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The
Death of Local News
AlterNet.org
By Paul Schmelzer
April 23, 2003
Tune into the evening news on Madison, Wisconsin's Fox TV
affiliate and behold the future of local news. In the program's
concluding segment, "The Point," Mark Hyman rants against peace
activists ("wack-jobs"), the French ("cheese-eating surrender
monkeys"), progressives ("loony left") and the so-called liberal
media, usually referred to as the "hate-America crowd" or the
"Axis of Drivel." Colorful, if creatively anemic, this is TV's
version of talk radio, with the precisely tanned Hyman playing a
second-string Limbaugh.
Fox 47's right-wing rants may be the future of hometown news,
but – believe it or not – it's not the program's
blatant ideological bias that is most worrisome. Here's the real
problem: Hyman isn't the station manager, a local crank, or even
a journalist. He is the Vice President of Corporate
Communications for the station's owner, the Sinclair Broadcast
Group. And this segment of the local news isn't exactly local.
Hyman's commentary is piped in from the home office in Baltimore,
MD, and mixed in with locally-produced news. Sinclair aptly calls
its innovative strategy "NewsCentral" - it is very likely to
spell the demise of local news as we know it.
The Rise of Sinclair Broadcasting
Like many a media empire, Sinclair grew through a combination
of acquisitions, clever manipulations of Federal Communications
Commission (FCC) rules, and considerable lobbying campaigns.
Starting out as a single UHF station in Baltimore in 1971, the
company started its frenzied expansion in 1991 when it began
using "local marketing agreements" as a way to circumvent FCC
rules that bar a company from controlling two stations in a
single market. These "LMAs" allow Sinclair to buy one station
outright and control another by acquiring not its license but its
assets. Today, Sinclair touts itself as "the nation's largest
commercial television broadcasting company not owned by a
network." You've probably never heard of them because the 62
stations they run – garnering 24 percent of the national TV
audience – fly the flags of the networks they broadcast:
ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, and the WB.
TV Barn's Mark Jeffries calls Sinclair the "Clear Channel of
local news," a reference to the San Antonio, Texas, media giant
that has grown from 40 to more than 1,200 stations today thanks
to the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which relaxed radio ownership
rules. But the parallels extend beyond their growth strategies.
Jeffries describes Sinclair as having a "fiercely right-wing
approach that makes Fox News Channel look like a model of
objectivity," while Clear Channel is best known for sponsoring
pro-war "Rallies for America" during the Iraq conflict. And like
Clear Channel's CEO L. Lowry Mays – a major Republican
donor and onetime business associate of George W. Bush –
the Sinclair family, board, and executives ply the GOP with big
money. Since 1997, they have donated well over $200,000 to
Republican candidates.
Sinclair's news department also takes a page out of Clear
Channel's book of non-localized programming. According to
Sinclair's website, NewsCentral is a "revolutionary news model"
that introduces "local news in programming in markets that
otherwise could not support news." Begun in 2002, it's being
tested in five not-so-small markets: Minneapolis, Flint (MI),
Oklahoma City (OK), Raleigh (NC), and Rochester (NY). (Hyman's
segment, "The Point," however, is aired on all 62 of its
stations.) In these five cities, the hour-long newscast combines
local broadcasting with prepackaged news. To maintain the
appearance of local news, the Baltimore on-air staff is coached
on the intricacies of correct local pronunciations. Or the
weatherman, safely removed from the thunderstorms in, say,
Minneapolis, will often engage in scripted banter with the local
anchor to maintain the pretense: "Should I bring an umbrella
tomorrow, Don?" "You bet, Hal, it looks pretty ugly out
there..."
Journalists have been pondering the specter of centralized
news operations for some time, both because it affects the
quality of news and because it could put them out of a job. "We
should all be conscious of the dangers that are present when you
have one newsroom producing the news," says John Nichols,
associate editor at The Capital Times in Madison and co-author
with Robert McChesney of the books "Our Media, Not Theirs," and
"It's the Media, Stupid." "That's a real possibility. It's a very
dangerous future, but Sinclair is already living in the dangerous
future."
One Giant Newsroom
And that future's getting pretty crowded with media
mega-empires jostling to "synergize" their operations. The
Tribune Company is already cross-training reporters. Under the
label of journalistic "synergy," the company owns most of
Chicago's media outlets: The Chicago Tribune, WGN's TV and AM
radio stations, Chicago Magazine, the AOL project Digital City
Chicago, plus the Chicago Cubs (not to mention its 22 TV stations
nationwide, 25 percent stake in the WB network, 14 newspapers,
the syndication service Tribune Media Services, and 14 online
publications including cars.com and apartments.com). A Tribune
reporter – variously called a "multimedia reporter," a
"backpack journalist," or merely a "content provider" –
might attend a mayoral press conference, for example, armed with
a digital audio recorder, a camera, and a notebook to provide
stories for radio, print, online, and television news. While the
debate rages over whether such journalists can consistently
produce high quality news, the real fear is that only one voice
will frame and tell a news story. It's a chilling thought when
that lone perspective is shaped by a Sinclair or Fox
worldview.
"Thomas Jefferson and James Madison believed that, in order to
sustain democracy, media needed to be cacophonous and diverse,"
Nichols says. "Today we don't have that. Our range of debate is
getting incredibly narrow: The mainstream discourse runs from
right-wing to far right-wing."
This sentiment was echoed by David Croteau, Virginia
Commonwealth University professor and author of "The Business of
Media: Corporate Media and the Public Interest," during one of
only two public hearings on the Federal Communications
Commission's plan to radically relax rules governing media
ownership. "We cannot, therefore, treat the media like any other
industry. It's products are not widgets or toasters; they are
culture, information, ideas, and viewpoints," he said.
Indeed, the issue of centralized news will be exacerbated
after the FCC's June 2 vote on ownership. On the chopping block
are six regulations that attempt to preserve a diversity of
voices and local control of media – from the ban on owning
both a TV station and newspaper in the same market to limits on
how many radio stations one group can own in a given area.
Should the FCC vote to weaken these protections – as
expected – more of our airwaves will be concentrated in the
hands of a few corporations. Currently six companies control most
of the country's media: AOL Time Warner, Disney, General
Electric, News Corporation (Fox), Viacom, and Vivendi Universal.
A study released in February by the Project for Excellence in
Journalism. Crunching data from 172 stations and 23,000 stories
over five years, the report determined – to the ire of
major media industry groups – that "smaller station groups
tended to produce a higher quality of newscasts than networks
owned by larger companies – by a significant margin." It
also found that "local ownership offered some protection against
newscasts being very poor."
When talking about media deregulation, Nichols takes issue
with the word "deregulation." He sees it as a term used by
conservatives to project a false image of free-market values and
small government. In fact, he says, the recent FCC decisions do
not eliminate regulations. They instead are "dismantled and then
reassembled in a form that allows a handful of companies –
like Sinclair – to get bigger and bigger and bigger." He
says, "We still have a highly regulated media. The only thing
that is changing is that it's now being regulated in the
interests not of democracy or the people, but larger
corporations."
The cooptation of words that accompanies the handover of the
airwaves to corporations is proving effective. Only a third of
all Americans realize that the public owns the airwaves, and
about a tenth are aware that the FCC gives stations licenses for
free, according to the Pew Research Center for the People and the
Press. Equally alarming are the results from the Project for
Excellence in Journalism survey: 72 percent of Americans say they
have "heard nothing at all" about the upcoming June 2 FCC vote on
relaxing ownership rules.
Powell himself sees the airwaves not as conveyors of culture
but as a commodity. When asked in 2001 what he thought the term
"public interest" meant in the FCC's mission, Powell replied, "I
have no idea ... I try to make the best judgment I can in ways
that benefit consumers. Beyond that I don't know."
Paul Schmelzer is a Minneapolis-based writer and edits the Web
site Eyeteeth: A Journal of Incisive Ideas
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