Blog Post: Will the FCC's new media ownership rule actually become a national election issue?

The Democrats on the Federal Communications Commission are crowing today. Yesterday the United States Senate overwhelmingly voted for a resolution condemning the FCC's recent relaxation of its newspaper/TV cross ownership ban. Only the Georgia twins, Senators Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson, expressed opposition to the resolution. It now goes to the House, where a parallel measure will be debated soon.

Happy are FCC Dems Jonathan Adelstein and Michael Copps. Here is Copps' press comment:

The Senate spoke for a huge majority of Americans last night by voting to overturn the flawed FCC decision gutting our long-standing ban on newspaper broadcast cross-ownership. With courageous leaders like Senator Byron Dorgan, the Senate has struck a blow for localism and diversity in a media environment crying out for more of both."

And Adelstein:

The Senate's complete rejection of the FCC's attempt to permit greater media concentration represents a great victory of the people over the powerful. In light of the Senate's action, any proposed transaction seeking to exploit the new rules will likely face intense scrutiny. This vote reflects a strong consensus across the ideological spectrum against further media concentration, from left to right and virtually everybody in between. The FCC veered dangerously off-course from the American mainstream, so our elected representatives are trying to steer us back. This unequivocal, bipartisan rebuke of the FCC is a wake-up call for us to serve the public rather than the media giants we oversee. Chairman [Dan] Inouye, Senator Dorgan, Vice Chairman [Ted] Stevens, Senator [Olympia] Snowe and the many other Senate leaders and public interest organizations who pushed this forward deserve our congratulations and the thanks of the American people.

President Bush has promised to veto the measure, of course, citing the "changing media landscape," and asserting that the FCC's denounced rule takes

"into account the abundance of news and information outlets that exist today and furthers the public interest by providing greater financial flexibility to newspaper and broadcast outlets struggling to survive in today's intensely competitive media environment. In addition to reducing the prior rule's excessive regulation of well-functioning markets, the new FCC rule includes substantial constraints to guard against excessive concentration. The administration supported this FCC action and strongly opposes any attempt to overturn this rule by legislative means."

And so if the House passes the parallel resolution, and Bush indeed vetos it, Congress is poised for a veto override debate that will force Republican presidential contender (and Arizona Senator) John McCain to decide how much he wants to run against the White House in his campaign. It will also catapult an FCC media ownership issue to national prominence, something that very rarely if ever happens.

In fact, I can't remember a single instance in United States history when it actually has happened. I seem to recall that when Herbert Hoover was Secretary of Commerce and was just starting to regulate radio, he got some flack from parties who feared that Hoover was constructing the service to suit his presidential ambitions (he ran for and won the White House in 1928). FCC Chair Newton Minow's Vast Wasteland speech, in which he condemned the low quality of television, made headlines. But Newton gave the speech before the National Association of Broadcasters in 1961, a year after his boss John F. Kennedy was elected President.

I guess one could go wayyyy back to the presidential election of 1892, when Populist candidate James Weaver called for the creation of a publicly owned national telegraph system. Weaver won a million votes, but I'm not sure how much national play his telegraph proposal got. The election mostly focused on the debate over the tariff, with Democrat Grover Cleveland trouncing Republican Benjamin Harrison.

Big telecommunications controversies just seem to miss Presidential campaigns. The 1913 Kingsbury Commitment, in which AT&T conceded the rights of independent telephone companies to connect to its national system, took place a year after the turbulent four way race of 1912. The creation of the FCC was accompanied by a debate over whether to create a non-commercial zone of spectrum. But that fight took place in 1934, two years after FDR won the White House.

AT&T agreed to break up during the Presidential election of 1984, but this was a done deal, and went undebated by either Ronald Reagan or Walter Mondale.

I guess that I could cook up some lefty explanation for this lack of a national footprint: the media deliberately silences these sort of discussions. That sort of argument. And I suppose there is some truth in that. But I think that it is also true that this stuff is often way too geeky to generate national froth. It just doesn't have the juice that you can squeeze out of national security, health care, the economy, Hillary's husband, Barack's minister, and John McCain's age.

But this time around could be different. Golly. We'll see. . .