“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 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.



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.”



At his 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 [Reagan] 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.





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Charles Miller is a research scientist at the University
of Iowa and a member of Iowans for
Better Local Television