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. Sometimes 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, 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 Broadcasting'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 become 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 informed, 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 withwhich
local 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 information, useful Web sites include
MediaMatters.com and SinclairAction.com. The NPR program called “On the
Media” is also valuable. Furthermore, a 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.

If you would like to contact or join a group of citizens concerned about the state of our local news, click here:  IWantMyNewsBack@yahoo.com

   If you would like to help fight Sinclair Broadcasting and bring back responsible journalism, click here to receive action alerts from Rapid Response – Iowa.