SEATTLE -- The number of TV stations one company can control, and whether it can also own a newspaper in the same town, "is not a very sexy issue," John Sandifer told a pair of commissioners from the Federal Communications Commission at a hearing here on Friday.
That may be one reason news outlets don't make much of an effort to cover media consolidation. The "orange blaze of a house fire" is more likely to attract a news director's attention, said Sandifer, the executive director of the Seattle branch of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.
Even so, Friday's public hearing on media consolidation filled the University of Washington's student union auditorium. Attendees weren't even put off by snowfall during the morning rush hour -- an unusual occurrence in this normally mild climate.
The Seattle hearing was one of a series of meetings organized to sample public opinion about proposals supported by FCC Chairman Michael Powell to relax or do away with the decades-old regulations. Radio ownership rules were deregulated in a similar way eight years ago.
The rules limit one company from owning TV stations that reach more than 35 percent of American households, forbid a single TV network from owning a second broadcast network, limit multiple TV stations owned by one company in a market and place other limits on media consolidation.
Judging by the muttered asides and spontaneous bursts of applause as the invited panels of experts testified, the assemblage was overwhelmingly opposed to loosening the rules.
FCC commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, one of two Democratic members of the five-person board, said the proposed rule changes had already drawn far more public attention than most of the commission's actions. He called the more than 15,000 public comments received so far "a huge number for the FCC." But, he noted, with more than 260 million citizens whose access to news and entertainment will be affected, that is still only a small sampling of public opinion.
Michael Copp, the other Democrat on the commission and the only other commissioner to come to Seattle, said: "We're not going to get the kind of national debate that I'm hoping to get here until we get the networks to cover it." He noted that when the changes were unveiled last fall, "One network did one story at 4:45 in the morning."
Media concentration, according to Jim Compton, a former NBC News bureau chief who now sits on the Seattle City Council, means that the mostly out-of-town owners "back a pickup truck to the loading docks of the local stations and put money in it and take it away." Compton said most of that money should stay in the local community to fulfill the FCC licensing mandate for community service.
Rep. Jay Inslee, a Democrat from a suburban Seattle district, compared keeping the rules to protecting democracy. He said the phrases "consolidation" and "economies of scale" sound like positives, but that "the media today does not produce widgets, it produces democracy."
"If you remove the rules against consolidation, you will get more consolidation," he said, which will result in "less diversity and probably less access to local opinions. The multiplication of technology results in the same voices over more different channels."
As evidence, Inslee cited the changes in commercial radio since Congress scratched the ownership limits in 1996. Since then, the number of station owners nationwide has dipped by 34 percent. One media company, Clear Channel Worldwide, went from owning 40 stations to owning 1,200. Another division of the company is the world's largest producer of concerts and other live entertainment events.
Not everyone on the panels agreed, however.
Becky Brenner, general manager of two Seattle radio stations owned by media giant Infinity Broadcasting that play different flavors of country music, said that despite being part of a large corporation, she has complete autonomy over the playlists and other aspects of her stations' programming, including the news division.
Based in New York, Infinity owns 180 stations spread across 22 states.
Mark Allen, of the Washington State Association of Broadcasters, said ownership restrictions hurt those in small markets with few broadcasters. If one is struggling financially, a bigger, more prosperous station can't step in to purchase the smaller station to continue its on-air efforts, he argued.
Allen said the rules were based on an outmoded "all-things-to-all-people paradigm" for mass communications that was more in line with the early years of broadcasting, when only a few stations were available anywhere.
"You don't expect to hear in-depth news analysis on an alternative rock station," he said.
