What the Commission is proposing through the chairman, Powell, is a further extension of the number of stations that any licensee can own, along with a relaxation of the ownership within a community.

So one is national, the percentage of the national audience that a single licensee can reach. That was 35%. The assumption is that they’re going to propose going to 45%.  Basically, what they propose is lifting any limitations at all. That is, as soon as the biggest owners acquire the maximum the Commission just ups the limit again in order to let them continue to acquire more and more stations.

A second thing is the ownership of more than one station locally.

A third thing is the ownership of newspapers and stations by a single owner in the same community.

It’s things of that nature.

I think we saw that in Iraq, and now I think we’re about to see that here at home. That is to say, I just don’t think that there’s a real commitment to a sense of democracy and a responsible responsiveness to public sentiment and so forth. I think the Administration makes up its mind what it wants to do, they’ve got an agenda, they’re going to bull ahead and do it--whether it’s in another country or it’s here, even if it’s opposed by the civilized world abroad and opposed by thoughtful Americans at home--they just go ahead with what it is they’ve got in mind.

The point is, when we began with this, with the Radio Act of 1927 and re-enacted as the Communications Act of 1934, what Congress and the commissions were thinking of was essentially a single owner of a single station, living in the community where the station was operated. It was very much a “mom and pop" operation.

This was a compromise in the United States.

In most countries--every country views broadcasting as special--and in most countries that meant a public corporation; in some countries, a governmental agency; in this country, a governmental agency to regulate but a permission to private parties to use public property, the airwaves, at personal, private profit.

But this was a contract. And in exchange for the opportunity to use public property for private profit, the stations were to provide a public service. And, indeed, in the early days, they certainly did.

But Congress, at the outset, was incredibly prescient in terms of the potential political power that this new technology might develop over the years. As one Congressman put it, “If we should ever allow such a great power for manipulating public opinion to fall into the hands of the few, then woe be to those who would dare to disagree with them.”

And that’s essentially what’s happened, as Ted Turner himself--not a shoddy example of large media ownership--but as Ted Turner observed the other day, there are now five firms that provide 90% of the news and views that Americans get.

I think we’ve seen the extent to which that tends to be influenced by the Administration. Certainly, in the United Kingdom, they’ve got a much wider range of news and views about the Iraq War than our five firms here in the United States provided their audience.

So I think there are some extraordinary risks to a democracy in what the commission has already done, not to mention what they’re about to do. And that, to me, is clearly the most important and the most devastating and the most outrageous--bordering on criminal--consequence of this; and that is, the drying up of diversity and dissent in opinions and information reaching the American people.

But I don’t mean to minimize the adverse impact of it on the creative community, which has formed its own public interest organization to fight this; small station owners; advertisers, who suddenly find themselves confronting increases in advertising rates that parallel those we confront with pharmaceuticals (and for basically the same reasons).

So it is an adverse impact on a lot of people. It’s a rare day in Washington when you see the National Rifle Association and Mothers for Peace linked arm in arm, opposing some governmental proposed regulation. But that’s what we’re seeing on this one.

Let me describe as briefly as I possibly can, the confluence of four, five or six forces that are coming together to create a multiplier in terms of the devastating consequences of this.

The one that people are talking about is the fewer and fewer firms that dominate the media in the United States. Clearly, that’s outrageous and awful and should never have happened as much as it’s happened already, let alone to happen more.

But what makes it so much worse is when you combine this with the fact that the FCC has also repealed the Fairness Doctrine. So there is now not even a modicum of a requirement (because the Fairness Doctrine was a very weak requirement), there’s not even a modicum of requirement of any kind of balance in the presentation that a broadcaster, using public property with a public service obligation, there’s no longer any requirement of any kind of balance in that programming. And we can talk at greater length about the details of the Fairness Doctrine and what a weak sort of doctrine it was to begin with.

Third, there’s been essentially an abolition of public service responsibilities. When I was on the Commission, we had requirements of local news and public affairs and children’s programming and limitations on advertising and so forth. Virtually all of that is gone.

Fourth, we now permit a total overlap between control of the distribution medium--such as cable television or a network with over-the-air stations or a chain of newspapers that are delivered--a total overlap between the distribution, the ownership of the distribution channels, and the ownership of the content. So that a cable television distribution system may very well be a subsidiary of a large parent conglomerate corporation that also owns the programming that that cable system is carrying.

That would be bad enough, except for the final point, which is that the Supreme Court now holds that no one in America has First Amendment rights in the mass media except the people who own the media, and that with the right to free speech goes the right to freely censor those whom you wish to censor.

So imagine you have the dominate television station in a community--or even multiple stations within a community, or you have the dominate newspaper in a community--and someone is willing to pay you, and you have for sale either space, in the case of the newspaper, or time, in the case of the radio or television station. You have posted rates and a customer comes in with the money and puts it on the counter. If you don’t like what they are saying, and you’re the owner of that medium, you can say, “Sorry, buddy. We’re not going to take your money, and we’re not going to let that information get out to the people of this community.”

Now the Commission is putting all five of those things together, so that you have larger and larger accumulations--not just of a medium of one sort, like radio stations or televisions stations--but they also permit the companies to combine. Some now own the best sellers and the authors and the movie studios and the theaters where they are shown and the magazines that hype the movies and the television networks that subsequently run the movies and the cable systems that carry the cable channels and the video tape and DVD manufacturing and also their sale and rental outlets and they have worldwide distribution, so you permit all that ownership.

But not only that, but you do away with the Fairness Doctrine, you do away with any public service obligations, you permit the same entity to own both the distribution channels and the content, and then you say, “Nobody whose views they don’t like has any First Amendment right to speak in the United States.”

You’ve come very, very close to the sort of thing that Mussolini had and we referred to as “fascism,” with a corporate state control of the government through and by and with corporate power. That’s what we’re getting closer and closer to.

Which would be worse in a way: That the Administration and Powell at the FCC are not bright enough to see what is happening, or that they are so devious that they are, indeed, very conscious of what is happening and they are doing it deliberately?

Those are the five factors that I wanted to kind of lay out. It’s very difficult to do that in 30 seconds—or for you to edit it into 30 seconds. No one has talked about that to the best of my knowledge, in the thousands of words that have been written and spoken on this. Nobody has talked about how these five forces come together to make this exponentially worse than merely the increase in numbers of stations and newspapers one can own.

The Fairness Doctrine no longer exists, but did exist forever from the beginning of the Radio Commission and then the Federal Communications Commission in 1934. It provided very little, and it was opposed by advertisers and owners, but it was often supported by news directors. Because when the advertising manager would come in and say, “Oh my goodness, you can’t run that stuff critical of our major advertiser,” the news director could say, “Well, not only can I, but the FCC says I have to, and unless you want to risk losing your license, we’re going to have to put on a balanced view about this.”

The Fairness Doctrine had two simple requirements:

One was that a station had to deal with controversial issues of public importance. You couldn’t just be a jukebox with commercials. You had to have some local news and public affairs, and in doing that, you had to report on the controversies in the local community.

Number two, in the course of doing it, I will describe what was not required because that’s really the better way to approach it. There was not a requirement of “equal time.” The imbalance could be ten to one or so, whatever. There was no requirement that a given individual be put on the air; you couldn’t walk into a station and say, “I demand under the Fairness Doctrine that you put my statement on.” That applied to political candidates, but that’s another story. So the station could choose. It didn’t have to be balanced within a program. You could have a “slash and burn” attack on some idea on Wednesday and two weeks later have some employee at your station summarize the views of those who support the idea.

So it was a very minimal set of requirements, indeed I think it would have been impossible for an ethical professional journalist to violate them. I mean, what are you doing as a journalist? You’re looking for controversy, right? That’s what it’s about. How do you present it? You present it by presenting the controversy, by presenting both sides.

So, there were no really legitimate professional journalists who complained about this, but the FCC did away with it anyway. Now there’s no requirement.

I remember a station in Washington, D.C., that was just continuous, unabashed conservative ideology. And it’s not just conservative anymore. Its actually partisan; it’s Democrats bad, snear, snear, chuckle, chuckle, and Republicans good. So it’s not even conservatives and liberals. It’s just unrelieved. I remember this station in Washington, listening to it, and it was Rush Limbaugh, Michael Reagan and Gordon Liddy and Ollie North and Michael Savage, one right after the other. It was like 10 or 12 hours of right wing, slash-and-burn the Democrats.

Clear Channel and the Dixie Chicks is a classic example of capitulation to the Federal government administration. I mean, they exercised their First Amendment right to say whatever they wanted to say, and Clear Channel decided that’s not good for President Bush, so let’s bash the Dixie Chicks and ban them from the airwaves. And when you give someone a thousand radio stations, they’ve got the ability to do that.

Back in the old days, you have one station owner in a small town who gets really upset with the Dixie Chicks and takes them off the air. That person can express their view in that way. But it’s not going to have that much effect nationally. But when you concentrate this power in the hands of five individuals, they really are in a position to--as someone once said, “The media may not tell us what to think, but they certainly tell us what to think about”--you’ve put in the hands of very few people the power to decide what it is we’re going to be thinking about.

The television station ownership has increased up to the limits permitted by the FCC and the FCC keeps raising the limits, and that’s what they’re now in the process of doing.

When you start combining types of media you’re in the position to hype a bestseller that you own through magazines and newspapers and television stations that you own; and then turn it into a film at a motion picture studio that you own; and then distribute it through a theatre chain that you own; and then run it on the television network that you own; and have the actors in it come and appear on the late-night talk show on the network which you own; and then run it on the cable channels that you own; and then put it on video tape and DVD at a manufacturing plant that you own; and offer it for sale and for rental through a sale and rental chain that you own; and then distribute it worldwide, including the soundtrack from the movie, which you put on a CD and sell through the record label that you own; and you have an incredible multiplier.

What happens in general with this multi-media accumulation that I just described from books to DVDs is that it is no longer possible for there to be an Alfred Knopf who decides he’s going to publish a book, knowing that he’s going to lose money on it because this is just one whale of an author who deserves to have an audience. Anymore, when you’re paying five million dollar book advances, you cannot afford to distribute anything but best sellers.

I don’t know if you saw the piece in the New York Times within the past week about the extent to which Wal-Mart and Target and other stores like that (not that there’s a lot of them like that), the extent to which they are calling the shots on what books end up getting published and what music ends up getting made because of the quantity of it that’s distributed through their stores and their desire to censor the content so as not to upset their customer base. So you’ve got that phenomenon going on, too.

One of the consequences of that is that we cannot really support anymore in our economy much except for the superstars, whether it’s a Michael Jordan on the basketball court or a John Grisham as a novelist or whatever. They can be either people of genuine talent or they can be people of manufactured celebrity, but there are only so many of those that you can support and you pour millions, if not billions, of dollars into their creation, and you thereby drive out a lot of lesser talent that was “lesser” only in the sense of not having the audience at this stage of their careers, but not less lesser in terms of their abilities and artistic accomplishments. You drive them out, and so you have less diversity for that reason as wel. There’s just not the same diversity coming into the pipeline because everything they do has got to make a big profit.

Well, you make the point that they don’t have to sell, but when somebody comes along and offers you so much more for the property--particularly if you’re of an age when you’re getting ready to retire anyway and running the station is a lot of headaches--and along comes somebody and says, “Look, I’ll give you a multiple of what you paid for it and you can retire and never have to work another day in your life.” That’s very attractive.

Any time you’re talking about adding one more station to 1,000 radio stations, they’re going to be able to make more money off of it than the local guy because they can hike up the advertising rates and get national advertisers.

They tend to do away with the personnel. So we have that story coming out of North Dakota where there was some local tragedy--now today, the bombing in New Haven, at Yale--and something like that happens in a small town, it used to be that everybody in town would turn to the local radio station because good old Joe or Betty or whoever was on the microphone knew what was going on and the phone was ringing and informing them, and they could look out the window and see. and they told people what was happening. Today, something like that happens, there isn’t a human being at any of those stations. They’re all picking up stuff off of the satellite and rebroadcasting it and it’s all computerized. So not only are they not required by the FCC to provide local service, they wouldn’t have anybody there if they wanted to do it. But they don’t want to do it because they can make more profit not doing it. They can make more profit by running computers 24 hours a day. They don’t have to worry about computers showing up late or having to have back up or having sick days or whatever. They just keep running. So that’s what we’ve lost. Radio is really an entirely different business than it was when I was growing up in the 1930’s and 40’s.

Broadcasting executives have been telling us since 1930 they need this or that protection or additional revenue to keep from going broke. I mean, that is not a new story.

Check and see: How many of them are taking cabs and how many of them are being driven around in limousines? Find out what the executive pay is at one of those networks for everybody who’s working for them at over $100,000 a year. I think that’s quite a bit of money.

I’m trying to think of the name of the executive who came up with the LOP formula, the Least Objectionable Program. The programming theory was that all the programming is objectionable, nobody is really crazy about anything on the three networks as they then were, but whichever program is deemed to be the least objectionable is the one that will be watched by the most number of people and will give you the greatest rating, .

Because what they’re comparing their current condition with are the days when the three networks were dividing amongst themselves no less than about 95% of the audience watching television. That’s why the television license was referred to as a “license to print money.” There was just no way you could lose money with that kind of an oligopolistic control. You divide that audience three ways, and no matter what percentage of it you got, you became rich beyond your wildest dreams of avarice, whether you were a network or a network affiliate.

Well, now they’re down around, I don’t know what, 50%, maybe 45% even, but something in that range. They have lost a lot of audience to the diversity that cable television offers. You give people three choices they’ll watch one of the three choices. You give them 80 choices, and at least some of them are going to watch something other than the three choices. The most still end up watching those three choices, or if you count Fox and others, you’ve got more than three in terms of the old classic networks. I’m thinking of ABC, CBS and NBC.

So yeah, they’re not making the kind of money they were making before, but I think they’re doing quite nicely.

They were threatening in the 1950’s that the World Series would no longer be carried on what they called "free television." There was a big hearing before the United States Senate. Somebody had found in the Constitution the right of every American to watch the World Series on advertiser-supported over-the-air television. And this right was going to be threatened if we wouldn’t let the networks make more money and stomp out more competition.

That was 50 years ago. They’ve been crying wolf forever.

And they have increasingly gained this control of content, this blend of control of content and conduit, when they own the programming that runs on their networks. They own the stations that are the most lucrative stations in the largest markets. In New York where you are, it’s what, 2, 7 and 9, CBS, NCB and ABC? You and I, I think, could probably just take one of those stations and split the profits between us and live very comfortably. They have stations in all the largest markets that they own, in addition to all the affiliates, in addition to the worldwide sales. A lot of the money is made on the worldwide sales. I remember when ITT wanted to acquire ABC, and we started looking at what ABC owned abroad; they owned a lot of very profitable stations around the world. Plus, of course, again, the syndication rights. That is, in the day of the falling dollar and rapidly rising negative balance of payments, among the things we do export from this country are feature films and television and music.

People will talk about the number of outlets, okay? They’ll say, “Oh my goodness, look, you’re complaining about this. We’ve got 10,000 television and radio stations; we’ve only got 2,000 newspapers. What’s your complaint?” Well, I’ve just laid out what’s my complaint.

My complaint is that the person that owns the station has the right to deny everybody in his or her audience any First Amendment right to put their view out on that station.

AT&T, at one time, was literally a monopoly; it owned all the telephones, the wires, the whole thing, switching stations. And there was complaint about AT&T; Lily Tomlin did her little routine about, “We don’t care, we don’t have to, we’re the telephone company.” But there were no ALCU First Amendment complaints. Why was that? Because anybody who wanted a phone could get a phone. Once you got a phone, you could say anything on the phone you wanted to say, as far as the phone company’s concerned. I mean, the FBI might come in and crack down on your for some crime or something. But the telephone company wasn’t going to have anything to do with it. That is an open model. That is a legally enforceable right of entry.

There is no mass medium today in which any American has a legally enforceable right of entry. That’s what is so significant about this.

You can have 10,000 stations owned by 10,000 people or 10,000 stations owned by one person. So long as the person who owns it has the absolute power of censorship, that’s the ultimate check on any kind of meaningful diversity and dialog in the United States.

Well, that’s because of how they define the reach of UHF stations.

As a practical matter, most Americans today, when they, quote, watch television, unquote, are in fact getting a signal delivered to them through a cable from their cable television company. A few of those signals also exist somewhere as over-the-air signals; most of them don’t. Most of the channels that you get on cable are signals that are sent directly from a studio to a satellite and back down to cable television system receiving dishes, from which they are then sent out throughout the cable system’s area.

Originally, when there was no cable, UHF had a terrible disadvantage because they used a lot more power and they had a lot less reach. Plus the fact that nobody had receivers that could pick up UHF, and then once they got them they didn’t have antennas. But that’s another long and absolutely hilarious and tragic story.

Once you put a UHF station on the cable, it’s a signal of comparable quality to any other television signal. Do you see what I mean? So as a practical matter, the reach of the UHF goes far beyond what the reach of the UHF would be if we were all picking up UHF stations on rabbit ears antennas or rooftop antennas. So that’s part of that.

There is also, in fairness, since I should say something in fairness during the course of a half hour monolog, those who will argue that 35% is actually much less than 35%, or 45%, that what is being measured is potential reach. That is to say, if everybody within the reception area of the station had their TV set on--and in point of fact, at this time of night across America, only about half of them do--if everybody had their TV set on and they had their TV set tuned to that station, that the owner of that chain of stations would be reaching 35% of the homes or 45% of the homes. But, in point of fact, (a), they don’t have their sets on and (b), they have them tuned to a lot of stations besides that station. Now I don’t happen to find that persuasive, but I simply mention it to you as part of the overall background.