Editor & Publisher, November 2, 2006
By Mark Fitzgerald

Once more, the ban on common ownership of a newspaper and a broadcast station in the same market faces long overdue elimination by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

But don't underestimate the newspaper industry's proven ability to lose on the cross-ownership issue despite an unassailably logical case.

Repeatedly, the industry has viewed cross-ownership as an inside-the-Beltway matter that the American people shouldn't worry their pretty little heads about. Newspapers and the news media in general scoff at — and never engage in public debate with — the many pro-regulation activists who have figured out how to stoke and channel public distrust of Big Media.

It's possible that the industry will learn from its many past mistakes during this latest round of rule-making reform — but I personally am not betting on it.

So if the ban survives yet again, I won't fall down in shock. Still, that would be by any measure a remarkable outcome, given how the stars are aligned against it.

The ban was merely foolish when it was adopted in 1975, a time when most TV sets got five or six channels. It's insane in a nation of 120-channel satellite radio, 500-channel digital cable, and literally countless Internet sources of news, information and entertainment.

The media environment has changed so profoundly that business columnist Richard Siklos in this Sunday's New York Times could persuasively argue — as E&P did in its print magazine editorial in August — that newspapers are unlikely to rush out and buy TV stations even if the ban is overturned.

Too many papers have noted well how recent years have treated Tribune Co., which in its 2000 acquisition of Times Mirror made a huge bet that media cross-ownership regulation would change — and that owning TV stations and newspapers in the nation's three largest markets would allow access to untapped advertising treasure.

Newspaper/broadcast synergy, it turns out, is easier imagined than realized.

The practical impact of this learning on the fight to overturn the cross-ownership ban is that many papers may be even less engaged in the issue than they were when it was last bruited about, in 2003. Back then, the end of cross-ownership restrictions seemed certain. An energetic FCC chairman opposed the ban, and he had a majority ready to vote with him.

Newspapers and networks squandered this advantage in part by being very, very quiet about cross-ownership. It's only a little exaggeration to say that newspapers and television imposed a blackout on the issue, writing almost nothing about the impending rule changes until the very eve of the vote.

A Pew Research Center poll done six or seven months before the vote found an astounding 72% of Americans had no idea at all that the FCC intended to dramatically rewrite media rules. When the public did start hearing about the proposals — mostly from "media democracy" advocates and their Op-Ed sympathizers — it turned out the more they knew about media deregulation, the less they liked it.

Citizens flooded the FCC with more objections than the commission had ever received on any issue. And while the newspaper industry strategy "worked" — it got the squeaky-tight vote it figured on — the public uproar quickly helped reverse the victory. First, congressmen weighed in to revive the regulations. Then an appeals court ordered the FCC to go back to the drawing board. Ironically, the court's decision noted that given the media environment nowadays, the cross-ownership ban was probably well past its sell-by date.

Now, there's a new energetic and Republican FCC chairman, Kevin Martin, who has spoken forcefully against the cross-ownership prohibition. And when the issue finally reaches the voting stage next summer, the vote, likely to break again along partisan lines, favors repeal.

There's another more worrying constant, though: The newspaper industry appears to be falling back on the same strategy of engaging bureaucrats and commissioners — but mostly declining to take its case to the American people.

Now, I know, it's early in the process. But last week, while the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) filed its well-reasoned, 117-page brief with FCC, pro-ban forces released a flurry of "studies" purporting to show the ill effects of media concentration on democracy, women, minorities and, of course, the "diversity of voices."

You probably read about those studies. And if you hang out in blogosphere neighborhood that concerns itself with Big Media — you definitely read about them.

I never saw anything anywhere about the NAA filing, and a search of Google News turns up nothing.

The activists were busy at the FCC, too. More than 1,300 parties have filed briefs with the commission just as the NAA — the majority in favor of retaining the cross-ownership ban and other ownership regulations.

As NAA noted, most of the pro-ban comments followed a template created by the Center for Digital Democracy. "A vast majority of the substantive comments supported repealing the ban," harrumphed an NAA press statement.

But hundreds of citizens thought it was important to object to cross-ownership, and the industry is doing little to dissuade them.

NAA President and CEO John F. Sturm told me Monday that the association intends to participate in the official FCC public hearings. But don't look for the NAA to confront pro-ban advocates during the road show hearings being conducted by the FCC two Democratic, and pro-ban, members, he added.

"We will not participate in the unofficial hearings that have taken place that I think are nothing but unstructured pep rallies, [and concern] issues that have nothing to do with cross-ownership," Sturm said.

He's right on the facts, of course. But the NAA and newspapers in general need to get it through their heads that on this and other matters of public policy, they've got to engage the public. Even if — or should I say especially if — they think these citizens are somehow being manipulated by professional populists who are flat wrong on the issues.

Newspapers cannot on the one hand argue that their special place in democracy and liberty of expression entitles them to be free of government-imposed regulations like the cross-ownership ban — and on the other hand, refuse to mix it up by arguing their case in any arena more public than the file cabinets of the FCC.

Just as a matter of strategy, engaging in public debate is all the more urgent because Martin has suggested that the FCC may take up all the rule re-writing at the same time. That means repealing the cross-ownership prohibition will be thrown in with regulations that, for example, could allow the Clear Channels of the world to own even more radio stations in a single market.

And that will certainly mean more public opposition to media deregulation.

As important as debating the issue, is covering it. Newspapers and network television shamed themselves three years ago by telling the public little or nothing about media rule change that were in the works. It wasn't a failure of journalism, so much as a willful dereliction of duty to democracy.

Will newspapers be able to overturn the cross-ownership prohibition? I'm dubious for one big reason.

The industry seems to have convinced itself that it need not convince the public about the rightness of its case, so long as it can convince three out of five FCC commissioners.

That hasn't worked before, and I'm betting it won't work this time around, either.

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