The zipping point

At age 63, having spent most of the last two decades immersed in Washington politics, FCC Commissioner Michael Copps isn’t much of a hipster when it comes to identifying the hot hip-hop groups or cool late-night TV shows. But even he’s figured out that pop culture consumers young and old believe something has gone horribly wrong when it comes to the diversity of choices in today’s entertainment programming. Copps was in the car the other day with his youngest son, a high school senior, watching the teenager click the radio dial over and over, trying in vain to find a decent music station.

“After a minute or so, he said to me, ‘What’s wrong with radio? There’s nothing good on at all,’ ” Copps recalls. “When we went on a trip to look at colleges, he brought along a stack of CDs. He had no interest in the radio. He said, ‘I don’t like what they play.’ ”

All too many of us have said the same thing, either about radio, television or the movies. The much-heralded 500-channel universe has turned out to be more of a mirage than an oasis. Of the 91 major cable TV networks available in at least 16 million homes, 80% are owned or co-owned by just six media giants. Since May 2001, when he joined the FCC, Copps had been something of a lonely voice in the wilderness, waging an uphill battle against the onslaught of both vulgar programming and media consolidation. Then came the Super Bowl, complete with sexist beer ads, erectile dysfunction commercials and a crotch-grabbing, MTV-produced halftime show that culminated in Janet Jackson’s infamous breast baring.

A storm of protest erupted. It was followed by the now-familiar election-year Washington kabuki dance, featuring fulminating politicians, contrite media conglomerate moguls and flustered NFL officials -- even FCC Chairman Michael Powell, who has consistently avoided criticizing Big Media companies, declared himself outraged by the events. If anyone had a right to gloat, it would be Copps, a former history professor who rarely watches TV, listens to NPR and has all the charisma of, well, Dick Cheney. The Super Bowl fiasco, followed by headline grabbing congressional hearings and hefty FCC fines against several radio raunchmeisters has offered a timely spotlight for Copps’ pet issues -- media consolidation and indecency on the airwaves.

“The FCC has been a paper tiger, so in a way we’re largely responsible for the media companies’ race to the bottom,” Copps says. “When the industry saw we had no interest in pursuing any real indecency enforcement, they figured we must have zero credibility. We’ve now finally taken some action, but I don’t know if we’re really walking the walk or just talking the talk. I’ll believe we’re serious about indecency when we send a couple of the more serious cases to a license revocation hearing.”

Copps’ linkage of indecency with media consolidation isn’t just based on a wild hunch. According to internal FCC data, since the government’s Telecommunications Act of 1996 opened the doors for a vast expansion of local radio and TV ownership by media conglomerates, the growth of media consolidation has been closely followed by a steep rise in indecency complaints. In 2000, the first year of available statistics, there were only 111 indecency complaints reported to the FCC. In 2003, there were 240,342 complaints. Complaints this year have already passed the 500,000 mark. As anyone who has ever tried to get a cable company on the phone will attest, media conglomerates largely operate at a safe distance from the communities they service, while locally owned broadcasters have to defend their programming choices at the local grocery store. And under relentless pressure from Wall Street stock analysts, big media companies regularly succumb to all sorts of odious short-term ratings gimmickry to boost quarterly earnings reports. It’s hardly a surprise that 80% of recent FCC indecency fines have gone to DJs working for two conglomerates, Clear Channel Communications and Infinity Broadcasting.

Unusual alliances

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the consolidation-decency debate is how it has managed to bridge the country’s nasty Al Franken versus Bill O’Reilly, red state versus blue state partisan divide. The FCC’s controversial ruling last June to allow media giants even greater sway over showbiz programming was opposed not only by Copps and fellow Democratic Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein but by the conservative Parents Television Council, the NRA, various civil rights groups, Common Cause, the Conference of Catholic Bishops and NOW. “This isn’t a liberal or conservative cause,” says Parents Television Council Executive Director Tim Winter. “The political alliances on this issue are extraordinary.”

Once again, there’s a culture war raging, but this time the issues are so thorny that it’s almost impossible to identify the players with an ideological scorecard. Syndicated DJ Howard Stern was a supporter of the Iraq war and various Republican candidates. But thanks to the heat he’s taking in the decency debate, he’s now as ardent a Bush basher as Michael Moore. How times have changed. A decade ago, when the National Endowment for the Arts was under attack over the images in “Piss Christ” and Robert Mapplethorpe photos, the left and right raged at each other across a chasm of free speech issues. The decency debate was so one-sided that Newt Gingrich could get away with blaming the notorious drowning of Susan Smith’s two sons on the liberal Democratic establishment, which he claimed had “replaced civilization with a culture of irresponsibility.”

Today it isn’t so easy to stereotype. Conservatives can be found promoting diversity while liberals are heard bashing entertainment moguls. Douglas Vanderlaan, the Florida scientist whose FCC complaint led to Bubba the Love Sponge’s firing, is a John Kerry supporter and a big fan of Prince and “The Simpsons.” One of Republican Powell’s biggest critics has been conservative commentator Brent Bozell, who wrote a column excoriating the FCC and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox network for airing the sitcom “Keen Eddie,” which featured an episode where “a band of thugs trafficking in horse semen hires a prostitute to have sex with a horse in order to extract its semen.”

On the liberal end of the spectrum is James Steyer, a civil liberties attorney who teaches 1st Amendment law at Stanford and heads Common Sense Media, whose website provides parents with information and reviews of films, CDs and TV shows. Steyer is just as outspoken about the media conglomerates’ refusal to accept responsibility for their programming excesses.

“There’s a conspiracy of silence among entertainment executives -- they’re no different than the tobacco executives who refused to admit that cigarettes caused cancer,” Steyer says. “Deregulation has simply greased the pockets of Sumner Redstone and Rupert Murdoch and Clear Channel while spawning a fundamental lack of accountability among top media executives. For them, it’s always somebody else’s fault. We’re not blaming all of society’s ills on them, but to say they bear no responsibility for violence, sexual behavior and other health issues among young people flies in the face of reality.”

Both sides believe that until this year’s indecency uproar, the media frequently dismissed them as cranks and scolds. “Until recently, the press painted two extreme perspectives -- either the 1st Amendment absolutists who represent a 1950s ACLU view of the world or the right-wing fundamentalist Christian thought police,” Steyer says. “But millions of people take a more thoughtful middle-ground approach. The 1st Amendment isn’t a suicide pact -- it doesn’t say anything goes.”

The media take notice

For years, media consolidation was one of those issues considered worthy of debate only by policy wonks and public interest groups. The general public rarely stopped to read sober-minded studies, such as the one done after the 2002 elections, which found that 60% of the top-rated local news broadcasts had failed to devote one second to campaign coverage. But after Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl antics shone a spotlight on Viacom’s MTV-CBS hegemony, people began to connect the Big Media dots.

“The Super Bowl had more of a galvanizing effect on the media and the FCC than it did on grass-roots America,” Copps says. “Ordinary citizens were already upset. For the past three years, when I boot up my computer each morning, I see dozens of complaints about what was on TV the night before. We’re just catching up.”

The decency debate could serve as a consciousness-raising alert. When the FCC was readying its rollback of limitations on media ownership last year, Powell held one public hearing, and that was only after Copps raised a ruckus. Copps held a series of his own hearings, paid for out of his personal budget. On the other hand, FCC officials had 71 private meetings with top broadcasters in the months before the rollback, including personal lobbying sessions with News Corp.’s Murdoch and Viacom’s Mel Karmazin.

Of course, not everyone is enchanted by this new surge of activism. When it comes to radio personalities like Stern, some people see a vulgarian while others see a truth-teller or harmless sex addict. Shock jock supporters say parents carting kids to school can always change the station, though in dozens of cities across the country that simply dials up another tawdry show on a station owned by the same do-anything-for-a-rating conglomerate. Entertainment executives worry that, having awoken from their regulatory slumber, the FCC and irate Washington politicians will now go too far in the other direction, turning into an indecency lynch mob. If a tree-hugging NPR station like KCRW is jumpy enough to fire commentator Sandra Tsing Loh for one ill-timed obscenity, imagine what mischief might happen when saber-rattling congressmen get into high gear. The House has already approved, and the Senate is considering, far more restrictive broadcast decency standards, which include drastically higher fines and a so-called three-strikes provision.

Even the most ardent anti-consolidation activists have low expectations about any thoughtful debate emanating out of Washington. They suspect that politicians, being politicians, will simply channel their outrage into hollow election-year grandstanding. “Congress should be looking at the real culprit, which is themselves,” says Jeff Chester, head of the Center for Digital Democracy. “Congress has basically rubber-stamped everything the broadcast industry has ever asked for. Along with the FCC, they’ve created the economic structure that promotes today’s tabloid, bottom-fishing media culture.”

No one is sure whether the alliance among some conservatives, civil libertarians, consumer advocates and the creative community will hold fast under political duress. But it’s refreshing to see people confronting such an age-old issue without retreating to knee-jerk ideological bombast. Liberals have been reminded that free speech isn’t just a right but a responsibility, while conservatives have discovered that unregulated big business can be just as damaging to family values as any raunchy radio show. The 1st Amendment isn’t just a legalism, it’s one of America’s great contributions to the arts. But if the media conglomerates freeze out our most independent, outspoken voices, free speech will be more of an antiquated concept than a reality.

“This is a family issue, not a partisan issue, one that’s too important to be left to ideological extremists from either side,” Steyer says. “What people are looking for is accountability, not government interference. That’s why the solution is going to come from the bottom up, not from the top down.”