Why L.A.’s Air Has Gone Stale : Broadcasting: The local market is hugely profitable, but the airwaves have gotten blander and dumber since the FCC canceled public-interest rules.

“Los Angeles,” a local broadcast executive recently crowed, “is undeniably the healthiest radio market in the U.S. today.”

Judged solely by advertising, that may be true. An industry survey projects 1989 ad revenues of a staggering $400 million or more. Commercial spots on one highly rated rock station now sell for as much as $1,500 a minute.

Boom times indeed, it would seem--at least for broadcasters. But for audiences, the times are increasingly a bust. And a combination of market pressures and federal deregulatory policies dictates that this destructive trend not only will continue, it will accelerate.

Last year, classical music listeners mourned the demise of venerable KFAC, Los Angeles’ only commercial classical outlet, transformed by its new owners into a more marketable rock format. KKGO-FM has stepped into the breach with an all-new classical format, leaving its loyal jazz listeners in the same predicament that classical fans had just escaped.

How is it that a broadcast market with more than 80 stations serving millions of listeners can no longer find room for even one classical and one jazz station at the same time, while endless variations on the same old rock themes elbow one another up and down the dial?

The paucity of quality programming is not confined to music, or even to radio. For more than a decade, the TV air time devoted to serious public-affairs programming has steadily dwindled. A 1989 study by Essential Information, a Washington-based research organization founded by Ralph Nader, charted an average 51% decline during the past decade in issue-oriented public-affairs programming on TV stations across 50 markets surveyed.

When I became a Los Angeles County supervisor in 1974, most local radio and TV stations maintained some kind of news department and carried regular newscasts. As part of their public-affairs programming, nearly a dozen radio and TV stations aired editorials on timely and important issues. They offered a forum for public discussion of the public’s business.

Today, that vigorous, multifaceted debate has faded. Only a few public-minded radio and TV stations broadcast any editorials whatsoever. Broadcast schedules are stuffed with sensation-seeking talk shows, so-called “tabloid-TV” programs and “infotainment.”

Washington must share the blame for this sorry situation. For decades, federal policy decreed that the airwaves belonged to the public and that broadcasters earned the right to retain their monopoly licenses on a given frequency by operating “in the public interest, convenience and necessity.” The Federal Communications Commission scrutinized their program logs, entertaining challenges from competing applicants before it granted a license renewal.

All that changed when Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency, claiming a mandate to “get government off our backs.” Mark Fowler, Reagan’s man at the FCC, virtually abandoned his assigned role of ensuring that broadcasters operated in the public interest.

Fowler’s commission abolished the modest guidelines mandating a minimum amount of news and information programming. Further, it repealed the so-called “anti-trafficking rule,” which required owners to hold onto a station for at least three years before selling and put other limits on station ownership. The FCC said its rules were just that, not laws, and could be unilaterally canceled by their makers.

These actions destroyed any sense of broadcaster responsibility to the public and touched off a frenzy of speculation that sent station prices skyrocketing while burying new owners under mountains of debt. In such an environment, only the most profitable--that is, mass-appeal--formats can hope to survive.

A 1987 FCC action delivered the fatal blow to issue-oriented public-affairs programming. In the name of expanding broadcasters’ First Amendment rights, the commission abolished its 38-year-old “Fairness Doctrine” rule, which called on broadcasters to devote a reasonable amount of time to opposing views on issues of public importance.

The industry had denounced the Fairness Doctrine’s “chilling effect” on free speech, but after its repeal, the big chill only deepened. More and more stations abandoned any pretense of serious commentary and analysis.

Only Congress can cool the speculative fever that undermines quality programming by reinstating, with the force of law, FCC policies governing station ownership; only Congress can reinvigorate the public-policy debate by codifying the Fairness Doctrine into law.

Broadcasters instinctively resist any regulation as an infringement on their constitutional rights. But the First Amendment protects and empowers everyone, after all, not only the media. As the Supreme Court noted in its unanimous 1969 decision upholding the Fairness Doctrine, “It is the right of the viewers and listeners, not the right of the broadcasters, which is paramount.”

It’s time for Congress to take that principle to heart, and re-enact it as federal law.