No News is Bad News
by Robert Miraldi

On a Sunday night, when the New York Times has been picked over, the morning talk shows are long gone and when “60 Minutes” is done, I turn to radio.  Radio in the Hudson Valley – and what a vast wasteland I find.

I should by all rights be just sick and tired of news by that point in time.  Sunday is a big news day with lots of options, running from the Daily Freeman of Kingston, which begins my day, through the oh-so-heavy give-me-a-hernia NY Times.  But I am still hoping for a morsel more.

My hopes are dashed as I spin the dial. The choices in the mid-Hudson Valley are slim to begin with, but on Sunday virtually every station is on autopilot.  By that I mean you can’t find live people – just music that someone has turned on, advertisements of course to make money, and some station identifications so you know where you are.  But certainly no news or information.

God forbid a Noreaster should finds its way up the coast or if a blizzard was on its way. Radio would not help us at all.  They have put a nickel in the jukebox and are letting the records play, and they are selling the airtime to advertisers.  On your airwaves.

Think of it this way.  Someone asks to use your car for 8 years (the length of a radio license); they want to use it as a limousine and to pick up people at the airport. And they are making lots of money. With your car. And you get nothing in return – no money, no service, you don’t even get free rides when you go to the airport.  Something is wrong with that picture.

And I think of all this now because on Nov. 21, a commissioner from the Federal Communications  Commission is coming to the Hudson Valley  to hear citizens speak out about the state of the public airwaves. Congressman Maurice Hinchey, hot for media reform, will join the commissioner. The FCC, a five-member body lodged in Washington, D.C., is the government agency which rules and regulates the publicly owned airwaves.

Yes, the airwaves are one of the few things in America that we have nationalized, if you will.  We have declared that the space above us belongs to us all.  Contrast that, of course, with oil, which we have said belongs to Rockefeller if he owns the land above it.  But many years ago, mostly for practical reasons, the government declared that the airwaves belonged to the people.

It occurred not out of a great passion for smartly using a public resource, but because if the government did not decide who could use certain channels, voices would overlap. No one would be able to hear anything.  Plus, growing out of World War I, the government was afraid that propagandists might seize the airwaves and use them for evil political purposes (odd, they must have been anticipating the Fox Network of Rupert Murdoch-Bill-O’Reilly-Sean Hanitty).

The government-FCC decided it would give licenses to people to operate their stations but that the licensees (not owners, mind you) would simply act as “public trustees.”   That meant, simply, they had to provide some public service – and not just make lots of money with your resource.

And so for many years we asked things like fairness, balance, news or documentary, and attention to public policy issues of concern to a community.  We asked the stations to show some responsibility while they walked to the bank carrying the loot that we had granted them. 

And then along came the cowboy from the West, Ronald Reagan, who believed in old-fashioned competition and the power of the marketplace.  And Reagan said, get government off the backs of industry and let them regulate themselves, or not.  And so he deregulated the truckers and the airlines.  And it is an interesting discussion whether the government is better off in or out of industry’s business.

But he also got rid of regulations for the broadcast “industry” and he left them to their own devices.  That, by the way, is when the infomercial was born, when people began to spend 30 minutes selling you ginza knives and teeth whiteners because the FCC stopped saying how many commercial minutes would be allowed on TV.  In other words, they threw the whole broadcast industry into the hands of people whose primary goal, often, is to make as much as money as possible. 

With your airwaves.

Reagan got his way and the “fairness doctrine” was dropped, along with a host of other rules. The loss that galls me most was called “ascertainment.” Radio and TV stations had to ascertain or figure out what issues were important in their communities and they had to provide some news about those issues.  This would mean, for example, that radio stations in this community would have to investigate PCBs in the Hudson River or the funding for the state university or the need to close one of our local hospitals.

But all that went out the window.  If consumers demanded news, we would get news.  So it is your fault, dear listener, that when I turned on the radio on a recent Sunday evening I found nothing to remotely enlighten me.

Media reformer Robert McChesney suggests what needs to be done: make the commercial system more competitive, more localized, more decentralized and build a  healthy, vibrant, and pluralistic nonprofit and noncommercial media sector.     

Here are a few of my suggestions:

·         Don’t allow companies to carry the license for more than 8 years.  I don’t care how good CBS is, let others in.

·         Don’t give away stations to the same group for all 24 hours.  SUNY New Paltz and WMHT out of Albany share 88.7.  In the Netherlands, for example, the Dutch let three or four groups share one station and just divvy up the time.

·         Demand something that resembles public affairs programming. I know broadcasters don’t like this, and that definitions of what is “news” will vary.  I’d rather something than nothing.

·         Force stations to give away airtime during elections for candidate access.  It is a small price to pay for the profit they can make.

·         Drastically limit the number of stations any one company can own.  Why should CBS or ABC or Fox get to assemble these huge collections of stations?  It is corporate might at its worst, and in this case we can do something about it. You can’t stop McDonalds’s franchises; they use private property. The airwaves are not private.

McChesney comments, “The media firms are a very difficult lobby to beat and the conventional wisdom is that you can’t beat them—they’re rich, they’re powerful, they have huge lobbies in Washington and they have tremendous influence with politicians of all stripes.”  

But a storm of protest has been brewing for nearly a decade, and people in Washington are starting to listen. Go to the hearing or write to the FCC.  Let ‘ em know – they are your stations, they are using your resource, and you want – no, demand – that the public get something back.  We can argue over what we should get back, but the point is to turn around the discussion:  deregulate the airlines perhaps but don’t deregulate the public’s airwaves.

Robert Miraldi is an author and journalist who has taught media law at SUNY New Paltz for 25 years.

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