Big Media Hall of Shame
 

On April 18, Lowry Mays, chairman of radio giant Clear Channel, will receive the broadcast industry's "Distinguished Service Award." Distinguished service to whom? Not to you and other Americans. But Lowry isn't alone. He's one among many media kingpins who put their own political and business interests ahead of the public.

Now it's time for you to help free American media from the grip of these shameful men. You decide: who among them has done his utmost to make the media the abomination it is today? Vote for your worst below and on May 14 we will induct the "winner" into the Big Media Hall of Shame.



http://www.freepress.net/hallofshame/

Oh, that choice is way too hard.

I finally ended up with David Smith because of his incredible arrogance in terms of a total lack of fairness and equal opportunity that he tried (and failed, thankfully because of government pressure) to force his completely one sided views on all of his stations, and thus the public, during the last presidential campaign.

I think everyone should be able to broadcast their views from their own homes.

-Rudey

That would be pretty un-managable, but to some extent everyone can "narrowcast" their views from their own home right now.

On the internet.

Why does the government own the right to broadcasting? Why do stations have to pay the government for this right?

And yes, it's great that you can broadcast through the internet right now.

-Rudey

Until recently stations have not had to pay for their use of the airwaves. That's pretty new. The simple reason is that the government needs more revenue and has decided that since it has "control" (not ownership), it can levy use fees. Kind of like public lands and National Parks, but on a bigger resource.

By U.S. law, "the public" owns the airwaves. Of course that's pretty hard to define.

So, while the government doesn't claim to "own" the airwaves, and thus broadcasting, it has controlled them since the original Communications Act of 1932 was passed in order to end the chaos that radio had brought about on itself. It has been rewritten a couple of times, the latest in about 1996 or so.

Prior to the Act, anyone could put a radio station on any frequency at any power with any programming that she/he wanted. What happened was a total disaster in which the entire broadcast bands ended up as interference, with hundreds of stations broadcasting on the same frequency.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was formed to govern the many on air services, including commercial radio broadcasting, land mobile (2 way communications), television, microwave, defense communications, fire and police services and many others.

It's been a while since my last broadcast history course, but initially, I believe, the FCC (originally the Federal Radio Commission (FRC) only had authority only over the technical piece of the pie. As time progressed, however, Congress has given the agency power over issues of Fairness (Section 315 which was roughly translated by most as "Equal Time," but really equal opportunity) in political and news programming. More recently the moved into other barely defined issues such as (in)decency and programming standards regarding things like smut, language, etc.

For years, the Commission took a hands off approach because of the worry of encroaching on the broadcasters First Amendment rights.

More politically conservative Administrations and Congresses have legislated more FCC involvement in the latter in recent years, though. This has been particularly true in the Bush Administration. On the other hand, programmers have been pushing content and testing decency standards at the same time.

As has happened in the past, the government only allows industry to push so far before it pushes back.

Does that explaination help at all?

Tell me who David Smith is, please.

While it is upsetting that Clear Channel owns hundreds of stations, including a large handful here in Atlanta (there's also a large branch of the Cox empire here) , I haven't seen abuse reported. In fact, the last news about CC was that several of their stations would be joining Al Franken's Air America left-wing bunch.