Archive | March, 2003

The public hearing on media ownership held last Friday in Seattle was probably the one most deserving of the modifier “public” so far. I listened for a good portion of the afternoon to the Seattle IMC’s live ‘net feed, and presented a choice 20 minutes of public testimony on Friday’s mediageek radioshow. Of course, it’s too bad that only the two most public-interest minded FCC Commissioners were on hand to actually hear the public.

John at DIYMedia.net has some comments from Jonathan Lawson, a Reclaim the Media organizer, who helped make the hearing happen, along with helping get the word out for the actual public to attend.

“For his part, Lawson feels a lot better about the strength of the media democracy movement after last Friday. ‘I don’t feel like it’s a done deal at all,’ he said. In fact, it would seem, talk is changing from simply slowing the deregulatory juggernaut to ‘winning this thing.'”

The LA Times has an interview with Federal Communications Commission Media Bureau Chief W. Kenneth Ferree, the man charged with writing the new media ownership rules that the FCC Commissioners will decide upon. In sum, it looks like Ferree is leaning towards using “hard number” metrics and some of the same formulas used by the Justice Dept. in assessing anti-trust matters.

This is not a good thing, because it means treating vital news and information only like commodities. It makes information about our world and our communities nor more valuable than hog futures or a ton of copper. And that’s fucked up.

It’s all a symptom of the utter failure of our executive, legislature and judiciary to pay any heed to the role of the media in a democracy, where citizens are expected to have real useful information available to them. Instead, it all boils down to economics and any discussion of competition in the “media marketplace” only pays lip service to the “marketplace of ideas,” since that makes for a nice facade.

When you boil it down to econometrics, the democratic imperative disappears, because the argument for democracy is not an economic argument. Democracy is not having two colas to choose from, having two candidates to choose from, or having two TV networks to choose from. Democracy is about actual people having a role in deciding how their world, their communities and their lives will be managed. It’s about living a purposeful life, not consuming.

But when the whole issue of media democracy gets reduced to competition in the marketplace, that’s what democracy is reduced to — consumer choice.

I’ll give up being a consumer before I give up being a citizen.