Nicholas Johnson (N.J.): Thank you, Adam.

A.B.: First, why don’t you catch us up today, for those like myself who aren’t up on their telecommunications law and history. Where have we come from when the Radio Act was first introduced way back when.

N.J.: Well, you’re right. We had a Radio Act in 1927, and then a Communications Act in 1934, and numerous amendments since up to and through the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Virtually all countries on earth have recognized that there’s something special about broadcasting. It’s not just another business in the marketplace.

Somebody has to decide who gets what frequency, and somebody has to decide “this is going to be the AM radio band and the FM and television bands,” and somebody has to award these licenses—unless you’re going to run broadcasting as a public corporation like Iowa Public Television, or as a government agency as they do in some countries. So we opted for a system of government licensing for fixed terms, limited terms, to private owners in exchange for their obligation to provide a public service. There is no right to get a license renewed. We would look at their records, see what kind of a job they did in the community, and perhaps give the license to someone else if they would do a better job—not unlike members of congress getting re-elected. Nobody has a right to get re-elected, most do, but you don’t have a right to.

So it’s important to understand up front that we’re not talking about grocery stores or filling stations, we’re talking about something that universally has been recognized as special, extraordinarily powerful. I think the Congress was incredibly prescient back in the 1920’s when they were addressing the ownership question. They contemplated as system in which a licensee would have one station and be a person that lives in the community and operates the station. One congressman said, “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.”

Well, he could see, back then, what apparently the present Congress and FCC cannot see but increasingly more and more Americans are coming to see, and that is that we are rapidly evolving toward the kind of media that one has under an authoritarian regime. We have, essentially, a one-party press. Ted Turner spoke to this the other day. He’s the fellow who started CNN and was with AOL/Time/Warner. He said that 90% of what we see and read now comes to us from five sources in the United States. And I think we saw it during the Iraqi War; the very limited perspective that our media provided compared even to the media in the United Kingdom, let alone the rest of the world. They presented the U.S. point of view, but also presented a range of views that we simply don’t get in this country. We have very centrist to far right pro-administration presentation primarily. As the bumper sticker has it, “Our liberal media are as liberal as their conservative owners permit them to be.”

So that’s the background. We started off with government regulation—it’s not like a grocery store or a filling station—and limiting ownership and limiting media power was very much in Congress’ mind at the beginning.

A.B.: Those are the safeguards they put in place.

N.J.: Right.

A.B.: And did they also have things for the public good, things like you have to provide so much public service?

N.J.: Yes, that’s the other problem. I mean, the current ownership standards are outrageous. They’d make those early members of the House and Senate turn over in their graves. The notion that the FCC's making it worse by this proposal on June 2 is just unbelievable. I don’t know what you say because it’s so bad already.

But what makes it even worse than that is what you’re asking about, which is that we used to have a Fairness Doctrine, which did not require perfect balance or fairness (whatever that would be) but that there be some opportunity to present a range of views. That has been repealed by the FCC.

We used to have an obligation that in exchange for the right to make private profit from the use of public property, the airwaves, there was a public service obligation for local news and public affairs and telling people what’s going on. Now you have many communities in America, if they were to have a terrorist or other emergency arise, where there’s no human in any of the radio stations in that town—all owned by the same company, all operated from L.A. or New York or somewhere—who haven’t a clue as to what’s going on in that town. Information about local emergencies is a function that radio, historically, has performed.

And finally, we have permitted this combination of the content (the programming, the news stories in the newspaper) the combination of the content with the ownership of the conduit. The same company that owns the cable distribution system in Iowa City is also tied in with ownership of much of the content that flows over the Iowa City cable system. And that’s true for the networks and so forth.

Couple that with the Supreme Court’s position that nobody in America has any First Amendment rights except the people who own the media. So if you want to buy a quarter page in the Press-Citizen and they don’t want to sell it to you, you can’t buy it, you can’t get the word out. In Los Angeles the Los Angeles Times is the dominate paper in an 8,000 square-mile area that holds one of the largest cities in the United States. You can’t get your views out. Only the people who own the media have First Amendment rights.

So you let them combine into five firms, you say nobody in America except those five individuals have any First Amendment rights, and they can control the content as well as the conduit over which it is distributed, they have no public service obligation and there’s no Fairness Doctrine, and you’ve got a very serious, serious problem in any society that pretends to a modicum of democratic control.

A.B.: Now, newspapers and print media, how are they under the domain of the FCC? I thought that was just radio and television, telephone, Internet stuff.

N.J.: You’re absolutely right. The FCC has absolutely no jurisdiction over newspapers, as such. It is similar, in a sense, to an early case decided by Justice Frankfurter, back in about 1940. There were network regulations from the FCC. The question was, you know, "the network doesn’t hold a license, how can the FCC regulate a network?" And the answer to that question, according to Justice Frankfurter, and your question, according to me, is that when you regulate the over-the-air stations you can regulate the kinds of contracts that they can enter into. You’re not saying that a newspaper can’t be affiliated with a local station; you’re saying that the local station can’t be affiliated with the newspaper. So you’re regulating the television station.

A.B.: You’re not regulating what they own, in particular?

N.J.: Well, you are regulating what is jointly owned, in particular, but you’re coming at it from the standpoint of what you have jurisdiction to regulate. You’re not coming at it from the standpoint of the newspaper.

Nor is a newspaper, a company that owns a newspaper precluded from owning a television station. What we’re talking about is in the same community.

So you’ve got problems here both with national domination and problems with local domination. When you have one owner, as say, in Atlanta, Georgia, who owns WSB-TV, AM, FM, Cox Cable, the billboards, magazines and The Atlanta Constitution. Now imagine you’re an FM station owner trying to compete with them. This is not just about diversity of ideas. It’s also about small business. It’s also about advertisers, who are suddenly paying monopolistic-level rates to get into the market. It’s also about other media that want to compete and can’t because of the humongous discount that the monopolists can offer in the community.

A.B.: Right. So like in town here, the Cedar Rapids Gazette owns Channel 9…

N.J.: Well, that is wonderful local service that they provide, you see, so we wrote an exception into our rules for them, actually. No, actually, we did. I think most people in that particular instance, at least I have not heard a lot of complaint locally that the Gazette is a shoddy newspaper as compared to the Press-Citizen, say, or that there’s an effort to dominate the political scene in Eastern Iowa as a result of this media conglomerate’s power or anything of that sort. Mostly we’re talking about the limit we used to have that you could only own seven AM radio stations nationally, for example. Now there’s one company that owns over 1,000 radio stations. The FCC doesn’t see anything wrong with that. But what’s wrong with that is that you’ve just deprived, you know, 993 communities of having a local owner who belongs to the Rotary Club and walks the streets and . . .

A.B.: And hires locally…

N.J.: Yeah, hire local people and know something about the local community.

A.B.: I know in Europe they have controls and restrictions on the length of commercials and they have fewer commercials per hour. Here, I don’t know how many minutes it is per hour, but can the FCC say something like “Let’s have fewer commercials” or put any kind of restrictions on?

N.J.: They not only could do that, but we did do that when I was there. Bear in mind, I spent seven years on the FCC writing dissenting opinions, describing how horrible things were with corporate control and lack of regulation. Now we look back on that as “The Golden Age” of FCC regulation.

Licensees were supposed to say what they were doing to serve local needs when they’d come in for their license renewal, and one licensee said, “Well, we have two needs in our community. One is to be entertained and the other is to promote commerce. I do the former by playing records and the latter by running commercials.” As long as they’d explain what they were doing, that was all right. But one guy came in he and said he was going to have 32 minutes of commercials an hour. We had a limit of about 12 or something like that. So the commission staff asked him, “You’re going to have 32? What’s that about? Why are you going to do that?” He said, “Well, my wife wants a fur coat.” And that was considered adequate explanation. So that was back when we had really tough regulations and we did stuff like that. Now there’s virtually no limit as far as I know.

When I was there, Mattel, the toy company, wanted to have a half an hour program during which kids would be playing with Mattel toys. We said, “Fine, but the stations are going to have to log that as 30 minutes of commercial. That’s not a program, that’s a commercial.” Now we have stations on cable that do nothing but sell 24 hours a day.

A.B.: I can remember when cable was the commercial-free alternative. You were paying every month, and you were paying not to watch commercials. And now every station on cable has commercials. There’s only one, I think it’s Turner Classic Movies, that’s commercial free. Do you think, true or false, is there more diversity in the media today than when . . .

N.J.: Is this a quiz?

A.B.: Yeah.

N.J.: No, I don’t think there’s more diversity. There’s been progressively less diversity over the years. We projected it, and everybody said we’re Chicken Little—the sky is falling, you know, we’re trying to scare everybody. Well, things today are much worse than what those of us media critics were concerned about 30 or 40 years ago. It never dawned on us that we’d be talking about five firms.

But I remember when Time and Warner merged before AOL part of it, we were opposing the merger (I was off the FCC at the time, but with a public interest group), we asked them, “Why do you guys want to merge?” And they, pretty candidly, said, “Well, because some day there are going to be five firms that control all the media on Planet Earth, and we intend to be one of them.” And, of course, they are one of them.

Of the music that people buy in stores, hear on the radio, listen to as sound tracks of movies, there are five or six firms in the world that control like 95 percent of that music.

And now, as I mentioned earlier, Ted Turner says that there are five firms that are providing 90 percent of our news and entertainment in this country. It is really dangerous, particularly when you have no check on that at all. There are stations you can listen to…I do not know of stations that run consecutively one after the other Jim Hightower and then Molly Ivans and then Jesse Jackson and then Ralph Nader; but I do know stations that run one right after another Rush Limbaugh and then Gordon Liddy and Michael Ragan and Ollie North and Michael Savage.

A.B.: Buckley.

N.J.: Yeah, Buckley, whoever. There’s a station in Washington D.C., a radio station (I listen to radio throughout the night) and there’s one of them that it’s just all night long. And it’s not just conservative. That doesn’t bother me so much, I mean there are legitimate debates, discussions we can have, particularly if we have both points of view represented. But so much of it has become partisan. I mean, it’s kind of “slash and sneer” at Democrats. “They’re all Liberals.” And then it’s not just Conservatives, but it’s Republicans, it’s pro-Bush and anti anybody who’s critical at all of Bush. You know, the Dixie Chicks, suddenly the media combine and we’re going to take them off of our thousand radio stations. That’s a dangerous kind of power. That’s not what America is about.

A.B.: How could the FCC say, “Well, let’s have more diversity, let’s have the Dixie Chicks on to talk to Rush Limbaugh and respond.” Could they ever say that?

N.J.: No, they wouldn’t say it in that way, and I wouldn’t support them saying it in that way. But I think what you do is that you have something like the Fairness Doctrine. The Fairness Doctrine was no restraint. I mean, most news directors thought it was wonderful because they could go to the advertising director and say, “Look, we have to put this stuff on and we don’t care if you lose a few commercials. The FCC requires us to do it.” So it would kind of back up the professional journalists who really wanted to do a job. It didn’t require them to use any particular format. It was not equal time. In fact, it did not provide that any named individual could get access to the station. It did not require that every program had to be balanced. They could have a one-sided slash and burn program on, and then a week later have some other points of view presented. They didn’t have to put any particular individual on. They could have their own employee state the position of the other side.

In fact, it would be virtually impossible for a professional journalist to ever violate the Fairness Doctrine because it’s just so broad in what it permits, and most journalists would be well within its requirements.

A.B.: And yet they got rid of it?

N.J.: Yeah. They got rid of it.

A.B.: When was that?

N.J.: Oh, I don’t know. During this whole corporate . . .

A.B.: It evaporated over the course . . .

N.J.: Yeah, this whole corporate takeover of America, generally, and as a part of it, American media. Because you have to control the media if you’re going to try to control the country and control the government. Media control is central to this whole effort.

But at least with the Fairness Doctrine, you had some sense of responsibility. I mean, even if it was outnumbered by ten to one, in terms of the amount of time provided, there was some time provided for other points of view. But now, you can just be “Republican good, Democrat bad. Republican good, Democrat bad” 24 hours a day. And somebody, you know, in whatever part of the country is listening to nothing but that all day long. Does that have a consequence in terms of presidential election? You’re darn right it does. Sure it does.

A.B.: You are Iowa City born, bred, went to Washington, moved back?

N.J.: Yep. The only Iowa-City born fellow hanging out over there at the Law School, I might add. Yeah, I was born in the University Hospital.

A.B.: And you have, I visited your website today—www.nicholasjohnson.org—great website. A lot of information on you, but also links and things to other free speech groups and related topics and stuff. Why did you start that website? What was your thinking behind that?

N.J.: Well, it serves a lot of purposes. I wasn’t going to mention it, but I’m glad you did—www.nicholasjohnson.org.

A.B.: It’s on the screen.

N.J.: Oh, is it on the screen? How terrific. No, I’ve posted thousands of things on there that people can read. It’s currently visited regularly by users in 132 countries, so it’s proven to be very popular. There’s nothing on it for sale. The books of mine from the past, How to Talk Back to Your Television Set, Test Pattern for Living are up there in full. Test Pattern for Living has developed another little cult following now, 30 years later.

A.B.: We have How to Talk Back, we have that in our library.

N.J.: People are free to go there and download it. It’s fine with me.

I also use it for my classes. All my students’ papers—seminar papers—are posted there. I had a very nice comment from a Harvard professor saying what high-quality work our students at Iowa were doing. I put resources up there for the class.

When I was on the school board, I put the stuff I was writing for the school board up there. I wrote a column every two weeks for the Press-Citizen about K-12 issues, and all those Op-Eds went up there on the web.

So it’s just a great variety plus links out to other things.

During the Iraq War, I was so concerned with the limited view that we were getting from American media. I listen to BBC at night on WSUI to get a broader view of news. And so I also have a list of a lot of newspapers around the world that have their newspapers up on the Web, so I created a page with links to those, and a link to the Iowa City weather.

A.B.: I was going to say, most of the time you don’t see a namesake website like this one, unless someone’s running for office. Is that in your future?

N.J.: No, that is in my past. I very briefly ran for the U.S. Senate when the Democrats didn’t have a candidate years ago. As soon as Dick Clark came out, I boldly went out and threw my support to Dick Clark. Later, I ran for Congress. The goal was to defeat H.R. Gross, and he stunned everyone by dropping out and announcing he wasn’t going to run the afternoon of the morning I announced I was going to run. But then I immediately became the carpet bagger overnight, instead of the local hero I’d been the day before. And then I ran for and was elected to the school board, and that was my—if you’re familiar with the story in the film "The Last Hurrah," the Frank Skeffington character, mayor of Boston—well, my last hurrah was the school board.

A.B.: One term, that was it.

N.J.: I said one term up front. You know, 30 hours a week of volunteer time on top of a 60-hour week schedule I was already holding. I think three years of that is about as much as anybody should be expected to give to the community for no pay, so that’s what I did.

A.B.: What, in the remaining time, do you want to talk about? Any particular issues?

N.J.: Well, it depends on what the remaining time is. I explained to you that normally . . .

A.B.: We’ve got about two or three minutes.

N.J.: that normally I talk for entire semesters at a time.

A.B.: I know.

N.J.: You have no idea how you’ve restrained me.

A.B.: We’re compressing it.

N.J.: That’s right, we’ve tried compressing it.

A.B.: I don’t know how restrained you were, you’ve restrained yourself. We have about two minutes. What’s the future? You did some predictions in one of your books, How to Talk Back to Your Television.

N.J.: Yeah, I wrote a chapter called, “Communications in the Year 2000.” And I wrote that in 1969 or 1970. And it proved to be remarkably prescient as to what was going to happen; what I called, “instantaneous, ubiquitous no-cost communication.” I think with the Internet, we’ve come very, very close to that. It’s not totally instantaneous; it goes 186,000 miles per second, that’s pretty close to instantaneous. It’s not ubiquitous, but in most cities around the world you can at least find an internet café to log on. And it’s not no cost, but you can get free e-mail access and so forth.

A.B.: Do you see the same content conduit issues we see in broadcasting, with people who own the site owning the content?

N.J.: Oh, absolutely. That’s going to be the big fight, when the ISP, say here Mediacom, will want to control not only the conduit to get you to the Internet, but may want to control what content you can get once you get to the Internet. So, we go through this fight all the time. There’s always somebody who wants to control the society. It’s up to the rest of us to try to prevent that from happening.

A.B.: How can we do that?

N.J.: By supporting public access television for one thing. That’s why I fought for access television as an FCC commissioner, so that you and I can sit here and talk about whatever we want to. You know, we don’t have to care about "ratings" or whether anyone’s watching. We can just lay it out there. If people want to hear it, they can.

So come down here, learn how to make video, get your own point of view out there. That’s what we fought for in creating public access.

A.B.: That’s a good plug for us. Thank you.

N.J.: It’s well deserved.

A.B.: Are we out of time, Renee?

We’re going to wrap it up here. I’d like to thank Nicholas Johnson, former FCC commissioner, talking about media ownership and just telecommunications stuff here today. This show’s going to replay on Saturday at noon, so if you missed part of it, you can catch the entire thing next Saturday at noon, the 24th, and it’ll replay next Monday as well.

Thanks a lot for being here.

N.J.: All right. Thank you.