A Groundswell of Support for Reforming the Media

If you know anything at all about the Federal Communications Commission, says media scholar Robert McChesney, you shouldn't be surprised by its June 2 vote to relax rules restricting how many media outlets a company can own. The FCC, he explains, is traditionally a “captured” agency—one that has internalized the values of the industry it regulates—so its decision to hand over more power and wealth to media conglomerates shouldn't be shocking. But here's what is: Despite a virtual blackout on the issue by network news, the public flooded the FCC and Congress with some 2 million responses—the vast majority opposing deregulation. (Even Congress took notice, with the Senate voting September 16 to roll back the FCC ruling.)

Does this groundswell signal an isolated consumer uprising or the growing strength of a new movement pressing for media democracy? It's too soon to tell. But as the country heads into what promises to be a contentious election year, a number of grassroots organizations have clearly been energized by the fight. Membership at the 30-year-old citizen lobbying group Common Cause spiked to 200,000 after it helped to fund a series of ads opposing the FCC vote. Its hard-hitting response quickly earned it new monetary support, largely from online supporters. The Internet activist network MoveOn.org generated 340,000 letters to Congress through its own FCC campaign.

The issue of the ownership of major media being held in just a few hands will be at the heart of two major fall conferences. The National Conference on Media Reform (Nov. 7-9 in Madison, Wisconsin; www.mediareform.net/conference.php), convened by McChesney and The Nation's John Nichols, and the shadow convention to the World Summit on the Information Society (Dec. 10-12 in Geneva, Switzerland) both hope to draw further public attention to the problems stemming from current media trends.

A year ago, McChesney said that the FCC's runaway drive toward deregulation was all but unstoppable. Today he says, “The real story here is how the fix wasn't in. . . . For the first time in U.S. history, there was an enormous grassroots campaign to oppose it. Unprecedented! And it still blows the minds of everyone in Washington.”

According to Kalle Lasn, publisher of Adbusters, a media watchdog publication whose recent rise in circulation is another sign of growing concern about these issues, the war in Iraq was a jump start. Once combat began, peace activists turned their attention to the networks like Fox and CNN that seemed to do little more than echo Pentagon press releases—the same companies that stand to benefit from deregulation. “People suddenly said, “Oh God, we're fighting this war, and we're doing it because of what we heard on CNN,'” Lasn says. “It's a powerful force when you realize that the most powerful nation in the world can actually be making fundamental mistakes because of its communication systems.”