Public Airwaves? Hardly

As any insomniac who has listened to a TV station’s early morning sign-off knows, broadcasters are licensed by the Federal Communications Commission to operate “in the public interest.” Not that you’d know that by watching the programming.

A study released last week by the Kaiser Family Foundation found broadcasters retreating from commitments to public service that they made just before Congress handed them a set of regulatory breaks in the mid-1990s. Among these commitments was running more public service announcements--educational messages often produced by nonprofit groups, of the sort that helped increase seat belt use and reduce drunk driving.

The study is unfortunate proof that the FCC and its chairman, Michael K. Powell, take their oversight duties too lightly. The analysis, titled “Shouting to Be Heard,” found that while 20% of all TV air time is devoted to paid commercials, only 0.4% of all TV air time goes to public service announcements, and almost half of these announcements air between midnight and 6 a.m.

One FCC commissioner, Michael J. Copps, responded that if broadcasters didn’t improve their public interest efforts there would “be a reaction.” That’s uselessly vague, but Copps did note that TV station “license renewal has become pretty much a postcard affair” for the FCC, and he said that in the future the commission should conduct “a somewhat more rigorous examination” of how each station met its public interest requirements.

Even in such a bashfully modest proposal, Copps faces opposition from at least two fellow commissioners, Kathleen Q. Abernathy and Kevin J. Martin, who say that any public interest requirement violates broadcasters’ 1st Amendment free-speech rights.

Public service announcements are part of a larger public service issue that includes whether broadcasters should have to offer discounts to political candidates for ads during campaigns. Abernathy and Martin have aligned themselves with Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.), who leads the opposition to any enforced public service, particularly involving campaigns. The current system favors incumbents, who usually have established fund-raising networks. “We’re going about [campaign reform] all wrong,” Lott argued. “I prefer a fundamental approach.... It’s called freedom.”

Not all political candidates, however, will agree that freedom means spending $750 million each election cycle to reach the American people, who supposedly own the airwaves.

Regulators intent on deregulation at all costs have turned public ownership into fiction, with help from Congress. The Kaiser study illuminates just a part of the problem.