Panel Discusses Media Diversity
Feature Story by Suzanne Lee - 3/19/2002
Washington, D.C.- Weeks after the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit invalidated the Federal Communications Commission’s rule on newspaper broadcast cross ownership, supporters of cross ownership held a forum at the National Press Club to discuss media diversity. The March 15th event sponsored by the AFL-CIO and 28 civil rights, women’s, media, public interest, and consumer groups examined “Why diversity and competition in news reporting matters: The case for the retention of the FCC newspaper/broadcast ownership rule.”The sponsoring organizations stressed the importance of the newspaper/broadcast ownership rule, which restricts joint ownership of a daily newspaper and broadcast station in the same market through the following statement: “In an environment increasingly dominated by a handful of large multi-media corporations, the elimination of the cross-ownership ban will exacerbate market concentration in both large and small communities and thereby diminish the numbers and diversity of alternative voices and adversely affect the quality of localism in news reporting.”
In his remarks, Wade Henderson, executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, emphasized the importance of local news programming in view of the lack of ownership diversity and competition and noted the recent elimination of local news programming in communities in Tennessee, Virginia, and St. Louis. Henderson asserted, “This is a serious cause for concern because local media coverage reflects local interests, local concerns, and local needs.” “The public interest community needs to consider coming together to develop sustainable ways to leverage these new communication advances to ensure a strong voice for our entire community in this new communications environment,” concluded Henderson.
Henderson also invoked the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. to relate the need for varying voices to be expressed through the media: “Injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.”
Adopted in 1975, the FCC’s newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership rule was designed to encourage diversity in viewpoint and in competition in broadcast. At the time, the Federal Communications Commission emphasized, “[It] is essential to a democracy that its electorate be informed and have access to divergent viewpoints on controversial issues.” The rule was necessary because it was “unrealistic to expect true diversity from a commonly owned station-newspaper combination.”
Besides Henderson, a number of experts in media and news reporting were on hand for the panel discussion. Federal Communications Commissioner Michael J. Copps presented opening remarks as Professor Douglas Gomery of the University of Maryland School of Journalism outlined his report on the FCC rule, which he suggested was “the last bastion for maintaining divergent viewpoints in most American communities.”
Mark Cooper, research director of the Consumer Federation of America, Belva Davis, the first African-American female reporter on the West Coast, former CBS news director Edward Fouhy, Kings College School of Journalism Professor Stephen Kimber, and Linda Foley, president of the Newspaper Guild, also joined the panel of experts.
