What do Marquette University, the Sierra Club, NARAL Pro-Choice Wisconsin and the Milwaukee LGBT Center all have in common?
They, along with many other members of Wisconsin’s left-wing, co-sponsored last week’s “Town Hall Meeting on the Future of Media,” featuring Michael Copps and Joel Adelstein of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
Two themes seemed to dominate the evening: First, women and minorities presently own a very small share of broadcast media stations. The only remedy for this situation, apparently, is for the FCC to make it an explicit policy that their decisions will be biased in favor of diverse ownership. If Commissioners Copps and Adelstein had a majority, watch out for FCC-style affirmative action, perhaps even quotas. The statistics do not seem to comport with anecdotal evidence. Turn on cable, and you can watch WE, Hallmark, Lifetime and three shopping channels anytime of day. From 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., network television is basically dominated by women’s programming, from Oprah to Days of Our Lives to Judging Amy. And you can find original or re-run episodes of Sex and the City almost any night of the week.
Granted, just because a station carries women’s programming does not mean that it is owned by women, but do you think a man came up with the business plan for the Hallmark Channel? I doubt it. The second main point of the evening is that huge multinational corporations are buying up more and more of America’s media outlets. These large corporations then consolidate viewpoints and filter the news they give us to fit their anti-tax, anti-worker agenda.
At the same time, most conservatives are convinced that the media, particularly the large national outlets, display a terribly liberal bias in the news, from Dan Rather to the New York Times. These conservatives’ presumption that the media is liberal seems to align well with the anecdotal and academic evidence on the point.
This yet again reminds me the extent to which human nature is to shape facts to fit our worldview. How is it that rational, intelligent people can have two vastly different answers to a simple factual question: Does the media show a bias in reporting the news?
Still, there is certainly some common ground to be made on these issues. Commissioner Adelstein talked about the “overly violent and hyper-sexualized” nature of TV programming, and I was quick to applaud.
On the whole, I think the opponents of “big media consolidation” are fighting a losing battle. The Web is allowing today’s news consumers to demand it all – a print story, an audio sound-byte, a video clip – right on the computer screen. The best way to make this convergence cost effective is for companies to own multiple forms of media, so a Journal Sentinel story can also feature a TMJ4 video report and a WTMJ 620 audio clip. Convergence and consolidation seem to be the wave of the Web-based future.
Witty comments, juicy gossip, illicit copies of memoranda and all the rest are welcome at daniel.suhr@mu.edu.
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