is how the seven Baby Bells, into which the AT&T; trust was shattered by court order in 1984, have managed to reassemble themselves into four near-monopolies, like globules of mercury coalescing back into bigger blobs. It’s all about making them into stronger competitors, see?

The most pernicious such masquerade currently onstage involves the U.S. media business, where what was once a vast landscape of independent TV and film studios, broadcast networks, cable channels, cable and satellite systems and newspapers is homogenizing into half a dozen enormous conglomerates. Federal regulations designed to limit such concentration have been around for decades -- some date back to the 1940s -- but they have been steadily eroding as surely as the polar ice shelf.

With a vote scheduled June 2, the Federal Communications Commission is poised to eliminate or liberalize the whole roster of rules governing how many local TV stations or how many radio and TV stations in the same market one entity can own. The agency also is contemplating gutting rules that prohibit co-ownership of TV stations and newspapers in the same city or the ownership of more than one TV network.

This plays into the hands of the media bigs, who argue that the proliferation of news and entertainment programming -- hundreds of TV channels, thousands of radio stations and the Internet -- has turned these rules into antiques.

“The indisputable fact is that American consumers today enjoy a greater quantity, quality and variety of television programming than at any time in our nation’s history,” Mark Pedowitz, executive vice president of ABC Entertainment TV, kept repeating, like a mantra, at a public forum on media concentration sponsored this week by USC and the FCC. He also sought sympathy for the “deteriorating economics” of running a TV network, which boils down to the necessity of having to pay more and more to the producers of monster hits such as “Friends” and “ER.”

What he didn’t say was that an increasing share of this diverse entertainment and news production and distribution is controlled by a small cadre of big companies, including his employer, Walt Disney Co. Nor did he acknowledge the social rationale for fighting such concentration.

As it happens, a majority of the FCC also is trying to keep those elements out of the discussion, partially by leaving murky exactly what the commission is planning to enact next month.

“We are on the verge of dramatically altering the nation’s media landscape, and we don’t even have a draft proposal to vote on,” said FCC Commissioner Michael Copps, one of two dissenters on the five-member panel. “What’s at stake are fundamental values and democratic virtues.”

Copps is eloquent on the subject of what is fueling this headlong rush to vote, which is being pushed by FCC Chairman Michael K. Powell. Simply put, it’s the desire of the leading media companies to grow even bigger.

Powell, for his part, has clearly fallen under the same spell as many other Washington regulators in the deregulatory age: He believes his proper role is to help businesses make money by cooking up a public-interest rationale for dismantling the rules, when he should be forcing them to tailor their financial expectations to the demands of the public weal.

There’s no question that lifting the caps would set off a land rush that would make the Oklahoma sooners of 1889 look like a bunch of loafers. Among the companies chafing under the restraints are Viacom Inc. and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., whose broadcast empires exceed the FCC’s limit on nationwide audience reach. Tribune Co. is hoping that repeal of the newspaper-TV cross-ownership ban will allow it to hang on to TV stations in cities where it also owns newspapers -- New York; Hartford, Conn.; Miami; and L.A., where it owns The Times.

The FCC has not spent much time exploring how increasing media concentration will affect -- just to name a few stakeholders -- independent TV and movie producers (who will have fewer bidders for their wares), small businesses (which will pay higher prices for ad time), local politicians and community activists (who are bound to be ignored by the national owners of local stations), and the average TV viewer (who will be confronted with a larger selection of interchangeable garbage).

True, the FCC does claim to have sponsored nearly a dozen studies of media ownership issues. Of most of these the less said the better, other than they would need to sit in an oven for about 12 days each at 375 degrees to be even half-baked. Many purport to subject the implications of media concentration to sophisticated statistical analysis, but end up swearing at common sense. My favorite is one that examined the 2000 presidential-election coverage of co-owned newspapers and television stations in 10 cities to determine whether they tended jointly to support Bush or Gore, or split their vote.

The survey found that in some cases the outlets matched one another’s slants, and in some they didn’t. But what makes the project so blindingly irrelevant isn’t that it was inconclusive; rather, it was that slanted news coverage of national politics is not the real problem with media consolidation. Rather, the disappearance of independent voices is felt most deeply in coverage of local issues and politics.

Don’t tell me how the papers and TV stations felt about Bush and Gore, but how they covered Villaraigosa versus Hahn or the fate of the state budget. Viacom, which owns KCBS-TV Channel 2 and KCAL-TV Channel 9 in Los Angeles, recently consolidated their news assignment desks, which removes one local decision-making voice from the mix. (The company boasts of programming a combined 11 hours of local news on the two stations every day, but I believe that at least three of those hours are devoted to interviewing the losing contestants from CBS’ “Survivor,” and most of the rest to covering freeway car chases.)

This isn’t the only aspect of media consolidation to which Powell’s FCC majority seems willfully blind. Opponents of ownership caps keep arguing that the explosion of TV programming, as evinced by the scores of cable channels aimed at marginal interest groups, shows there’s no danger that mega-conglomerates will be able to wipe out diversity on the dial.

“How can you get more diverse than a bass-fishing channel?” Powell recently asked an interviewer. This is the sort of comment that proves George Orwell’s continuing value as a commentator on political flapdoodle. For one thing, there doesn’t actually appear to be a bass-fishing channel. Even if there were, the issue isn’t whether some channel with a few thousand subscribers exists, but the ownership of the channels that actually dominate the cable lineup.

The answer is: the usual suspects. Of the 25 top-rated cable channels in the country, 20 are at least one-third owned by one of the five biggest media companies in the country. Want to sell your program to TNT, Lifetime, USA, Nickelodeon or FX? You’ll be dealing with, respectively, AOL Time Warner Inc., Disney, Vivendi Universal, Viacom and News Corp.’s Fox division. Some diversity.

Can anything stop the FCC’s deregulation juggernaut? Last month, 15 senators sent Powell a letter asking him to slow it down. (Politicians are fully alive to the dangers of having their local paper and broadcast outlets concentrated in the hands of someone they may have teed off.) But Powell has not budged.

Even some media moguls are beginning to exhibit overeaters’ remorse, like the ice-cream addict who feels queasy after a full pint of Rocky Road. Ted Turner, who started his Superstation and CNN empires on an entrepreneurial shoestring before selling them to Time Warner, last week lamented publicly that “the media is too concentrated, too few people own too much. It’s not healthy.”

Of course, he was really trying only to score off his old foe Rupert Murdoch, whose jingoistic TV and newspaper properties Turner accused of “warmongering” during the recent hostilities. Turner hasn’t yet turned the spotlight on himself, or he’d remember that he still happens to be vice chairman of AOL Time Warner, the largest entertainment and media company in the world.

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Golden State appears every Monday and Thursday. Michael Hiltzik can be reached at golden.state@latimes.com.