The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights

Contents

• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments and Caveat
• Preface From LCEF
• Preface From MIT's CRCP
• Introduction: Off Course on a Long Dark Road

Part One

• Section 254
• Section 255
• Section 706
• The Impact on Rural America

Part Two

• Section 202
• Media Mergers (1995-2001)
• A Brief Note on Mergers
• Telecom Mergers (1996-2001) 
• Section 336

Part Three

• Section 257
• Section 714

Afterword

• Does the Digital Divide Still Exist?

Appendix

• The Authors
• About CRFCP
• About LCEF
• About MIT's CRCP

Preface From the Leadership Conference Education Fund

No conversation is more important than the conversation about who gets to participate in the conversation.

If you are not at the table when the conversations about public policy related to equal educational opportunity, criminal justice, fair housing, or equal pay for equal work are taking place, you will not get to voice your concerns.

The conversation that determines who among us gets a chance to join in the debate over the issues most important to them is at the heart of what communications policy is all about.

At a time when traditional media, i. e. print, radio and television is converging with new media and when educational and economic opportunities and political participation are increasingly dependent upon communications infrastructure and technology, these conversations have taken on a new sense of urgency.

Hailed by lawmakers from both parties as a great leap forward, the 1996 Telecommunications Act, the first rewrite of the then-62-year-old communications law, was said to have eliminated the legal and regulatory restrictions that were hindering U. S. companies in the Information Age.

It is now more than six years since the passage of the Telecommunications Act and voices from all across the political spectrum are suggesting it is time to review the promises made and the goals set. The different analyses contained in this volume contribute to that review.

There is much to cover.

For example, an adverse relationship has been found between media consolidation and political participation among underserved popula-tions. 1 Media consolidation has also been associated with lower levels of media ownership by underserved populations, less diversity in programming and limited coverage of the interests of underserved groups. 2 As is reported here, the Act has decreased competition in the marketplace of ideas by greatly reducing the number of owners there-by consolidating and homogenizing disparate voices.

In recognition of the importance of this issue, the Leadership Conference Education Fund in collaboration with the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights has joined a vast array of organizations actively engaged in the conversation about how our nation should govern communications.

The direct involvement of local and national civil rights coalitions has resulted in great improvements in communications policy over the past forty years. This reform began in earnest during the glory days of progressive reform we call the civil rights movement. Civil rights leaders fought and won battles against discrimination and for equal opportunity based on race, ethnicity, gender, ability, and sexual orientation in the communications industry.

These advances contributed to the progress made in educational and economic opportunity as well as political participation. Unfortunately, we have seen many of these advances reversed through subtle means at a time when educational and economic opportunity and political participation are increasingly dependent upon communications infrastructure and technology.

When poll workers cannot confirm voter registration because they don't have on site access to a computer database, when the poor are denied Lifeline telephone subsidies, when federal grant-matching programs (such as the Department of Commerce's Technology Opportunity Program) are slated for elimination, when a sixth grader from a poor family does not have the access to the Internet that her counterpart in a wealthy family has, when local television focuses on the crime of brown and black men while ignoring white collar crime, when local civil rights leaders don't get their issues covered despite an expansion of news coverage, the need for civil rights leaders to be part of the communications policy debates is clear.

Recognizing that there is more work to be done in this area and that these issues are becoming more rather than less important, in December 1999, the Leadership Conference Education Fund, in partnership with the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, launched the Digital Opportunity Partnership.

The goal of the Digital Opportunity Partnership is to ensure the civil and human rights community has a voice in the Digital Age both by accelerating the understanding, acceptance, and use of information technology among underserved communities and the organizations that represent them and by increasing the involvement of the civil rights community in the shaping of the new communications and information technology environment.

In the past few years, LCEF has made significant progress in educating the civil rights community, policy makers, the media and the broader public about these important issues. Among these policy-related activities are:

• Completing a baseline communications and information technology policy survey and resulting report, From Digital Disconnect to Digital Empowerment. Convening a communications and technology policy forum for the leadership of the civil and human rights community entitled, Working Toward A Comprehensive Civil Rights Agenda for the Digital Age.
• Launching a new communications and technology policy luncheon series entitled, Building a Civil Rights Agenda for the Digital Age.
• Launching the Digital Empowerment Campaign, a coalition of over 100 civil rights, public interest, education, health, religious, labor, women's, community development, and technology organizations, working to preserve and strengthen the federal government's leadership in expanding opportunity in the Digital Age.
• Creating a comprehensive online resource center covering communications and information technology policy located at Civilrights.org
• Developing a close working relationship with other national and local organizations working on communications and information technology policy.

The collection of essays included in this book are meant to help inform the broad civil rights community, policy makers, the media and the broader public about the range of issues and the diversity of viewpoints on communications policy issues -- to continue the con-versation about the conversation.

It is important to note that the varied opinions expressed in the following articles represent the views of the individual authors only. At the same time they provide useful information toward developing a comprehensive civil rights communications and information technology agenda -- an agenda that will have us critically engaged in the debates shaping the Digital Age. Such an agenda should address at least three main tasks.

First and foremost, we must determine what traditional civil rights policies that promote diversity and competition are still appropriate in this new communications environment and we must fight for them. We must organize and fight against the steady erosion of policies that support a communications and media structure that serves to bolster democratic institutions.

Second, we as a community must determine what new strategies for promoting media diversity need to be pursued in light of the political climate and the convergence of old and new media.

For example, the Internet is -- and will increasingly be -- relevant to the functioning of media in our society. We need to formulate a new policy framework that recognizes the impact of the Internet on the communications landscape. Central to this policy framework is a body of research and analysis that will help us better understand the impact media consolidations have on diversity and localism.

Finally, we need to be thinking outside the box. The Internet offers new ways of thinking about the enabling environment for development of free and independent media. The civil rights community needs to leverage these new communication advances to ensure a strong voice for our entire community in this new communications environment.

We must not only work with traditional media, we must do more to access, aggregate, produce, manipulate, and disseminate information on our own terms. In short, we must use the ability afforded by these technology-based communications advances to do for ourselves that which we previously relied on others to do for us -- produce our own conversations.

The civil rights community -- and the Leadership Conference in particular -- looks forward to working with other interested parties in a conversation about ensuring all Americans are part of the Digital Age.

Karen McGill Lawson, Executive Director
Wade Henderson, Counsel Leadership Conference Education Fund

Endnotes

1. See Joel Waldfogel and Felix Oberholzer Gee, "Electoral Acceleration: The Effect of Minority Population on Minority Voter Turnout." National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 8252 (April 2001).

2. See Joel Waldfogel, "Who Benefits Whom in Local Television Markets?" The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania (Nov. 15, 2001).