Commentary : ’86 ELECTIONS SIGNAL BROADCASTING CHANGES

Six years of rapid, frenetic changes in the nation’s mass media appear headed for an end as a result of last week’s election.

And Mark S. Fowler, Ronald Reagan’s point man on radio and TV issues, may be on his way out as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.

With Democrats controlling the Senate and stronger still in the House of Representatives, Wash ington insiders say conservative Republican efforts to deregulate the electronic media and to redefine the social role of publicly licensed radio and TV companies are dead for the next two years.

Conservative Washington attorney Bruce Fein, one of the architects of deregulation, said the election means the momentum of the last six years “is just going to grind to a halt. There won’t be any (new deregulatory) initiatives.”

The new Congress is not likely to continue approving a Fowler deregulation agenda that turned the communications business into a multibillion-dollar flea market, led to the widespread gutting of local radio journalism, encouraged sharp cutbacks in network TV news operations, abandoned the goal of quality children’s programming on commercial television, threatened employment and ownership gains of women and minorities and, across-the-board, denied the obligation of media companies to perform up to the highest standards of public service and social responsibility.

Liberal communications activist Andrew Schwartzman, whose Washington-based Media Access Project has been at times a lone progressive voice in the capital’s six-year Republican wilderness, said that the election news means “the world’s a little bit better for us now. . . . I’m a lot happier than I was two weeks ago.”

Fein, Schwartzman and other communications specialists across the political spectrum see the next two years shaping up like this:

--The election is almost certain to hasten Fowler’s departure from the FCC, perhaps leaving it with no chairman or only a caretaker chairman for the remainder of Reagan’s last term. The Democratic Senate may refuse to confirm a Reagan appointee if Fowler decides to leave, as he hinted before the election. Many consider him too much the ideologue and too close to the Administration to remain an effective FCC chairman. Leading candidates to take his place are sitting commissioners Dennis Patrick and Mimi Dawson. Dawson, who would be the first woman to head the agency, may have rough going, however, because her champion, Sen. Bob Packwood (R-Ore.), has had much of his power curtailed by the new party alignment.

--The setting of the public agenda in broadcasting and telecommunications shifts from the FCC to Capitol Hill. The newly empowered Democrats can be expected to launch new initiatives to curb TV violence, foster quality children’s programming and defend equal employment opportunity--all issues at the forefront of communications policy-makers in the 1970s but largely abandoned in the ‘80s by Fowler and the Republicans. Likewise, the new powers on the Hill may choose to re-examine and even roll back some of the deregulatory efforts of the Fowler years--especially a rule change that allowed broadcasters to more easily buy and sell radio and TV stations.

--Public television, which has been on the receiving end of a dribble of federal funds and a tidal wave of conservative criticism, is likely to receive a financial boost and political protection from the Democratics on the Hill. Senators could demand that the White House match each conservative appointment to the critical Corp. for Public Broadcasting with a liberal, as was common in the Nixon and Ford administrations, when last a Republican White House butted heads with a Democratic Congress. (Just prior to the election, the Administration’s efforts to stack the corporation with conservatives had grown so blatant that no less a Reagan stalwart than retiring Arizona Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater refused to support White House appointees.)

--Stung by the expense and bitterness of this year’s election contest--especially negative TV and radio commercials--politicians from both parties can be expected to launch efforts to set campaign spending limits and, one way or another, to put curbs on political advertising. Recent efforts to kill broadcasting’s fairness doctrine and equal-time rules are virtually dead as of last week, unless pending court cases result in decisions that the controversial rules are unconstitutional.

The election results “mean a radical shift in the politics of deregulation,” said Donald West, managing editor of influential Broadcasting magazine, the commercial radio and TV industry Washington-based trade journal. Television “just grows larger and larger in political influence. That makes it irresistible for the politicians to get their hands on,” West said.

“The Senate, on balance, will be more regulation minded,” added a more cautious Edward Fritts, president of the powerful National Assn. of Broadcasters, the commercial industry’s Washington-based trade organization.

New congressional committee assignments won’t be handed out until next week, but the men in line to set communications policy won’t continue to hand the industry everything it asks.

On the Senate side, longtime communications specialist Ernest F. Hollings (D-S.C.) is likely to resume his old posts as chairman of the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation and its communications subcommittee. As ranking minority member of the committee during the Republican reign, Hollings has been an outspoken critic of much of the Fowler and Reagan Administration deregulation agenda and a staunch supporter of broadcasting’s fairness doctrine.

(If Hollings does not take the communications subcommittee post, the job is most likely to go to Democrat Wendell Ford of Kentucky.)

Capitol Hill’s most knowledgeable and powerful Democratic spokesman on communications issues, Rep. Timothy Wirth (D-Colo.), is unlikely to assume a communications leadership position when he moves to his newly elected post in the Senate.

Giving up his chairmanship of the House subcommittee that oversees communications issues, Wirth looks as if he will choose different Senate committee assignments--spots that will place him in more visible positions with long-term possibilities for Senate leadership.

Candidates for Wirth’s House job promise to be even more outspoken in their objections to what they believe have been industry excesses in the last six years--especially the traffic in station sales that have seen billions of dollars worth of broadcast properties change hands. And, some say that the station trading has taken money away from programming.

First in line for chairmanship of the House communications subcommittee appears to be Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), a liberal who previously has not taken a leadership role on communications issues. Standing in the wings, however, are Rep. James J. Florio (D-N.J.) and Rep. Al Swift (D-Wash.). Swift, a former broadcaster, is said to be especially eager for a crack at the subcommittee chairman’s post.

On the surface at least, the new congressional powers promise to raise a formidable bulwark against any further Fowleresque remaking of the broadcasting world.

Fowler’s engineering feat of the last six years has ignored a five-decade social compact between broadcasters and their public. The FCC, during the Fowler reign, has not represented the public’s best interests in a radio and TV system that has always been notorious for devoting the public airwaves to profit instead of excellence and corporate gain instead of civic responsibility.

No one today promises that the damage to broadcasting can be undone or that the Democrats will bring in a new golden age for radio and TV. Maybe this era of fast-buck cynicism is drawing to a close. At last.