Progressive Media Resources Group

WHAT MEDIA CORPORATIONS DON’T TELL YOU ABOUT THEIR LEGISLATIVE AGENDAS
2000
from PublicIntegrity Website

recovered through WayBackMachine Website

The CENTER FOR PUBLIC INTEGRITY, founded in 1989 by a group of concerned Americans, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, tax-exempt educational organization created so that important national issues can be investigated and analyzed over a period of months without the normal time or space limitations.

Since its inception, the Center has investigated and disseminated a wide array of information in more than sixty Center reports. The Center’s books and studies are resources for journalists, academics, and the general public, with databases, backup files, government documents, and other information available as well.

The Center is funded by foundations, individuals, revenue from the sale of publications and editorial consulting with news organizations. The Joyce Foundation and the Town Creek Foundation provided financial support for this project.

CHAPTER 1
Profiteering from Democracy

In his January 1998 State of the Union address, after decrying the campaign-fundraising “arms race,” President Bill Clinton proposed a major new policy that would address a big part of the problem - the high cost of campaign commercials.

Within 24 hours, Federal Communications Commission chairman William Kennard announced that the FCC would develop new rules governing political ads.2

But days later, the powerful broadcast corporations and their Capitol Hill allies managed to halt this historic initiative. In the Senate, Commerce Committee chairman John McCain, the Arizona Republican, and Conrad Burns, a Republican from Montana and the chairman of that panel’s communications subcommittee, announced that they would legislatively block the FCC’s free air time initiative.


In the House of Representatives, 17 Republicans including Majority Whip Tom DeLay, Appropriations chairman Bob Livingston, future House Speaker Dennis Hastert, and Billy Tauzin, chairman of the House Commerce Committee’s telecommunications subcommittee, sent a blunt letter to Kennard.


Ranking House Commerce Committee member John Dingell, the Michigan Democrat, also sent an opposing letter to Kennard.4 Faced with the very real threat that his agency’s budget would be cut, Kennard had no choice but to retreat from the proposed rulemaking.

It was a humiliating and metaphorical moment for the FCC. In a very public way, the agency and the White House had been flattened “like a pancake,” recalls former FCC chairman Reed Hundt, Kennard’s immediate predecessor. But the threat of a shrunken budget and a congressional backlash "The likes of which would not be pleasant to the Federal Communications Commission under any circumstances,” was the way Livingston described it) caused the FCC to back down.5

Free air time went from the fast track to the back burner.

Many politicians in power tend to fear free air time for the leg up it would give to challengers. And more than that, free air time for political candidates would affect the bottom line of a very important industry and Washington player - the media industry. It would cost broadcasters millions of dollars in lost advertising revenue.

They were not about to allow a direct affront to their financial self-interest become law.

Indeed, the media’s success in handling the threat of free air time for candidates is but one of a stack of proposals that media companies have flattened like pancakes in Congress and the White House in recent years. Which is why the media is widely regarded as perhaps the most powerful special interest today in Washington - not that you are likely to read, see or hear much about it in national news media stories.

Today, the giant media conglomerates are as often as not taking sides in their own self interests in some of the most pressing issues of the day. From proposed limits on the advertising of tobacco companies to federal giveaways like rights to the digital spectrum - a $70 billion gift to broadcasters - the “public papers” of today have a wide range of pernicious projects of their own.

Even with the advent of mass communication, which in theory gives the most remote inhabitant of the nation a front-row seat to the doings of Congress and the executive branch, the alarm has rarely been sounded.

How do media corporations win friends and influence people in our nation’s capital? The old-fashioned way, by using the time-honored techniques with which business interests routinely reap billions of dollars worth of subsidies, tax breaks, contracts, and other favors. The media lobby vigorously. They give large donations to political campaigns.

They take politicians and their staffs on junkets.

Lobbying

Since 1996, the 50 largest media companies and four of their trade associations have spent $111.3 million to lobby Congress and the executive branch of the government.

The number of registered, media-related lobbyists has increased from 234 in 1996, the year the historic Telecommunication Act became law, to 284 lobbyists in 1999.

And last year, the amount of money spent on lobbyists was $31.4 million, up 26.4 percent from the $24.8 million spent in 1996. By way of comparison, in 1998, when media firms spent $28.5 million lobbying, securities and investment firms spent $28 million, labor unions spent $23.7 million, and lawyers spent $19.1 million.

The media wasn’t the biggest lobbying interest (airlines spent $38.6 million, defense contractors $48.7 million, and electric utilities spent $63.7 million).7 But unlike the media, none of those interests has the power to determine what subjects are covered in the local paper or on the evening news.
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The rest is an interesting read from way back at:

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/sociopol_mediacontrol61.htm