For the last few months, the president and his supporters have repeatedly dismissed Social Security as an outdated program designed long ago and far away for another time and another populace. Kevin Martin, the newly appointed FCC chief, is taking a similar tack in bashing rules made in the 1970s banning a single company from owning a television station and a newspaper in the same market. Claiming that the cross-ownership rules are relics of a time before cable television and the Internet, he wants to scuttle the ownership limits, allowing media companies to increase their presence in local media markets.
On the Social Security front, the salesmanship continued yesterday. The Washington Post reported that a few Republican House members rolled out a brown 1935 Ford Coupe (1935 is the year FDR instituted Social Security — get it?), and compared the jalopy to the “old” Social Security program. According to the Post, the car was only part of the attraction, as the Republicans “brought out a collection of curios: a washboard, a box of 20 Mule Team Borax, a Decotel Candlestick telephone, and a Remington portable typewriter.”
The message is clear, if simple-minded: Since old cars and phones don’t work as well as newer models, we should scrap one of the most successful social programs in American history.
It will take more than gimmicks, of course, for Congressional Republicans to save the president’s Social Security plan from the dustbin of history. But that’s not stopping those in other parts of the federal government from taking the same tack. The FCC’s Martin, as we noted, has adopted the tactic in selling his proposals to remove barriers to further big media consolidation. According to a recent issue of The Deal, Martin is moving away from his predecessor Michael Powell’s hardball, all-or-nothing style in trying to push though the repeal of various limits on television, radio and newspaper consolidation. While there is no doubt that Martin has the same goal as Powell — offering up large chunks of the media landscape to Big Media as some sort of free lunch — he’s quite a bit craftier than Powell. The Deal reports that of all the print, broadcast and radio deregulatory moves currently being considered by Martin, the one he has zeroed in on is the current ban on cross-ownership of newspapers and television stations in a single market.
The plan appears to be to argue that now that television, radio, and the Internet have eroded the once dominant role newspapers played, there’s no longer a need to continue a ban on cross-ownership that was adopted when newspapers were the sole source of news and information. Martin is obviously sticking to the new talking points of old-is-bad, new-is-good. But allowing huge media conglomerates to essentially set up fiefdoms of influence by monopolizing many smaller markets strikes us as nothing new at all. To the contrary, it’s a throwback to the industrial concentration of a century ago, which featured unbridled monopolies whose abuse led to the first antitrust laws.
In a bit of good news, not everyone at the FCC is on board with the plan. The two Democratic FCC commissioners, Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein made it clear this weekend at the National Conference for Media Reform that they oppose Martin’s moves. The two called on the public to resist Martin’s efforts to relax ownership rules, with Copps warning that if Martin’s plans are implemented, media conglomerates will “try to digest the whole cake.”
We’ve been down this road before. The public rallied in 2003 by the millions to tell their representatives that they prefer an independent and decentralized media (3 million wrote the FCC to oppose media consolidation), but now it appears the fight is going to begin anew. The FCC’s tactics may have changed, but the end game is the same.
— Paul McLeary
Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.
