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Since the 1934 Communications Act, the original idea has been what the FCC talked about as "integration of ownership and management." The notion was that the person who was the licensee would also be the operator of the station and live in the community. This would mean, by definition, you would have only one station per licensee. So, since the Act requires that anything the FCC does has to be proven to be an improvement in "the public interest," I have never really seen adequate proof that the public gained in any way whatsoever by even giving a licensee two stations, let alone giving Clear Channel 1,200, or now raising the cap of television station ownership from enough stations to reach 35% of the American homes to a limit of 45% of all American homes. I just don’t see how the public interest is served by that. And that’s the burden of those who are advocating these massive accumulations of media power and, with it, the economic and political power that it brings along.

I think the argument in favor of permitting media concentration follows logically if you believe in the Mussolini model of a Council of Corporations, which is what he had in Italy in his Fascist state, and you think that America is better off being run by the Fortune 500 CEOs in cahoots with the President of the United States and, through their campaign contributions, the House and Senate. If that's your notion of an ideal government then you need to have a capacity to control the mass media in America. You see, we still have the remnants of a democracy, public opinion carries some weight, and you have to stifle alternative views and control what information and views the American people get. So, if you think we’re better of with corporate control, then obviously you would want to have a concentration of mass media under the control of large, powerful corporations, and the fewer hands the better because it is easier to control them. You can’t invite 10,000 licensees of 10,000 radio stations to your White House dinner. You can invite the single licensee of 1,200 radio stations to your White House dinner. That, I think, would be the primary argument for it. But I don’t happen to be of that persuasion.

I think we’re better off as a nation the more diversity of views we have -- including, not incidentally, views that are diametrically opposed to mine. That doesn’t bother me a bit. But I would like to see a range of views out there, so that all of us as Americans are exposed to the widest possible diversity of opinion, the greatest possible number of sources of news and information.

I heard a talk last night on the local university radio station, WSUI here in Iowa City, from an outfit called Alternative Radio. The speaker was a 42 year-old woman born in India who has published a book that is now in six million copies in 40 languages. You put her name into Google and you get 43,000 hits. I would guess that most of your listeners probably have never heard of her. And I would never suggest for a moment that the distribution service that put out her speech, called Alternative Radio, should dominate the airwaves in the way that the right-wing commentators do now. But I do think her voice ought to be heard along with the voices of dozens and dozens and dozens of others who take a view contrary to that of the Administration and the large corporations contributing to the expanding American Empire and its effort to control things around the world. I think it’s good to at least hear those views.

The "liberal media?" Well, I say, with the bumper sticker, "the liberal media is only as liberal as its conservative owners permit it to be."

The Supreme Court has made very clear that the only people who have First Amendment Rights in America are the people who own the stations. On the assumption that you, personally, don’t own KAAA or KZZZ, even you have no First Amendment rights. You are there only so long as the owner wants you to be there; you can be fired at any time. Editors of newspapers don’t have First Amendment rights, journalists don’t have First Amendment rights, and the audience sure as heck doesn’t have First Amendment rights. With the First Amendment right that owner has to speak, the Supreme Court says they also have the First Amendment right to censor everybody else. So, if you want to invite me on your show, here I am. But if I came into the station and wanted to buy time to put out a message the owner didn’t want, there is no legal responsibility on the part of the owner to sell that time to me. Ditto for the local newspapers. If they don’t want to sell space, I can’t buy space. So the owners of the mass media have the power to shut out all views that they don’t like.

By definition, large conglomerate media accumulations of media power are big business. So what do you expect? Of course they hold a conservative, big business view. And that’s perfectly legitimate. But I don’t see that there’s any real argument about it. I would put it to the test. I heard a promotion for O’Reilly on your station. Well, that’s fine. I think O’Reilly ought to be heard. But I know stations where you can listen to O’Reilly, followed by Rush Limbaugh, then Gordon Liddy, Michael Reagan, Ollie North -- a drumbeat of anti-Democrat, pro-Republican hyperbole. I do not know of any radio station in America where you can listen to Jim Hightower, followed by Molly Ivans, followed by Ralph Nadar, followed by Jesse Jackson, followed by Noam Chomsky, followed by Howard Zinn. I don’t think such a station exists.

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As a wise person once observed, "the choice you’ll never know is the choice you’ll never make."

• When “60 Minutes” first came on the air, CBS was constantly wanting to cancel it because it didn’t have an audience. I did what I could to try to encourage them to stick with it. I said, “This is a good show. Ultimately, this is going to do well. Stay with it, stay with it. I understand you don’t have an audience now.” Well, it ultimately became the number-one rated television show in America.

• When the Watergate hearings were on live in the afternoon, everybody in the broadcasting business said, “Oh my God, We’re going to lose our audience, we’re not going to have the ratings we need.” The Watergate hearings got higher ratings than any of the shows they were up against.

There’s a growing gap between the income of the average corporate CEO and the average worker at that corporation that used to be 40 to one and is now 530 to one—530 times the income is being earned by the executive compared to the worker. You think Americans don’t care about that? The layoffs; the robbing of retirement funds; millions of people unemployed? Americans don’t care about that? Tax breaks for the rich that the rich don’t even want and think is folly, as a matter of social policy, driven by the desire to cut back on all social programs and leave us nothing but a Denfense Department?

In every other war, we’ve raised taxes. Now we’re cutting taxes. In prior wars, we weren’t dealing with the Social Security payments that we have now and the Medicare and Medicaid payments that we have now. The London Financial Times projects we’re going to have a 40 trillion—that’s with a ‘t’—40 trillion dollar national debt. There’s no way we can continue Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid—the programs that the Republicans have been trying for decades to abolish—there’s no way that those can be continued with these tax cuts, and they fully well know that.

Now I think the American people are interested in these subjects. And I think that they would listen if they were presented in something other than a 20-second sound bite, and even that only every eight months.

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www.nicholasjohnson.com. It’s dot “org,” actually. Unfortunately, I do nothing that’s a “com.” Something we’re about to do on your station is a “dot com.” I think that’s wonderful, it keeps the station on the air.

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"The public interest, convenience and necessity," that’s the theory of the public airwaves. Well, that’s what the statute says, that’s what the law says. But this FCC, it’s kind of "last man out, turn out the lights." I mean, I don’t see that they’re doing much of anything but picking up their paychecks over there these days.

We used to have a Fairness Doctrine. It didn’t require much. It didn’t require equal time. It didn’t require that you put a given individual on the air. It just said you have to deal with controversial issues and when you do it, you have to present a range of views. It's pretty simple, and virtually impossible for a professional journalist to violate. Well, the FCC’s repealed that.

We used to have requirements of local community service, local news, public affairs, and programming of that kind. That’s pretty much been eroded.

We used to have limitations on ownership, and they’ve been virtually abandoned, even before this most recent ruling.

The FCC has enormous discretion to carry out the law or not, and it chooses to give those who support the current administration virtually whatever they want in terms of more and more media power.

There are some efforts being made in Congress. I think they’re pretty weak-kneed, if you want my opinion. But there are House and Senate Communications subcommittees of their Commerce Committees. Billy Tauzin heads the House Commerce Committee, a Republican from Louisiana, and he is really enthusiastic about this current FCC and what a wonderful job they’re doing, and if only they would go further. Because the 1,200 stations owned by Clear Channel just aren’t quite enough, and he’d like to see them be able to own even more.

But there are others, certainly most of the leading Democrats on the Communications Subcommittee and the House Commerce Committee who’ve introduced a bill—I think it’s HR 2052—which is designed to limit the FCC to permitting a single licensee to only the 35% reach that it allowed before. Well, that’s about 33% too much, so far as I’m concerned right there already. So there’s that bill, and on the Senate side Senator Hollings and Senator Trent Lott—an interesting combination—have introduced a bill to do the same thing in the Senate. So something may come from that, but these media giants are so powerful—and I don’t mean just economically, but politically. After all, what is it that the politicians do with the hundreds of millions of dollars they raise for congressional campaigns? They give it to broadcasters to buy time. Well, the same thing they’re buying the broadcaster can provide them for free. So there’s a kind of power that goes beyond even the millions of dollars at stake.

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Well, there’s no question that the decision-making was done outside the view of the public. I think that kind of behavior is totally unacceptable, if not criminal. When I was an FCC commissioner, I never took a dollar from industry for all these trips that they take. I didn’t go to lunch at industry’s expense. There are some people who sometimes virtually never buy a lunch for themselves anymore in Washington. I didn’t object to meeting with industry representatives, but I would suggest to them, “If you’re going around seeing all of the commissioners, let’s get us all in a room at once and you can make your presentation one time.” So, I think of course the commissioners need to hear from the industry, but I think it needs to be done in public where the media and members of the public can know what’s going on.

I think what we’re seeing with governmental policy, it’s not just at the FCC, it’s a degradation of  environmental standards, corporate benefits, it’s all across the spectrum that is going on now. There’s kind of this bullheaded idea that we saw with regard to the Iraq War where the Bush administration didn’t want to hear from the CIA and the DIA intelligence people who were telling them that there weren’t any weapons of mass destruction, there is no connection between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Ladin. We had as much as 95% opposition on the part of the public in many of the countries around the world to our doing this. We’ve been getting out of international treaties and refusing to sign them and developing more and more hostility towards the United States around the world, and the administration just doesn’t care. They’re just going to go ahead and do it anyway. Bush said, with regard to the protests, “Well, I’m not going to govern on the basis of focus groups.” Well, no, he governs on the basis of what his major campaign contributors want. That’s the problem we’re up against, and his own determination.

And we’re seeing the same thing at the FCC. There were over half a million comments filed with the FCC by outraged citizens. Ninety-seven percent of the comments received by the FCC were violently opposed to this. It was opposed by the National Rifle Association and all kinds of groups across America. Ted Turner spoke out against it, one of the wealthiest media owners in the country. It’s like the wealthy who are saying they don’t want tax cuts. The administration just has its mind made up what it wants to do and it just bulls ahead with it.

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What difference does it make? I think it’s going to make a big difference. We saw that in North Dakota not long ago in a town where there was some kind of local disaster. Normally people tune to their radio to find out what’s going on, what they should do, it’s one of the great stories of early-day radio’s contribution to this nation. But when they tuned to their local station, there’s no local news there. The reason is that there’s no human being there. The programming is coming via satellite from a nationally distributed service out to the stations, the licenses to which are held by a single owner. The commercials are sold nationally, the music is distributed nationally, and there’s just nobody there. There’s no community tie at all.

So I think there’s going to be a real loss to the American people before you even get to the matter of an outfit like Clear Channel clearly tied into the administration. They sponsored rallies in support of the war, and then went out and covered their own rallies as news. When the Dixie Chicks said something critical of President Bush, they banned the Dixie Chicks from all 1,200 stations. I mean, that’s the kind of abuse of media power that we have seen. We’ve seen it in the past, even when the ownership was limited. And we’re going to see a lot more of it in the future.

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I don’t know of any. As we were mentioning earlier, I do know of stations that run one right wing, conservative, Democratic-party bashing commentator after another. I don’t know of any stations, let alone networks of stations, that run one radical left commentator after another. I’m not aware of that.

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I would suspect—and I don’t know the details, so I don’t want to represent that I do—but my guess is that the satellite service that you’re talking about is going to be providing primarily a nationally-distributed, satellite-distributed music service, and there’s not going to be much of any way to provide local news in that. I may be wrong, but it seems to me, offhand, that’s probably the case. They may have some nationally-distributed news services as a part of that, but I doubt that there’s going to be any range of views. I think it’s going to be centrist to right, if they have news at all, and little sound bytes, and not a lot of news about what’s going on around the world.

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That’s essentially what I’m saying. I think that’s why the National Rifle Association was arm in arm with some liberal groups that they normally would be excoriating, but on this one they were all in agreement that this is bad news for everybody. When you start controlling the media and putting it into half a dozen hands, that’s not exactly what the founding fathers had in mind originally.

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Does televised violence encourage real life violence? There’s absolutely no question that television does stimulate violence in the society. We have over 3,000 scientific studies documenting this, numerous presidential commissions, congressional committees, task forces have brought together that evidence from time to time. I haven’t seen anything in the last 30-40 years that would suggest the contrary. Media has an enormous responsibility because they know the consequences of their acts. They do it because it’s cheaper programming to produce, and it provides higher profits. So this is an example of deliberately engaging in behavior known to be harmful.