Essays,
testimony, and interviews of IBLTV members
1.
Ted Remington's Op-Ed piece on Sinclair Broadcasting's misuse
of our TV airwaves and its degrading effect on public discourse.
2.
"There's a problem..."
Op-Ed on the smear attack on Iowa City's Ted Remington by Mark
Hyman and Sinclair Broadcast Group.
3.
Nicholas Johnson's work.
University of Iowa Law professor and former FCC commissioner,
Johnson has written on media issues for many years. See his
website to access various materials, including a section devoted
to media reform issues.
4.
IBLTV
appearance on "Talk of Iowa". Hear IBLTV members
discuss some of the issues on Iowa Public Radio's public affairs
program. (This link will take you to WSUI's audio archives.
Look for the June 7th, 2005 edition of "Talk of Iowa"
entitled "Better Local Television).
6. 'Point'
hijacks local airwaves. IBLTV member Trish Nelson notes
in the Iowa City Press-Citizen how Mark Hyman misrepresented
the writings of Ted Remington -- for a second time. (Editor's
note: Hyman and Sinclair have yet to correct this error).
Sinclair
Broadcast Group, the Wal-Mart of television, sets
up shop in Iowa
By Ted
Remington
Individual
and PAC contributions by Sinclair Broadcasting Group executives
to Republicans in the last five years: nearly $250,000.
The opportunity to
foist off canned editorials on eastern Iowans from half a continent
away: priceless.
If you've
flipped by KGAN at around 10:30 on any given night in the past
several months, you've seen someone named Mark Hyman delivering
his daily editorial, "The Point" at the tail end of
the nightly newscast. Mr. Hyman is not a journalist. He's not
a KGAN employee. He's not even an Iowan. So why is he prattling
away on our airwaves?
The simple
answer to that is because he can. Hyman is the vice president
of Sinclair Broadcasting Group, Inc., a Baltimore-based company
that aims to do to local news what Walmart did to local shopping:
offer low cost, low quality product in homogenous outlets across
the country to maximize profit. Sinclair owns or operates 62 local
television stations across the country, including Iowa stations
KGAN, KFXA, KFXB, and KDSM.
Part of Sinclair's
modus operandi is to gut local news operations and replace them
with a one-size-fits-all broadcast. In many markets, much of the
"local" news is actually created in Sinclair's studios
in Baltimore, beamed to its stations, and presented as home-grown
product. Thus far, Iowa viewers have been spared the worst of
Sinclair's excesses, but we've hardly gone untouched. If you've
noticed that Tiffany O'Donnell anchors not only KGAN's 10:00 news,
but also the 9:00 newscast on KFXA and KFXB, you've seen Sinclair's
handiwork. And if business takes you to Des Moines and you feel
a little homesick, just tune in to KDSM's nightly newscast, hosted
by your "local" news anchor. . .the indefatigable Tiffany
O'Donnell.
Has Ms. O'Donnell
conquered the laws of time and space in order to hold down three
anchoring jobs simultaneously? Not exactly. Sinclair uses its
stable of KGAN talent to create a generic newscast that is shown
on KFXA, KFXB, and KDSM. The people of Dubuque have suffered most
from this news cloning. The city no longer has a newscast of its
own, but must do with the generic Sinclair-cast that pays virtually
no attention to stories of particular interest in Dubuque. KFXB
is, for all intents and purposes, no longer a local station.
One upon
a time, Sinclair never could have pulled this off. Media ownership
regulations ensured no single company could run multiple television
stations in the same market. But the current incarnation of the
Federal Communications Commission, with the approval of anti-regulation
crusaders in the White House and Congress, relaxed these restrictions,
delighting companies like Sinclair, who can now scoop up multiple
stations at will.
And this
brings us back to the droit de seigneur that is "The Point."
Not content to merely profit from owning scores of television
stations, Sinclair's executives use the rights of ownership to
compel stations such as KGAN to run their canned political editorials.
Regardless of how out of step such commentaries might be with
the views and concerns of local viewers in specific markets, all
Sinclair-owned stations must provide Hyman access to their audience.
It's true
that Hyman's editorials are predictably conservative, far to the
right of the average KGAN viewer. But that shouldn't surprise
anyone. Given that Republican politicians and appointees spearheaded
media deregulation, one can understand why Sinclair's views (and
money) support GOP concerns almost exclusively. That's not the
problem.
It's also
the case that Hyman's ramblings rarely rise above the level of
talk-radio blather, relying on name calling, hyperbole, and shading
of the truth to create what passes for an "argument."
But that's not my primary concern, either.
What should
concern all eastern Iowans is that Sinclair, a corporate conglomerate
based on the east coast, is exploiting a local resource. If KGAN
wants to take a right-wing editorial stance, that's fine. If KGAN
decides to allot precious minutes of airtime to the musings of
a mid-level management type rather than a bona fide journalist,
that's their prerogative. But "The Point" isn't the
product of KGAN. It's the brainchild of a corporation as far away
from eastern Iowa in temperament and values as it is in geography.
We the people
own the public airwaves, not KGAN, Mark Hyman, or Sinclair Broadcasting
Group. I, for one, would welcome greater use of local broadcast
time for the discussion of topical issues, but let it be a truly
local discussion. Let's talk about school board elections, local
referendums, and proposed city ordinances. Let's talk about who
we want to represent us in Des Moines and Washington. And when
we discuss national and international issues, let's do it with
an Iowan accent.
"The
Point" represents a misuse of a public resource, a resource
too scarce to be given away. Certainly, there are larger issues
of media conglomeration that bode ill for truly local news. But
let's begin the fight here. Write KGAN and ask them to stand up
for their viewers by standing up to their bosses in Baltimore.
Better yet, write directly to Sinclair and tell them you will
not watch their programming as long as they take advantage of
their clients: us.
Sending a letter
to Sinclair Broadcasting Group: 37 cents.
Getting back our public airwaves: priceless.
Sinclair Broadcasting
Group Inc.
10706 Beaver Dam Road
Hunt Valley, Maryland 21030
There's
a problem when large broadcast corporations manipulate local
news
By Charles
Miller and Eileen Finnegan
Sunday
Guest Opinion featured in the Iowa City Press-Citizen,
April 10th, 2005
Imagine
that you are at home at the end of the day, watching the local
news. As usual, most of its content is predictable, but lately
a few items catch your attention. They may seem inappropriate
for a news program or simply things you don't agree with. Such
items become a topic of conversation with your friends. Some-times
a particular item bothers you enough that you write a letter
to your local paper or post your views on a blog.
Then one
night, as you watch the news, there on the screen is your face,
along with a judgmental voice that assails your fitness for
employment and your personal ethics. The broadcast ends. The
station never provided you with any warning nor is there any
follow-up. You wonder if there is anything that you can do to
effectively counter the potential harm that this broadcast has
done to your reputation.
Is this
just a paranoid dream, a dark movie plot about a dystopian future,
or a retelling of how the Soviet Union used its media to deal
with critics? Sadly, it is nothing so remote: It concerns an
Iowa Citian and a local television station amid a backdrop of
eroding broadcast ethics and notions of public service to the
community. This should alarm us all, because a democracy cannot
function without a vibrant and free press that cares about the
public interest.
On Feb.
16, KGAN-TV aired a segment called "The Point" which
disparaged Ted Remington, a University of Iowa faculty member.
Among the many thousands of academics, Remington was singled
out as one who "can't hold a job in the real world,"
an "otherwise unemployable individual with intellectually
bankrupt viewpoints" and someone with more concern for
sipping a latte than teaching ethically. His supposed offense
-- trumped up from a distorted take on a University of Iowa
plagiarism policy -- was juxtaposed with the case of Ward Churchill,
the Colorado professor who made callous statements about Sept.
11 victims. It was a classic attempt at guilt by association.
In reality, however, it seems unlikely that KGAN or its owners
cared a hoot about Remington's course policies or alleged sins.
The more likely reason for the smear was because he authors
a blog called thecounterpoint.blogspot.com, which is
critical of the station's parent company.
Truth
and fairness
As it turns
out, KGAN did not go out of its way to disparage a member of
its own community -- it simply broadcast the propaganda produced
by its owner, Sinclair Broadcasting. However, it did so without
evident concern about truth and fairness.Sinclair owns some
60 television stations across the United States and requires
them to air its political views on a daily basis.
While many
might recall Sinclair's efforts against John Kerry last fall,
the complicity of KGAN in besmirching Remington is more troubling.
KGAN was willing to broadcast Sinclair's diatribe without observing
the most basic journalistic standards. It did not bother to
contact Remington or follow up on its one-sided broadcast. This
is a case not only of a broadcaster with an impaired sense of
local responsibility but a frightening example of how wealthy
and distant owners feel free to use the public's airwaves to
squash whomever they wish.
Curiously,
Sinclair seems to have acknowledged its culpability. As MediaMatters.com
noted, it selectively removed from its Web site the archived
video of the Feb. 16 edition of "The Point," leaving
other editions on either side of that date intact. This is not
journalism, but something darker: an attack-and-hide mentality.
Some conservatives
cheerfully dismiss such concerns by appealing to the dogma of
free enterprise: Sinclair owns these stations, so it can do
whatever it wants. But it's just not that simple. The history
of FCC regulation of broadcast media makes it clear that the
airwaves belong to the public and that, as monopolizers of those
airwaves, broadcast media have unique obligations to serve the
public good. That is, after all, why they are licensed in the
first place.
Apologists
for Sinclair and Fox News make the rather incredible claim that
these voices are simply exercising First Amendment rights. A
reading of that amendment makes it clear that free speech rights
were granted to individual citizens, not to large corporate
concerns that simply buy up stations to more fully saturate
their "markets." When compared against the individual's
First Amendment rights, "commercial" free speech rights
are disproportionately powerful. That is what makes the KGAN/Remington
case troubling: Local news organizations are willing to forego
basic journalistic fairness to keep their corporate bosses happy.
And in the current political environment, this trend is not
likely to stop.
Declining
oversight
How has
broadcast media gotten so bad and unresponsive to the public?
There are many reasons, ranging from a disinterested public
to the loss of meaningful government oversight. Thirty years
ago, television stations were required to renew their licenses
on a yearly basis as a means of ensuring local accountability.
Now, license renewal occurs only every eight years. FCC Commissioner
Michael Copps has noted that relicensing has been trivialized
to a "postcard renewal" process.
Furthermore,
major efforts to weaken FCC rules have been promoted even against
strong public protest. On June 2, 2003, the FCC commissioners
voted 3-2, along party lines, to relax media ownership regulations,
even though 99.9 percent of the 750,000 comments sent to the
FCC were opposed to greater media consolidation. In an extraordinary
move, this measure was overturned by a 55-40 vote in the Senate.
In our pro-business political climate, it is not at all clear
that today's Senate could garner enough votes to again protect
the public interest.
Critically,
unlike other issues facing our country, media reform efforts
receive scant attention from the media, a natural result of
their abuse of their role as gatekeepers of public information.
If there is a bigger single threat to a democracy, we cannot
think of it, particularly as it is one carefully managed by
the industry.
It should
be noted, however, that media consolidation is not just a Democratic
or liberal issue: Sen. John McCain has staunchly fought it along
several fronts and has introduced a bill to reduce broadcast
license periods from eight to three years (i.e., the Localism
in Broadcasting Reform Act of 2005). He has called Sinclair
Broadcast-ing's refusal to air a program honoring fallen U.S.
service personnel a "gross disservice to the public"
and "unpatriotic."
Advocates
of media consolidation like to speak of "synergy,"
a term that may warm the hearts of the stockholders but should
generate a cold, Orwellian, shiver to those with larger concerns.
While examples abound of the problems of massive horizontal
and vertical media integration, let's take a simple example:
Would we have been able to address our fellow citizens in a
venue such as this column if Sinclair also owned the Press-Citizen?
Deaf
to public good
KGAN's
complicity in the Remington smear illustrates how powerful media
conglomerates have be-come and how deaf they are to the notion
of the public good. We urge our fellow citizens to consider
the debilitating effect of this trend on our democracy. Whether
you are conservative, liberal or in between, we all need to
be well in-formed, yet a powerful gatekeeper of information,
the broadcast media, has been deregulated to the point where
it too often serves the narrow interests of a multi-millionaire
business elite.
Such abuses
of power are to everyone's detriment, as is the ease with which
lo-cal broadcasters accept fake, government-created, video feeds
and uncritically air them as "news" (see The New York
Times' March 13 article, "Under Bush, a New Age of Prepackaged
News"). Compounding this problem are survey results indicating
that our nation's youth fail to fully appreciate the critical
importance of a free press in a democracy (see the Boston Herald's
Jan. 1 article, "First Amendment No Big Deal, Students
Say").
As we noted,
don't expect much coverage of this issue on the broadcast media.
For more in-formation, useful Web sites include Media-Matters.com
and SinclairAction.com. The NPR program called "On the
Media" is also valuable. Furthermore, an Iowa City group
of concerned citizens has formed. A number of activities --
from contacting local advertisers to political action -- are
possible. But we urge all to become informed about what is happening
to the means by which most Americans are informed.
Charles
Miller and Eileen Finnegan are Iowa City residents and University
of Iowa faculty members.
Point
Hijacks Local Media
By Trish
Nelson
Appearing
in the Iowa City Press-Citizen on June 28,
2005.
For the
second time this year, Mark Hyman, Sinclair Broadcasting's poster
boy for small-mindednes and brought to you by Sinclair's "local"
station KGAN, played fast and loose with journalistic ethics.
OK, so he's not really a journalist; he just plays one on TV.
Nevertheless, since he appears during the local news broadcast,
one might assume he is a journalist.
Hyman,
therefore, should have pointed out that a comment that he borrowed
from Iowa Citian Ted Remington's blog, The Counterpoint, at
www.the counterpoint.blogspot.com, was not part of Hyman's viewer
mailbag, as he presented it during the June 18 broadcast. This
is the second time in the past six months that the Sinclair
corporate vice president, living in Baltimore, Md., has singled
out the same local viewer presumably because Remington disagrees.
What I
want to know is why does this community and the FCC, broadcasting's
regulatory body, allow the publicly owned airwaves to be hijacked
and used against local citizens? Where is the public service
in this?
Let's take
our responsibility seriously. Write to your congressman, the
FCC, KGAN. It doesn't matter so much what we do, as long as
we do something.
"This is the single most important discussion any American
citizen can be a part of." With those words media critic
John Nichols began Iowa City's Wednesday meeting with FCC officials.
In a packed auditorium, Iowans expressed their concerns about
the state of our broadcast media. It was a triumph of direct
citizen engagement with Washington, the latter actually coming
to listen to the former.
But it
also was very troubling. We learned about a critically sick
media.
Sick
to the point that television news is packaged as entertainment
and entertainment is packaged as news.
Sick
to the point that the most popular political affairs show
for right-leaning people is one in which the host bullies his
guests, and the most popular political show for left-leaning
people is a comedy.
Sick
to the point that Americans prefer "boutique"
news sources -- blogs, Internet sites, radio shows tailored
to one's biases -- instead of crossing over to share information,
reach consensus and solve problems.
Sick
to the point that the third-largest source of TV revenue
is political commercials, so that only millionaires run for
office and use attack ads that "work" because they
destroy their opponents.
We go to
war, we waste resources, we lack basic health care, we slouch
to a "service" economy, while our media divide and
trivialize.
We are
no longer the country that marshaled the will to do something
as grand as land men on the moon. We can't even agree on a modest
gasoline tax to reduce consumption and actually pay for a war
conducted because of oil. Our public space is numbed by manufactured
paralysis, while real power deals continue behind doors that
shouldn't be closed.
How did
this happen? How has our great country gotten in such a pickle,
in which citizens disengage and fail to act as citizens?
The media's
demise did not occur overnight, but across 25 years of deregulation.
Since the 1930s, the FCC saw a strong public good in regulating
radio and, later, TV. It established that, as users of a valuable
and limited public resource -- the airwaves -- stations may
profit from them in exchange for also serving "the public
interest." So the FCC required fairness and access for
differing viewpoints. Codified in 1949, the Fairness Doctrine
kept public discourse civil and diversified. It held until the
1980s, when deregulation became the rage.
At his
1980 inauguration, Ronald Reagan said, "government is not
the solution to our problem; government is the problem,"
and his FCC proclaimed, "the perception of broadcasters
as community trustees should be replaced by a view of broadcasters
as marketplace participants." Not only did he veto the
Fairness Doctrine, but he also abolished limits on commercials,
eliminated community-affairs program requirements and trivialized
the renewal of broadcast licenses.
Deregulators
promised much: better shows, diversity, lower cable prices,
etc., as the free market would magically deliver a gem. But
the airwaves are anything but a free market and deregulation
and mergers profit only the extremely wealthy while returning
unwatchable TV. We get more commercials, less news and fewer
family friendly shows. Networks would rather show us people
ingesting pig rectums than inform us. One large TV owner, Sinclair,
sees nothing wrong with using stations to defame people who
disagree with them. And consolidation can even threaten public
safety, as Minot, S.D., learned in 2002 -- for more information,
look at item 3 that is listed on the page www.ibltv.org/
MediaConsolidation.htm.
These news
gatekeepers are compromised by vested interests. You might not
hear about military contract abuses from NBC, whose parent company,
GE, is a major contractor. But you might watch a "news
special" about "Disneyland at 50" on ABC -- guess
which broadcaster Disney owns. And, as shown in the brilliant
film "The Insider," CBS will suppress an important
"60 Minutes" expose about Big Tobacco if it thinks
the story might depress the stock value of its parent company,
Westinghouse.
Those of
us in the middle or upper class should not forget that not everyone
owns a computer, has high-speed Internet or has time to surf
news Web sites. Nor should we forget that TV still is the
primary source of news for Americans. Or that, in the cause
of unity, there is great value in citizens being informed together.
I urge
all to get involved in media reform. The FCC needs to hear about
how this corrupted system imperils good citizenship. I particularly
urge younger people, people who know little of the old, more
responsible media, to get on board. Iowa's TV licenses expire
this winter, providing a unique opportunity for citizen input.
Iowans for Better Local Television has formed to do just that.
Please join us, and sign our FCC petition, before we lose more.
