Martin Irks Activists by Citing Them in Ownership Comments
Foes of media consolidation are mad at FCC Chairman Kevin Martin for saying he made last-minute changes in the media ownership order at their request, especially since the revamp didn’t address many of their concerns (CD Dec 19 p1). At Tuesday’s commission meeting approving the order, Martin said he circulated a change in the order at 1:57 a.m. after soliciting feedback from consumer and public interest groups. But Consumers Union, the Consumers Federation of America and Free Press said the change Martin made didn’t fully reflect what they sought, so he shouldn’t have claimed the rule allays their concerns. An FCC spokeswoman declined to comment.
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As the groups did urge, the late change allows cross- ownership in markets smaller than No. 20 if a waiver applicant can prove it’s failing financially or has failed or promises to air seven hours weekly of news when it previously carried none. But they also asked Martin to kill four other conditions from his original proposal, said Free Press Policy Director Ben Scott and Consumer Federation of America Research Director Mark Cooper, who attended the meeting. Said Consumers Union Senior Counsel Chris Murray, another participant: “I was left with the impression, perhaps mistakenly, that those would be the only two standards that waivers would be based on, and that we would be narrowing the number of exemptions, not enlarging them.”
In his remarks, Martin may have implied that he made more concessions to the groups than he actually did, said Cooper and Scott. “It’s true that he met with us, but it’s a wild exaggeration to say that he addressed all of our concerns,” said Scott. “His statement carried the implication that he had taken significant steps to incorporate our proposals,” but that didn’t happen, added Scott. Cooper was more emphatic. “He’s acted improperly by citing it and using it to claim he’s done something,” said Cooper. “He has no business using that meeting as a claim that he somehow or another responded to the public interest community.”
Instead of yanking conditions, Martin added the groups’ two conditions to the four he first proposed Nov. 13. If a waiver applicant meets the two conditions suggested by the three groups, its merger will be presumed to be in the public interest. Martin’s conditions let the FCC decide if a paper’s and a broadcaster’s news staffs will be independent after a merger, as well as to assess market concentration and other factors in reviewing a deal. The FCC will consider those four factors in evaluating mergers in small and mid- sized markets, which Martin said would be presumed not to be in the public interest.
“We went in asking to go from four loopholes to two, and the two would be stronger than the four they were supplanting,” said Scott. “Instead of substituting our two for his four, he just added two on top to make six,” Cooper said. “He’s kept all of the looseness and added the loopholes.”
Martin said the waiver hurdles will be higher than under existing FCC rules, calling his plan a “moderate” one designed to relax a 1975 rule rendered obsolete by the rise of the Internet and other media. After failing to reach consensus with Commissioners Jonathan Adelstein and Michael Copps, Martin said he spoke to public interest groups who shared those commissioners’ concerns about the waiver process. Adelstein and Copps griped about the late changes (CD Dec 20 p2), saying they didn’t have enough time to review them. House Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell, D- Mich., has the last-minute tweaks in his sights as he reviews FCC transparency, said a Hill staffer.
Cooper and Scott said Martin should have mentioned industry’s heavy lobbying on the order, rather than singling out their groups’ efforts as factors in the changes. “The fact that we take a meeting at the 11th hour to try to balance the onslaught of industry lobbying only underscores how broken the process at the FCC is,” said Cooper. “What faith can I have in sitting down and talking to the guy?” Scott filed an ex parte on the meeting with an unusual amount of detail in what he called an effort to set the record straight in case of any later misinterpretation, he said. “What he did was what happens all the time in politics: You meet with your detractors, you hear out their concerns, you take the smallest piece of what they offered as a change, you incorporate that, and then you claim credit for addressing their concerns at least in some small part, and then you trust that the details are so complicated that no one will figure out what happened.”