On a hazy Saturday morning in June 2005, meteorologists reported that Chicago was about to endure the “warmest weekend since last summer,” with temperatures hovering around ninety and unseasonable humidity making the city air feel swampy, like Florida in August. Ordinarily the midwestern metropolis would welcome an early summer hot spell, yet this year marked the tenth anniversary of the great 1995 heat wave, when 739 Chicagoans died in brutal conditions. The weather took its greatest toll in the city’s poorest and most segregated neighborhoods—places like North Lawndale, an African American community on the West Side where decades of economic deterioration, population loss, and political neglect resulted in a landscape of empty lots, shuttered storefronts, and abandoned buildings, the kind of depleted neighborhood conditions that discourages visitors and potential investors from outside the area and fosters social withdrawal as a survival strategy for vulnerable residents. North Lawndale, like so many other shunned and stigmatized urban areas, was decidely cut off from the public goods and amenities that most city dwellers take for granted. The people who lived there not only were at risk of suffering in silence during treacherous weather but also were missing opportunities afforded to those with easy access to the greater city’s economic and cultural life every day.
I first learned about the particular dangers of social disconnection in North Lawndale during the late 1990s, when I did fieldwork in the community to understand why there were nineteen heat-related deaths there during the 1995 disaster. I have subsequently followed the neighborhood’s modest upward trajectory as developers experiment with new housing and commercial projects. Rebuilding was a frustratingly slow and often halted process, but on this warm weekend morning something special was happening: a coalition of civic organizations was planning to install a “wireless mesh” or “point-to-point network,” with a signal emanating from the original Sears Tower and going out to a series of small antennae placed on the roofs of local buildings. The mesh network would produce an “invisible cloud” of coverage, providing free Internet access to North Lawndale families who signed up for the service. About twenty-five people gathered to kick off the project by activating live connections at four residences and holding open computer workshops at a new community center. “Most of our families don’t have access right now,” said Carol Merrill, who grew up in North Lawndale and now works a few blocks from home at the Carole Robertson Center for Learning. “Affordability is a deterrent, because a lot of people are struggling just to do the basic things in living. But it’s so much easier to do things here if you have the Internet. It puts you in a whole different place.”
Her neighbor, Derrick Mack, had just returned to his family’s house in North Lawndale after graduating from Eastern Illinois University that May, and he was so excited about having high-speed Internet in the community that he volunteered to help build the network. Mack and I joined a small team of sweaty workers who drove through the neighborhood that morning, stopping at places in the network to attach cables to the antennae and drilling holes through walls made of brick and stone before connecting the lines into the PCs of local residents. “I always wanted to do something in the neighborhood,” Mack told me, his soft features and puppy eyes conveying earnest enthusiasm and hope. “I don’t want to abandon it. I want to be a young black man here with a college degree.”
Back at the community center, Mack narrated North Lawndale’s history with a bare-bones story that could apply to hundreds of African American ghettos across the nation, from the crowded period in the 1950s and ‘60s when there were “lots of shops and busy streets” to the apocalyptic 1970s, ’80s, ’90s, when factories closed, banks and grocery stores shut down, the streets emptied, and “things just went down.” Today, he explained, black professionals and some well-meaning foundations are leading efforts to revitalize the neighborhood, and community wireless is emerging as an essential tool. “Internet access is crucial for North Lawndale, especially for the kids here, and also for seniors. There’s so much they can do online—shopping, services, getting things you can’t find in stores. It’s so convenient. We can network, start up a North Lawndale Web site. And it will help us stay connected, to meet other people in the community. It’ll be great.”
For the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT), which led the project, it was an important initiative, part of a broader effort to connect about 250 households in four low-income neighborhoods to the Internet, offer classes on how to conduct online job searches and contact service providers, and demonstrate the value of high-speed access as a tool for economic development and social integration for those on the wrong side of the digital divide. The North Lawndale campaign grew out of a nationwide movement to promote media access. Chicago is just one of hundreds of U.S. cities where grassroots organizations, many working with public- and private-sector partners, are building affordable broadband networks to help underserved communities access and use the Web.
U.S. taxpayers funded the research and development that produced the Internet, making American citizens among the first to enjoy the benefits of Web technology. Although the United States remained a leader in Internet innovation through the 1990s, by the end of the first Bush administration it had fallen to thirteenth place in national broadband usage, with service that was “the slowest, most expensive and least reliable in the developed world.”1 As Foreign Affairs reported, in 2005 the United States was “the only industrialized state without an explicit national policy for promoting broadband.” But rather than passively accept this condition, citizens throughout the country have begun demanding better access to the service that their tax dollars helped to create, mobilizing to turn public spaces into free “hot spots,” where anyone with a mobile device can get online. Cities such as Atlanta, Austin, Seattle, and San Francisco are already saturated with public access points. Moreover, as Michael Calabrese and Matt Barranca from the New America Foundation observed, “dozens of United States municipalities long ignored by wireline providers because their markets were considered too small to justify laying cable or DSL have deployed unlicensed wireless networks … with rapid returns on their investment.” The successful early projects were in places as diverse as St. Cloud, Florida; Owensboro, Kentucky; Franklin County, Washington; and the Pala Indian Reservation in San Diego County.2
By 2005 support for municipal wireless service had spread from small underserved towns to major metropolitan areas, with Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and Portland announcing plans to contract with private-sector firms to provide citywide broadband access for reasonable fees because the major commercial services had failed to provide affordable service to disadvantaged citizens. The decision was particularly controversial in Philadelphia, where Verizon Communications, the dominant telephone company, and Comcast, the locally based cable giant, protested that the program would undermine commercial companies that already offered high-speed connections at market rates. “If you think this through for a second,” said Verizon spokesman Eric Rabe, “you realize that the city is taxing us, to some degree they are regulating us, and now they’re a competitor of ours. And I think you have to question whether that’s a really genuinely fair situation.”
Mayor John Street was more concerned about another fairness issue. In his view, the for-profit Internet providers had demonstrated their indifference to the city’s poorest neighborhoods and residents: with Internet access in private hands alone, more than 90 percent of households in Philadelphia’s affluent areas had home Internet access, compared to less than 25 percent of households in poor neighborhoods. Street found this unacceptable, and he declared: “I believe the day will come when having access to the Internet will be just as common as having water in one’s house or having, you know, some form of electricity or some form of heat … Wireless Philadelphia will allow low-income families, families that are on the cusp of their financial capacity, to be able to be fully and completely connected. We believe that our public school children should be—their families have to be connected or else they will fall behind, and, in many cases, never catch up.”3 In the program Street envisioned, broadband access would cost Philadelphia families between ten and twenty dollars per month, less than half the rates at the time.
With their market domination threatened in Philadelphia, leading cable and telephone companies rushed to the Pennsylvania statehouse, urging their legislative allies to ban publicly subsidized municipal wireless projects in cities where there is a private-sector provider. There was little public support for the state senate’s Act 183, which critics dubbed the “Verizon Bill” due to the widespread perception that the company played a prominent role designing the bill. But for telecommunications and cable companies, which controlled more than 95 percent of the national broadband market, the stakes were high. Anticipating competition for Internet service, since 1996 the industries had invested heavily in state-level lobbying and made major contributions to local officials, exerting extraordinary influence in the state capital, Harrisburg. It didn’t hurt that David Cohen, Democratic governor Edward Rendell’s former chief of staff and a regular atop surveys of the state’s most powerful people, was Comcast’s executive vice president, or that Verizon alone had spent more than $3 million on state-level lobbying in the previous two years.4 To call the cable and telephone companies “well connected,” as the Center for Public Integrity did in its major report on state-level political lobbying by the industry, was to understate their power.
After a rancorous debate that made the pages of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, the Pennsylvania state legislature passed a measure requiring any municipality interested in building a public wireless service to give the primary local phone company the right to do it instead, unless the municipality could complete the job within fourteen months. Calling the bill “a victory for Verizon Communication,” the Times reported that “if the phone company proceeds, the city must drop its plans to build a broadband network.”5 To make the bill politically acceptable, Verizon agreed to exempt Philadelphia from the requirement, and the city moved forward with its public plan. “While it may be good news for Philadelphians, it doesn’t bode well for the rest of the country,” said Jeff Chester, of the Center for Digital Democracy. “This is just an exception for Philadelphia, placing the rest of Pennsylvania, and indeed the other 49 states [where the cable and telecommunications lobbyists would turn next], off limits to municipal networks.”6
Chester was prescient. Telecommunications and cable lobbyists would storm local governments and statehouses throughout the country, and within months fourteen states passed laws restricting the development of municipal wireless projects. The effort reached Congress in May 2005, when U.S. representative Pete Sessions, a Texas Republican who had been a senior executive at the giant telecom company SBC Communications (which later in 2005 would acquire AT&T) before coming to Congress introduced HR 2726, the “Preserving Innovation in Telecom Act.”
Alongside the three other telecommunications giants, Verizon, BellSouth, and Qwest Communications, SBC had already established itself as an industry leader in the fight against public access projects. According to the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit research organization in Washington, D.C., “The San Antonio-based company is the most prolific spender on both lobbying and campaign contributions at the state level among telecommunications companies … SBC employees and political action committees spent $10.2 million on campaign contributions on state races from 1999 to 2004. The company also spent a minimum of $16.3 million to lobby state governments across the nation in 2003 and 2004.”7 The Sessions bill, which proposed a blanket prohibition on any municipal telecommunications service, information service, or cable service in markets where private firms offered similar products, was especially restrictive. Yet it was not until the public disclosure of the congressman’s industry ties that the proposal began to be deemed politically unpalatable, and it stalled in committee. This power grab by the private sector may even have backfired. Inspired by strong public interest in municipal access programs, in June U.S. senators John McCain and Frank Lautenberg introduced the “Community Broadband Act of 2005,” a proposal that, if it ever became law, could override state-level restrictions and allow local governments to provide wireless service.
By 2006 the political debate over Internet access expanded into another realm. Leading telephone and cable companies lobbied Congress to grant them rights to discriminate among Web sites, providing faster connections to the sites of corporations that pay a premium for highspeed service, and even to block access to selected sites altogether. Civic organizations quickly mobilized to preserve Internet freedom (or network neutrality), calling for legislation that would obligate telephone and cable companies to run any devices and applications that consumers choose, and to offer all users equal access to all available content. By summer the campaign to promote faster, cheaper, and open broadband access was attracting grassroots organizations and political officials from red and blue states, crossing right over the nation’s class and color lines.8
The fight to preserve Internet freedom and expand Internet access for the disadvantaged is just one part of a growing media reform movement that is unifying citizens concerned about problems stemming from consolidated ownership of radio, television, and newspapers, from the loss of local broadcasters to the loss of local content, along with those worried about issues such as broadband access, payola, propaganda, and copyright. Consolidation is the movement’s bedrock. In May 2003 CNN’s Lou Dobbs Moneyline (now Lou Dobbs Tonight) polled its viewers on whether “too few corporations own too many media outlets.” Although the audience for Dobbs’s program is neither liberal nor progressive, 80 percent said yes. Finding consensus on media policy issues is by no means uncommon. After the FCC announced its 2003 decision to relax ownership caps, Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, declared that “groups as diverse as the National Rifle Association, the National Organization for Women and the National Council of Churches oppose the FCC’s sellout to monopoly-minded media giants.” U.S. senator Barbara Boxer, a Democrat from California, said, “In all the years I’ve been [in Congress], I’ve not seen such deeply held feelings across ideologies.” Americans may be politically polarized and mired in the culture wars, but when they are fighting for air they are on the same side.9
TODAY AN UNPRECEDENTED NUMBER OF AMERICANS HAVE TAKEN UP THE cause of media reform, in hopes of reining in the local media outlets that slipped into the hands of distant corporate overseers. In the last decade ordinary people who—of all the things to fight for—never thought it would be access to local news and culture, have begun to engage in activities as diverse as volunteering to assemble wireless networks, teaching classes on “media literacy,” forming watchdog groups to monitor news and entertainment content, producing independent journalism about under-reported topics, and simply writing letters to express concern about proposed media policy regulations. After the 2004 elections, both MoveOn.org and True Majority polled members to ask what issues are most important for the future. “In each poll,” wrote the communications scholar Robert McChesney and the journalist John Nichols, media reform ranked second, ahead of peace, health care, education, and social justice.”10
The project of challenging media conglomerates, demanding content that serves the public interest, and restoring more public and democratic control of the airwaves has become the fastest-growing bipartisan social movement in the United States. “Today, for the first time in U.S. history, the issue of corporate control over the media is a political issue,” U.S. representative Bernie Sanders, an Independent from Vermont, told me in May 2005. “There is no issue more important than this because it touches upon all political issues. Millions of people are now thinking about this issue. This is one of those areas where there is fire taking place all over the country.” If Big Media outlets do not cover the conflagration, it’s only because they have so much to lose.
Reporters understand the stakes better than anyone, as I learned during my interviews with countless journalists who complained about how consolidation had hurt their profession and undermined their working conditions but told me that they couldn’t produce stories about the issue because it might damage their career. FCC commissioner Jonathan Adelstein made the same point when discussing his staff’s research on media ownership: “We’ve heard from a lot of journalists who said they felt very intimidated doing this story, sometimes explicitly, and sometimes it’s implicit. It’s clear to them that it’s not a career advancing move to write a story that challenges the policy that is being promoted by their boss … I think it’d be helpful if people could speak to us and be able to have their identity protected, so that they can say, in an unfettered way, what their concerns are, without having any concern about that hurting their career. I feel right now that journalists in particular are feeling intimidated about it. Which raises a real question about the independence of journalism in this country.”11
There is no reason to think of the nation’s media ecology as a natural, inevitable, or unalterable system, in which powers on high set the conditions and citizens have no capacity to clean up the polluted airwaves. Today media activists are organizing media reform campaigns in their hometowns while building a spate of national organizations—including the Media Access Project, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, Communications Workers of America, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), the Future of Music Coalition, the Center for Digital Democracy, Free Press, the United Church of Christ, the Parents Television Council, and Youth Media Council—that are fighting to revive the vital organs of American democratic and cultural life.
A DECADE AGO, NO ONE PREDICTED THAT MEDIA REFORM WOULD become such a galvanizing social issue—not even leaders of the largest media watchdogs and advocacy groups. As recently as 2001, Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. remarked, “The case for media reform is not being heard in Washington now … I hear people everywhere around the country complaining about the media, but we have yet to figure out how to translate those complaints into some kind of activist agenda that can begin to move Congress.”12
Two years later, more than two thousand people turned out for the first national media reform conference at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an event that its organizers originally expected to draw about two hundred and had to expand when registrations poured in. Sitting with me in the large cafeteria of the student union building, FAIR’s founder, Jeff Cohen, scanned the crowded room in search of friends, then squared his long frame in my direction and offered a look of amused bewilderment. “Fifteen years ago people thought I was nuts,” he explained. “There were no protests of media institutions. Media was something you grumbled about, not something you fought. Eight years ago we didn’t have a media reform movement. Proposals got hashed out while we were on the outside and in the wilderness, and we got the 1996 Telecom Act. Now we have the movement, and what we need is the political opening to make things happen.”
Historically, such openings have been unusual. Since the turn of the twentieth century, Americans who wanted to shape media policy had to mount relentless, well-organized campaigns against industry groups and government agencies that preferred to act without public input. Citing threats to the nation’s democratic process, citizen groups persuaded legislators to block monopolies in the newspaper and broadcasting industries during the 1900s and 1930s, and to connect concerns about competition and diversity in the media market to broader reform movements of those eras. Yet the Communications Act of 1934, which established the FCC, essentially ended the brief period of public participation in media policy making. After the commission opened, citizens would not even win the right to be heard in regulatory debates and take actions in courts until 1966, when the Office of Communications of the United Church of Christ (UCC) won a landmark case against the FCC in a U.S. court of appeals.13
The UCC’s campaign had deep roots in the civil rights movement. In the 1950s, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. complained about the the way southern broadcasters treated African Americans. Radio and television stations rarely invited blacks to speak over the airwaves, perhaps because of the stations’ support for discriminatory policies and use of hateful speech. King’s concerns helped move Reverend Everett C. Parker, a member of the Broadcast Pioneers and the director of the Office of Communications of the UCC, to travel through the South and survey broadcast content. The research, not surprisingly, showed that “stations typically broadcast hard-line segregationist views, and very little attention was paid to civil rights issues, except with extreme disparagement.” Parker presented his findings to a group of church leaders, and together they decided to ask the National Association of Broadcasters to demand that each broadcast licensee “pledge itself to air diverse programming, to use courtesy titles (Mr., Miss, Mrs.) for blacks, to provide blacks the opportunity to present their views on the air, particularly in cases where they felt they’d been attacked or when their views were not represented at all, and to accord blacks equal opportunity to buy air time.” According to the communications scholar Robert Horwitz, who conducted an extensive interview with Parker for his article about the UCC case, “The [NAB] board voted it down quickly and unanimously.”14
Civil rights activists were accustomed to preliminary setbacks, however, and although communications attorneys in the Capitol warned them against it, Parker and his colleagues decided to press the issue by legally charging a broadcaster with violating the public-interest provisions of the Communications Act. In 1964, Jackson, Mississippi, television stations WLBT (an NBC affiliate) and WJTV were scheduled to come up for license renewal, a process whose success was (and remains) virtually guaranteed unless the broadcaster has blatantly violated FCC rules. WLBT was a notoriously discriminatory station, with no African American employees despite an audience that was about 45 percent black. Parker persuaded Aaron Henry, the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) Mississippi chapter, and Robert L. T. Smith, a local politician and small-business owner who had filed complaints against WLBT with the FCC because the station refused to sell him airtime during his unsuccessful run for the House of Representatives in 1962, to join him in challenging its license. They filed a “bill of particulars,” claiming that WLBT “had failed to serve the public interest, convenience, and necessity.”
According to Horwitz, the UCC’s petition “charged that WLBT had discriminated against Negroes in the presentation of news and announcements and the selection of program material. The station had failed to serve the interests of the substantial Negro community in its viewing area and had further failed to give a fair presentation of controversial issues, especially in the field of race relations. In addition, WLBT provided a disproportionate amount of commercials and entertainment, with very little attention devoted to public affairs, education, or information.” To establish its case, the UCC organized a team of white monitors, none of whom were UCC members (“so that,” as Parker explained, “the Commission couldn’t say that blacks were doing something to (sic) their own interest and not telling the truth”), to review one week of WLBT’s offerings.15 Among their key findings were that, except for fifteen minutes of spirituals broadcast at 6:45 a.m., the station’s four hours of religious programming on Sunday morning originated out of white churches; that almost all the live local performers were white; that there were no black entertainers in the local offerings; that the only local children’s program banned black children from participating; and that the rare local public-service announcements that the station did run did not mention events in the black community or efforts to oppose segregation. WLBT’s attorneys claimed that national network programming offered material for black audiences. Yet the UCC had also checked the station’s logs, which revealed that the station had often substituted local coverage for NBC’s national stories about race relations, and introduced those it did run with warnings such as “what you are about to see is an example of biased, managed, northern news. Be sure to stay tuned at 7:25 to hear your local newscast.”16
The UCC petititon offered “overwhelming” evidence of the flaws in WLBT’s coverage, and the FCC staff recommended that the commission consider revoking its license. Yet the petition was the first license challenge by a group that had neither an economic interest in the station nor a problem with electrical interference from the station’s signals, and, after a year of delaying, the commissioners ruled against the UCC, saying that it did not have standing to protest the license. The FCC announced that, by a four-to-two ruling, it was dismissing the petition on grounds that the signers had no legally legitimate interest in the matter. Although the FCC renewed the WLBT license, the station’s refusal to acknowledge any wrongdoing, coupled with the scathing comments from two dissenting commissioners, compelled the commission to limit the renewal to one year instead of the standard three. Angered and emboldened, the UCC immediately filed an appeal with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, whose chief justice was the conservative Warren Burger (whom President Richard Nixon would later nominate as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court). In a surprising decision, Office of Communication of United Church of Christ v. FCC, Burger’s court ordered the FCC to conduct hearings on WLBT’s license renewal. “After nearly five decades of operation,” the chief justice wrote, “the broadcast industry does not seem to have grasped the simple fact that a broadcast license is a public trust subject to termination for breach of duty.”17
The court-ordered hearing took place in Jackson the next year in a room that, according to Horwitz, “was overflowing with Confederate flags.” Earle K. Moore, the lead attorney for the Office of Communication, remembered that local African Americans were particularly nervous. At the beginning of the hearing, Moore could persuade only one black person, Robert L. T. Smith, to sit at the counsel’s table. Moore also had a hard time lining up witnesses.”18 The hearing examiner, who oversaw the case, showed “solicitude for the station’s witnesses and animosity toward the Intervenors,” the UCC. After refusing to apply the burden-of-proof recommendations of the court of appeals, which had in fact been placed on the station, and blocking some of the UCC’s testimony, the hearing examiner ultimately ruled that the UCC had “woefully failed … to come forward and sustain their serious allegations” against WLBT, and recommended that the FCC renew the station’s license for three years. In a five-to-two decision, the conservative commission registered its agreement. Once again the UCC appealed, and once again the U.S. court of appeals took the case. This time, however, they would convene in the ceremonial courtroom, a clear signal that something significant was at stake.
In fact, the stakes were even higher than the litigants imagined. In an unexpected ruling, the appelate court blocked WLBT’s station renewal and opened a new process in which civic groups could apply for the license and seize a slice of the airwaves for their own use. But the decision had even greater consequences for the public’s relationship to broadcast media. The court used the UCC case to establish a new precedent, extending to citizens the “right to stand” before regulatory agencies that ruled on matters of public interest, and requiring broadcasters to recognize and address the concerns of local populations and minority groups. The decision opened the floodgates for civic groups that wanted to diversify content and improve community programming, forced broadcasters to hire minorities for their on-air staffs, and turned access to the airwaves from an abstract concept into a concrete cause. It also taught civil rights advocates and other activists an important lesson: whether the ultimate cause was racial segregation, quality education, fair representation, or the democratic process itself, demanding an open and accountable media would be an essential if frustrating part of the fight.
CIVIC GROUPS LEARNED ANOTHER IMPORTANT LESSON FROM THE UCC victory: media reformers could monitor and record broadcast content to establish whether and how media companies are polluting the nation’s public airwaves, turning watchdog techniques into the primary and most popular tools of the media movement.
Consider the problem of indecency and the campaign to make broadcasters respect community standards. Conservative Christian groups mobilized their constituents around the issue in the early years of the twenty-first century as radio conglomerates such as Clear Channel and Cumulus replaced local programs with nationally syndicated shock jocks whose crude banter offended their sensibilities, and their campaign reached a fever pitch after Janet Jackson exposed a nipple on the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show. The Parents Television Council (PTC) and the Family Research Council (FRC) pressured the Bush administration, Republican members of Congress, and the FCC to dramatically increase fines for offending media companies that, as the PTC’s president, L. Brent Bozell, put it, “would pollute … the public’s airwaves,” and liberal groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union warned about the potentially chilling effect of censorship and threats to free speech resulting from the FCC’s vague definition of indecency. “Because of the vagueness,” its executives wrote in a letter to congressional leaders, “speakers must engage in speech at their peril, guessing what the FCC will determine to be prohibited. Increasing fines merely exacerbates the problem, particularly for small broadcasters. Rather than face a potentially ruinous fine, smaller broadcasters are more likely to remain silent.”19 Although ultimately Democrats and Republicans supported more onerous penalties for indecency, resulting in heavy fines for Clear Channel, Infinity, and high-profile personalities such as Howard Stern and Bubba the Love Sponge, the issue remains divisive today.
Americans do agree that as consumers, we should not have to pay for content that we don’t want, particularly not when it offends us. Yet that is precisely what we have to do when we purchase cable television, because programmers, such as Disney and Viacom (which own cable channels), demand that providers, such as Comcast and Time Warner (which own cable systems and sell home connections), offer bundled packages that combine unpopular channels with the ones we really want, and cable companies pass the costs on to us. As Dan Isett, PTC’s director of corporate and government affairs, told me, “If a local cable company wants Nickelodeon, Viacom says that they have to carry lots of other things that they own, like MTV and VH1. They not only have to carry them, but often they have to put it in their basic package, too.” Senator McCain, who has been a steady advocate for cable consumers, used his opening remarks at a March 2004 hearing on escalating cable rates to complain that “when it comes to purchasing cable channels beyond the basic tier today, consumers have all the ‘choice’ of a Soviet election ballot. One option—take it or leave it. You want ESPN? You must buy 40-plus channels of expanded basic. You want CNN? You must buy 40-plus channels of expanded basic. You want Comedy Central? Well, you get the idea.”20 Once it was technologically impossible for cable companies to offer each household an individual menu of choices. Yet today it is not only feasible but economically beneficial—albeit for consumers, not providers and programmers, who stand to lose subscription and advertising revenue if they cannot force-feed channels into the box.21
Cable companies provide limited flexibility with their tiered packages and “video-on-demand” marketing campaigns, but their prices, particularly since the 1996 Telecom Act, never waver. Average cable rates have risen nearly three times the rate of inflation since 1996, when industry leaders convinced Congress that by deregulating the business they could keep costs down. In some markets cable prices have skyrocketed. U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) reported that “the larger the cable company and the greater the dominance of a region through clustering of systems, the higher its rates.” That helps explain why after deregulation nearly all cable subscribers experienced rate increases above 50 percent, with Cablevision customers in New York City getting a cumulative increase of 94 percent that essentially doubled their monthly bills. The price hikes do not stem merely from an increase in the number of channels offered, because today consumers pay more per channel than they did ten years ago—even though cable companies have downgraded the quality of basic packages by moving popular stations, such as HBO and ESPN, to the expensive premium and digital tiers, and letting service levels fall low enough to rank among the worst-rated businesses in the history of the American Customer Satisfaction Index. “These increases defy logic,” complained Senator McCain during one recent regulatory conflict. “The cable industry has risen to new heights in their apparent willingness and ability to gouge the American consumer.”22
There is a simple reason that cable companies get away with these practices: they enjoy monopoly power, leaving consumers, no matter how much they dislike their local cable provider, with nowhere else to get the service. Cable providers say that satellite services offer real competition, but the U.S. General Accounting Office has shown that this is not true. Satellite services have many competitive disadvantages: The satellite dishes require direct exposure to the southern sky, which many city dwellers lack. They sometimes do not offer local broadcast stations that carry popular local news and sports programming. They cannot deliver high-speed Internet access. The result is that satellite television is most attractive to sports fanatics and residents of remote rural areas without access to cable. The proof is in the pricing: in a typical market, the presence of satellite television service brings down the cost of cable television by about twenty cents per month, whereas the rare presence of a second cable provider results in monthly consumer savings of around five dollars.23
According to Gene Kimmelman, the director of the Consumers Union (which publishes the popular Consumer Reports magazine): “The fact is large cable operators simply do not compete with one another. Not one of the incumbent cable operators has ever expanded its infrastructure into an already-wired community and competed head-to-head. Instead, the major cable operators have through mergers and acquisitions become national firms, operating in regional clusters … In markets where 98 percent of Americans live, a single cable operator dominates multi-channel video distribution with a market share exceeding 80 percent.” These numbers actually understate the extent of the large providers’ presence. As U.S. PIRG reported, big cable operators, or companies with substantial investments in cable operators, own (wholly or in part) about 40 percent of the top cable channels; and “of the top 26 channels in terms of subscriber and prime-time ratings, all but one (the Weather Channel) is affiliated with either a principal cable operator or a broadcast network.” In other words, much of the money that cable providers “spend” on programs is actually boosting their own bottom line.24
The top cable operators generated record-setting revenues in 2000-2004—precisely when representatives of the industry such as James Robbins, then president and CEO of Cox Communications, testified during the Senate hearing on escalating cable rates that the industry faced “formidable competition.” Robbins and Cox chairman of the board James Kennedy (who soon after became the CEO) struck a different note in the “Letter to Shareholders” that they included in the company’s 2003 annual report, published around the same time as the Senate hearing, boasting of some of the “more than 22,000 reasons we’re so confident in Cox’s prospects for prosperity.” “Although Cox’s phenomenal performance in 2002 was a tough act to follow,” they wrote, “2003 was another remarkable year. Revenue grew 14% to $5.8 billion, operating cash flow increased 19% to $2.1 billion, operating cash flow margin improved significantly and, for the first time, we generated free cash flow for the full year, at $306.6 million.”25
The picture was even rosier at the largest cable operator, Comcast, where Chairman and CEO Brian Roberts gushed that the company had “record operating and free cash flows,” and exclaimed, “We are delighted to report terrific results for 2004 that include surpassing $20 billion in revenue for the first time in our history.”26 The astounding figure was an 11 percent increase over the $18.3 billion in revenue Comcast generated in 2003, which was itself 9 percent more than the $16.8 billion it earned in 2002. During the 2004 Senate hearings on cable rates, industry leaders insisted that they were doing everything possible to keep consumer costs down, yet the financial tables that Comcast published in its shareholder reports told another story. The “monthly average video revenue per basic subscriber” had jumped 6 percent between the final quarters of 2003 and 2004, and the “monthly average total revenue per basic cable subscriber” had gone up more than 10 percent. Put these numbers next to a cable bill and you can see that misinformation from Big Media is not limited to what you see (or don’t see) on television.
IN THE EARLY YEARS OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, PUBLIC FRUSTRA tion with the cable industry’s three core problems—cost, content, and local control—inspired another unusual alliance for media reform. The Parents Television Council (PTC), a conservative nonprofit organization whose base of one million members and three dozen local chapters calls for strict decency standards and heightened corporate accountability in media, and the populist Consumers Union (CU), led their constituents in a campaign to demand à la carte service from cable providers, so that Americans, who on average watch only seventeen of the many score stations they receive, would not be forced to pay for the ones they didn’t want. As a letter to Congress circulated in June 2005 by a coalition including PTC, CU, and the AFL-CIO (the leading coalition of labor unions) put it: “Why can you pick up the phone, order and pay for HBO if you want it, but can’t pick up the phone, cancel and stop paying for MTV if you don’t? When you visit your local convenience store to purchase milk and bread, should you also be forced to take and pay for a carton of cigarettes, too?”
To defend the system, cable providers and programmers argue that bundles help them offer a wider variety of channels, since big packages support niche channels that might not otherwise get enough subscribers to stay in business. But both providers and programmers have a more fundamental reason for taking this position: not only can cable providers charge higher subscription fees for multichannel bundles than they can for à la carte services, but cable programmers that own several stations in a bundle can offer advertisers their own big packages, giving them slots across their empires. “When the CU and PTC aligned,” said Ben Scott, the Free Press political director, “the industry got a bunch of corporate money, hired a high-end PR firm, and developed a brilliant strategy. They went around to the civil rights groups and said that à la carte would reduce the number of people who will get ethnic television, that it would destroy BET, TV One, Oxygen. And a bunch of congressional Black Caucus members came out against it.” The irony, Scott told me, is that “for years minority programmers were saying that the big cable companies were shutting them out. But they didn’t want to alienate them and risk losing the chance for a contract.” Media reform organizations insist that a mandated “free tier” not only would help minority-focused and public-interest stations to flourish in an á la carte system but would also encourage competition in specialized markets, such as foreign-language or ethnic programming, that are now quietly dominated by Big Media. (Viacom, for example, has controlling interest in BET, while Time Warner and Charter are major investors in Oxygen Media, and Comcast has operational control of TV One.)27 “By setting aside twenty slots for qualifying independent, minority-owned channels,” Scott argued, “you’d get more channels competing for ethnic niches. Á la carte paired with the free tier solves any diversity problem.”
The groups involved in the Cable Choice initiative, which called on cable providers to offer all consumers à la carte service options, had distinctive but overlapping concerns. Speaking at a U.S. Senate hearing on indecency in January 2005, PTC president Brett Bozell claimed that PTC represents “the vast majority of Americans sick and tired of the sewage pouring out of their airwaves, or on cable programs they are being forced to underwrite.” His colleague Dan Isett told me that “you can’t make an affirmative choice. And you also can’t make a negative choice and stop supporting a channel like MTV. Even if you block the channel with the V-chip, you’re still paying for it, and you’re supporting the company that makes it.”
“Let me tell you why Cable Choice must—I repeat, must—happen,” Bozell testified.
In recent weeks and months, a number of the so-called expanded basic tier networks have aired some of the most graphic and shocking content imaginable … I’m talking about advertiser-supported basic and expanded basic cable; what familes are given to take when they subscribe to this service. Several weeks ago the FX network, owned by the News Corporation, aired a program featuring a storyline wherein a funeral home worker preserved his deceased sister’s head. He assembled various body parts from cadavers and stitched them together, adding his dead sister’s head. And then he had sex with his Frankenstein-like creation. Call it incestuous necrophilia.
Not long ago that same network also aired a different program with an episode featuring a police captain who broke into a house to arrest two gang members. There was a struggle for a gun, and when the gang members prevailed, one of the gang members held the gun to the head of the kneeling police captain and forced him to perform oral sex on him … Mr. Chairman, it would be one thing if these networks were supported by subscribers who wanted to watch such filth. It is wholly another thing for you, me, and 80 million other American families to be forced to subscribe to these networks—to underwrite the production of this material—in order to watch the Disney Channel, the Golf Channel, the History Channel or a football game on ESPN.28
PTC’s relentless criticism of the News Corporation bothered political conservatives who expected more allegiance to the company that produces Fox News. But Isett told me his organization is convinced that “media consolidation as a rule yields bad results for consumers. Big companies put out much more indecent material than the smaller groups. It’s not the mom and pop broadcast stations whose owners and personalities you see in the grocery store every day.” Rupert Murdoch may be a hero to Isett’s allies, but PTC treats the media mogul just as it does Hollywood executives. During our conversation Isett mentioned scholarly and official studies that establish a link between Big Media companies and indecency, but he has other ways of making the connection. “It’s intuitive that executives in Los Angeles are not going to know what local community standards are, or how to respect them,” he explained, before establishing a connection between the methods used by PTC and the United Church of Christ decades earlier. “That’s why we believe in local control. We also do our own content analysis. We have about ten analysts in Alexandria who watch broadcast and cable channels all day and log TV shows. And our grassroots chapters around the country send us content. They’re incredibly active. You’d be surprised how much we get.”
Christian conservatives are by no means the only Americans who are outraged about the levels of graphic violence, profanity, and sex on daytime and prime-time television. Parents of all political and religious persuasions, and even a surprising number of civil libertarians, have been so upset about irresponsible programming decisions by Big Media groups that they have supported tough penalties against companies that violated decency standards. On its Web site, PTC proudly reprints a Seattle Times article stating that “U.S. Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., is one of the few legislators with 100 percent on the ACLU’s ‘score-card,’ voting along the organization’s lines on its key issues. He bucked the ACLU, however, on the decency bill. ‘I think we have a responsibility to protect our children. This is not a First Amendment question,’ McDermott says. ‘God knows I’m a First Amendment guy. But there is a need for us to be responsible for what our kids are exposed to, and I think it’s the FCC that ought to make those kinds of decisions.’”29 Jonathan Adelstein and Michael Copps, the two most liberal FCC commissioners, have taken a similar stance. Weeks after the Janet Jackson incident, Copps testified to the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet: “We open the door to unprecedented levels of media consolidation and what do we get in return? More garbage, less real news and progressively crasser entertainment. Should we really be surprised that two of the very biggest media conglomerates—Viacom and Clear Channel—alone accounted for more than 80 per cent of those fines that were proposed for indecency?”30
While PTC’s campaigns focus on improper content, CU is principally concerned about unfair charges from cable providers. For example, CU points to a 2006 USA Today/CNN/Gallop poll showing that only about 30 percent of consumers would pay to buy sports programming that included ESPN, while the majority of households, some 53 percent, probably would not if they had the choice. Without á la carte pricing, however, they don’t. And ESPN, which generates about half of Disney’s $54-billion market value, is one of the most expensive channels in expanded basic cable service for providers and, ultimately, consumers, at two to three dollars per subscriber, compared to others that are twenty-five cents or less.31
Whether the problem is what goes into the cable box or what goes onto the cable bill, both PTC and CU share a fundamental commitment to local control, and a deep conviction that the industry’s monopoly leverage, with one dominant provider in nearly every market, has weakened it. “For consumers, the appeal of choosing which cable channels to buy is undeniable,” wrote Bozell and Kimmelman, the CU director, in a joint editorial. “And for parents who care about what their kids watch, the option is indispensable … There is one thing that everyone can agree on: Regardless of what programs consumers find objectionable and why, they should not have to pay for channels they don’t want.”32
Facing both intense public pressure and heightened scrutiny from the FCC, in 2005 cable giants Time Warner, Comcast, and Echostar tried to head off legislation on Cable Choice by offering consumers a “family tier” package that excluded controversial channels such as MTV and VH1. Yet Time Warner’s package also excluded many popular channels that cultural conservatives prefer, including the History Channel, Animal Planet, Turner Classic Movies, ESPN, the Learning Channel, the Game Show Network, MSNBC, Fox News, CNBC, Inspiration Network, Trinity Broadcasting Network, and Eternal Word Television Network. Bozell denounced the package as “a very bad joke,” saying that “it is perfectly obvious Time Warner is deliberately offering a product designed to fail … According to Time Warner, no family should want to watch sports. According to Time Warner, no family should want to receive any news channel other than Time Warner’s CNN. According to Time Warner, classic movies are not appropriate for families. And neither is religious programming.”33 Instead of appeasing its critics, the cable industry riled them.
The industry also failed to mollify the FCC, and in February 2006 the commission issued a stunning reversal of its position on Cable Choice. Just two years earlier, the commission had paid the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton to study the feasibility of Cable Choice options, and together they concluded that such a system would result in higher prices for customers who ordered more than nine channels. After further review, however, the FCC’s Media Bureau announced that with à la carte pricing “a subscriber could receive as many as 20 channels, including six broadcast signals, without seeing an increase in his or her monthly bills. This is more than the 17 channels that the average household watches. The corrected calculations also show that, in three of the four scenarios considered in the Booz Allen [Hamilton] Study, consumers’ bills decrease by anywhere from 3 to 13 percent.” The commission explained that it had identified “a number of errors in the Booz Allen Hamilton Study” and acknowledged that the 2004 report “relied upon unrealistic assumptions and presented biased analysis.” Moreover, it concluded, “The current industry practice of bundling programming services may drive up retail prices, making video programming less affordable and keeping some consumers from subscribing.”34
Reversing its published findings is uncommon for the FCC, because doing so invites suspicion that the commission’s research is pliable to political interests. But Kevin Martin, who replaced Michael Powell as chairman in early 2005, had publicly expressed his sympathy for the PTC’s position on Cable Choice and indecency, and he boldly challenged his predecessor’s position. “I was surprised by the results of (the 2004 report),” he told the press, “which is why I wanted to look at the issue further.” The New York Times called the FCC’s about-face “a frontal assault on business as usual,” and USA Today reported that the study “undercuts a bedrock principle of the cable industry—that big bundles of channels deliver the best value for consumers.” Senator McCain immediately announced his intention to introduce legislation that would reduce franchising restrictions for new video providers willing to offer Cable Choice (though he did not follow up on it), and major telephone companies, seeking to take advantage of the bandwidth built into their networks by their industry’s lobbying of state legislatures for state-level television franchises, began to enter the TV service market. Although à la carte was not yet a fait accompli, PTC and CU were confident that the service would soon be available. “I think this will invigorate policymakers to pressure the cable industry and programmers to deliver the kind of channels consumers want, and at a lower price,” said Kimmel-man. “The cable industry,” Bozell declared, “no longer has any arguments left.”35
CAMPAIGNS FOR CONSUMER CHOICE IN PRICING AND CONTENT ARE A popular form of media activism for middle-class parents and families. For an emerging generation of younger activists who have taken up the cause of “media justice,” the major challenge is not to silence Big Media but to expose its irresponsible use of damaging misrepresentations and discriminatory imagery, and to establish a place for their own voices on the air. Taking inspiration from the environmental justice movement, which sprang up to call attention to the fact that poor and minority communities are unfairly exposed to dangerous pollutants such as industrial waste, media justice activists have declared themselves the primary victims of toxic representation. “It’s not just an issue of fairness,” the activist Malkia Cyril told me. “For people of color, what the media does is literally a matter of life and death. I come from a family that was torn apart by inaccurate coverage of what we were doing. The media dehumanized us, which made violence against us, from killings to incarceration, seem legitimate.”
Raised in New York City by Black Panther members, Cyril moved to Northern California in 1996, at age twenty-one, in search of a more tolerant and diverse youth culture. In 2001, she helped to start the Youth Media Council (YMC) in Oakland, a historically African American and increasingly Latino and Asian city that was a key target for California’s crackdown on juvenile crime. “The War on Drugs. The War on Crime. These became wars on young people of color, especially in California,” Cyril told me, in a soft, almost muffled voice that barely rose above her large and powerful frame. “We’re the enemy. And since the local media have made us out that way, we decided to do something about it, to hold them accountable.”
Using techniques honed by the United Church of Christ and also employed by the Parents Television Council, the YMC trained a group of seventeen teenagers to conduct content analysis, then had them monitor three and one-half months of coverage from KTVU-TV, a Fox affiliate whose evening news had recently been named “the best local newscast in the United States” by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. “They were extremely good compared to other stations,” Cyril explained, “but we had the impression that this A+ station was doing a C- job on youth issues.” In 2002 the YMC published the results of its study as Speaking for Ourselves: A Youth Assessment of Local News Coverage. The report documents a spike in local coverage linking young people to crime at the very moment that local youth crime rates dropped precipitously. Among the key findings: “In the period from March 1 to June 15, KTVU reported 55 stories about pets or animals and only 12 stories about youth and poverty. For each KTVU story about youth and poverty, there were 11 such stories about youth and crime. In stories about youth, law enforcement and politicians were quoted more often than any other sources. Only one story mentioned the declining rate of juvenile crime, and only two stories mentioned that school shootings are rare. When solutions to problems were offered, more than 83 percent focused on punishment, increased policing, or incarceration.” Of the roughly five hundred quotes in the stories, 70 percent were from adults, mostly from police, prosecutors, and politicians. Young people, in other words, were usually spoken for or spoken about, rather than given a chance to speak.36
According to the YMC, these patterns reflected broader trends during the 1990s and early years of the twenty-first century, when misleading news coverage that denied young people the microphone helped whip up public support for more punitive social policies for juveniles. “In a 1996 California poll,” the report explained, “60% of respondents reported believing that juveniles were responsible for most violent crime, although youth were actually only responsible for approximately 13% of violent crime that year.” But such misunderstandings are not limited to California, and during the 1990s local politicians throughout the country cited public opinion, doubtless built by sensational reporting of youth crime, as the basis for pulling back on long-standing juvenile protection programs. Since 1992, forty-five states have loosened criteria for charging children as adults in criminal cases. In California the incarceration boom resulted in a dramatic reversal of state spending priorities, and by 2000 more taxpayer dollars were going to jails and prisons than to its public universities.
Cyril said that the YMC was not interested in simply documenting the extent to which young people were misrepresented, nor in merely castigating the journalists and news agencies who portrayed youths as criminals. Instead, she issued the report along with an invitation to news organizations to become partners in conversation, if not coproducers of better youth coverage. As the YMC report put it:
We can transform media bias into media justice by building strong relationships between news outlets and youth organizations, and increasing the dialogue between journalists and youth community members … We continue to live and die on the word of experts and reporters. It is therefore critical to our survival that journalists and communities work in partnership to report on public policy issues that frame the contours of our conditions and draw the boundaries that define our lives. The organizations of the Youth Media Council want to establish relationships with news outlets to ensure that news coverage fairly and accurately represents our communities, thoroughly explores our issues, and brings our voices to the center of policy debates about youths.
“We did a press release announcing the findings,” Cyril recalled, “and then we had a delegation visit to KTVU, where we brought about fifteen of our young people and asked to speak with the news director.” Local station managers, not accustomed to such requests from viewers, misinterpreted the nature of YMC’s visit. “At first they didn’t understand that the kids weren’t interested in a tour. But these were kids from the streets, and they were serious.”
Ultimately, KTVU allowed the YMC delegation to meet with the news director, who agreed to disseminate Speaking for Ourselves to every reporter on staff. “They were defensive at first,” Cyril explained. “But they were willing to work with us eventually. They hosted a roundtable for all reporters in the area, and they helped legitimize the report and our other work.” A few months later, local community organizations that were protesting Clear Channel’s decision to fire the popular DJ and community affairs director “Davey D” Cook asked YMC to do another study, this time on KMEL, the Bay Area’s leading radio station for young listeners. “We didn’t have any money,” recalled Cyril. “But I said, ‘Who cares? Let’s do it.’”
The report, titled Is KMEL the People’s Station? showed that the station had become a steady advocate of both the war in Iraq and the local war on crime, effectively blocking out voices from grassroots peace and social justice organizations that had formerly contributed to Davey D’s shows. Clear Channel had also standardized the playlist so that “the Bay Area’s strong community of popular local artists was practically unheard,” while also shutting off the channels through which listeners could provide meaningful feedback on the programming changes. “KMEL only encourages audience participation through on-air contests and games,” the report states.37
“It was a very small project,” Cyril told me. “But that study has circulated everywhere, all the way up to the FCC.” It was also surprisingly effective, at least for the short term. “Right after our campaign KMEL initiated more local artist programming. They hosted an on-air broadcast about the war and 9/11, with young people talking. As far as we know, it’s the only broadcast like that that Clear Channel has done anywhere in this country.” Once YMC let up the pressure, KMEL let go of this programming style. Before long, the Bay Area music writer Jeff Chang reported, “KMEL was back to its old tricks, and it sounded like a regular Clear Channel station again.” Worse, in 2005 its sister station, “Wild 94.9” KYLD-FM, hired Rick Delgado, the controversial producer whom Emmis Communications Corporation fired from its “Hot 97” station in New York City for his role in writing, recording, and broadcasting the infamous “Tsunami Song,” which featured the lyrics:
There were Africans drowning
Little Chinamen swept way
You could hear God laughing “Swim You bitches, swim.”
That fall, YMC announced that it would challenge the licenses for four Clear Channel stations in the Bay Area, all of which expected to have their renewal applications rubber-stamped, as usual, by the FCC. “We know we’re not going to win,” Cyril confided to me, an ironic smile and gentle laugh breaking up her reserved demeanor. “But we’re saying it’s wrong to do hate radio. We’re trying to rebuild the idea of the public interest. We’re trying to create standards that will be the foundations for future rules. Maybe we won’t succeed in our lifetime. But we had lost a lot of fights before Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education. And I know that someday we’ll prevail.”