Civil Rights and Communications Policy
These days, most of the discussion about communications policy has been reduced and marginalized to talk about the proper mechanisms to induce competition and hype about which new gadgets will create the new consumer utopia.
In contrast, the civil rights community has been taking important steps to raise public awareness about the need for rules that protect democracy and participation in a radically altered communications environment.
In four briefings over the past year, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund (LCCREF) zeroed in on four issues of critical importance to the civil rights community – solving the persistent problem of the digital divide; minority ownership and employment in the mass media; the significance and importance of media content; and living wage and EEO challenges in the Digital Age. The briefings and accompanying research coincided with the consideration by Congress of new telecommunications legislation and the contemplation by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) of changes to media ownership rules.
New Research Shows Persistence
Of the Digital Divide
According to new research released by LCCREF at a September 27, 2005 briefing on Capitol Hill, the digital divide between online Americans and those lacking access to the net is large and continues to grow.
The LCCREF report, authored by Dr. Rob Fairlie of the University of California, Santa Cruz, finds wide racial disparities in computer and Internet access that are not explained by income or education levels. Based on the most recent and comprehensive Census data, the report finds:
• African Americans and Latinos are significantly less likely to have a home computer than white Americans. More than seven in ten white Americans own a home computer compared to roughly five in ten African Americans and Latinos.
• Similarly, African American and Latino families are less likely to be online. Roughly four in ten black and Latino children have home Internet access compared to nearly eight in ten white children.
• Income is a factor in computer connectivity but does not account for racial disparities. Even among families with incomes of at least $60,000 Black and Latino Americans are substantially less likely to have a home computer or be online.
• There is a cultural and language divide. Asian Americans have slightly higher home computer and Internet access rates than White Americans (78 percent compared to 70 percent). Spanish-speaking Latinos, especially Mexican Americans, have strikingly low access to a home computer or the internet.
“The digital divide debate is not a debate about gadgets or even markets. It is a debate about who gets to speak and to hear, and for what price, and to whom,” said Wade Henderson, counselor to LCCREF and president & CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights.
“Just like in the last century Congress recognized that access to the telephone was critical to all Americans, in this century, Congress needs to recognize that access to the Internet from the home, including access to high speed connections is critical to all Americans’ well being, economic security, and educational opportunity,” said Gloria Tristani, former Federal Communications Commission commissioner and president of the Benton Foundation.
Joining Fairlie and Tristani on the panel were legal advisor to the Communication Service for the Deaf and former FCC deputy Karen Peltz Strauss, Native Networking Policy Center president Marcia Warren Edelman, and the NAACP’s Washington Bureau director Hilary Shelton.
The LCCREF report includes a series of recommendations designed to close the digital divide for racial and ethnic minorities and people with disabilities.
The timing of the report coincided with increased scrutiny of the nation’s communications infrastructure, spurred by the inability of emergency workers to communicate with each other in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
“This infrastructure is something that many Americans have taken for granted, but Katrina demonstrates that we do so at our peril,” said Henderson.
The Legacy of Jim Crow in Broadcast Licensing
In a second briefing held on November 1, 2005, public interest advocates discussed how the FCC has failed to meet its obligations regarding diversity in media ownership.
Through a “hard won national consensus,” Congress determined a set of goals to address the great disparity in federal broadcast licenses awarded to women and minorities, said Mark Lloyd, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and a member of the LCCREF board.
Lloyd called these “a set of goals as yet unmet, a promise unfulfilled, a charge ignored by the leaders of the current FCC.”
While Latinos, African Americans, Asian Americans, and American Indians make up fully one third of America’s population, in 2000, they were licensed to operate only about 4 percent of the nation’s commercial radio stations and less than 2 percent of the nation’s commercial television stations.
Lloyd said that minority ownership of broadcast stations has fallen by 14 percent since the passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act.
In addition to more rigorous oversight by the FCC to address disparities in broadcast licensing, panels said there were other actions Congress should take, such as reinstating the Tax Certificate Policy, a policy that allowed the FCC to provide financial incentives for the sale or assignment of a broadcast license to a minority.
LCCREF released a report at the forum with these and other policy recommendations. “Attacks on policies promoting the inclusion of women and minorities in these areas have and will continue to limit the advancement of viewpoints and interests of under-represented communities, unless and until these attacks are stifled,” the report warned.
Andrew Jay Schwartzman, president and CEO of Media Access Project and an author of the report, joined Lloyd on the panel, along with David Honig, executive director, Minority Media and Telecommunications Council; Katherine Grincewich, associate general counsel, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops; and Celia Viggo Wexler, vice president for advocacy, Common Cause.
How Media, Race, and Public Policy Are Connected
The media often provoke racial animosity, participants in a December 6, 2005 panel discussion said. While the media occasionally convey images of harmony and similarity, the impact of positive images is often swamped by vivid negative images, and by the effects of systematic omissions, panelists said.
At the briefing, Professor Robert Entman of N.C. State University presented new data on the way the media operate, the images they produce, and the influence they exert, concluding that these images have a negative impact on both people of color and whites.
Among Entman’s findings: local TV newscasts racially stereotype issues of crime and poverty; network newscasts rarely feature black and Latino experts; and black politicians receive more critical coverage than white politicians.
The situation in fiction media is equally bleak, with a paucity of what Entman called “serious” roles for African Americans, and “stereotyped, niche roles” for Latinos and Asian Americans.
A report issued December 1, 2005 by the Asian Pacific American Media Coalition (APAMC) gives low grades to the networks on their efforts to increase diversity in programming and behind the camera.
According to the report, The 2005 Asian Pacific American Report Card on Television Diversity, no major network earned an overall grade better than a C+. Grades are based on data provided by ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX.
“Primetime television this season does not mirror the realities of the growing numbers of Asian Pacific Americans in the USA,” Karen Narasaki, president of the Asian American Justice Center and APAMC chair said.
Narasaki participated in the panel, along with Kareem Shora, director, legal department/policy, American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee; Gloria Tristani; and Andrew Jay Schwartzman.
Quality and Quantity of Jobs for Women
And Minorities at Risk
Unionized blue-collar and office jobs in traditional media once provided entry to the middle class, with good opportunities for women and minorities. Now, lower-paying jobs in new communications media are replacing them.
A panel of civil rights advocates and communications policy experts at a July 25, 2006 briefing attributed these trends to regulatory change in the aftermath of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, new technologies, and the increasing concentration of control of media resources.
The speakers had come together at an event co-sponsored by LCCREF and the Communications Workers of America (CWA) to discuss two new reports from LCCREF and the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR).
IWPR’s report, Making the Right Call: Jobs and Diversity in the Communications and Media Sector, analyzes data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the EEOC, and the U.S. Census Bureau. The report finds that today’s shift to “new” wireless media concentrates women and minorities in lower-paying jobs without the union protections of the “old” traditional media.
LCCREF’s analysis, Employment Trends in the Communications and Media Industries, discusses how rapid media consolidation over the last decade threatens the quality of job opportunities for women and minorities.
The reports were released at a time when new telecommunications legislation is being considered by Congress and the loosening of media ownership rules such as newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership restrictions, are being contemplated by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
Underscoring the importance of strong media ownership rules, Wade Henderson, president & CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, said, “In the media industries, where the voice of minorities and women is so critical, we find growing concentration blocks that voice.”
Linda Foley, president of The Newspaper Guild-CWA, said, “Women and minorities bring different viewpoints to news and entertainment that is absolutely essential to our diverse democracy. Concentration of media ownership by corporate giants exacerbates the historic under-representation of women and minorities in our media industries. Preserving and expanding diversity of media ownership is absolutely critical to growing employment for women and minorities in the media industry.”
According to the IWPR report, despite the explosion in new information technologies, overall job growth in the communications and media sector (14 percent) has lagged behind job growth in the rest of the economy (22 percent).
The report also found that women and minorities in wired telecom, the most highly unionized sector, have the highest earnings. Yet, wage disparities by race and gender persist.
All of the speakers acknowledged the limitations of existing data, which allowed for sample sizes sufficient to identify only two race/ethnicity categories: Non-Hispanic Whites and Minorities.
The problem of limited data is not a new one for the Asian American community, according to Karen K. Narasaki. “Asian Americans are often lumped into the ‘other’ category or not reported at all. Limited and aggregated data mask the real problems. For an accurate picture of the current employment trends, detailed information is critical to ensuring equal opportunity in the communications industry,” Narasaki said.
Shaheena Ahmad Simons, D.C. regional counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, agreed. “Although the Latino workforce continues to be increasingly integral to the American economy, Latino labor remains concentrated in certain industries and vastly underrepresented in others,” she said. “Complete and meaningful data will be essential to assessing this segregation, and to promoting the advancement of Latinos in fields such as the communications industry.”
Representing a community for which data is entirely lacking, Andrew Imparato, president and CEO of the American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD), said, “Since there is no requirement to collect data affirmatively about persons with disabilities working in the television cable systems, such as is required for race and sex in Sec. 634 of the Communications Act, it is difficult to ascertain the employment situation for persons with disabilities in this industry. However, based on anecdotal reports, and the continuing overwhelmingly high levels of unemployment among persons with disabilities, AAPD believes that this industry could voluntarily take steps to hire more persons with disabilities.”
Gloria Tristani, president of the Benton Foundation and a former FCC commissioner moderated the July 25, 2006 panel, which in addition to LCCR’s Henderson and CWA’s Foley, included Heidi Hartmann, IWPR president; and David Honig.
