Twenty-one national civil rights groups added their voices to the
growing chorus calling on the Federal Communications Commission to deal
with its shameful history of failing to address the crisis in minority broadcast ownership.

In a Nov. 1 letter, groups including the National Hispanic Media Coalition, Urban League, National Council of La Raza, Rainbow PUSH and the League of United Latin American Citizens,
called on FCC chairman Kevin Martin to create an independent minority
ownership task force before moving forward with any new media ownership
rules.

Media consolidation threatens the future of minority ownership. Studies conducted by Free Press
have found that the FCC has never conducted an accurate count on the
number of minority and female owners. How can the FCC move forward with
issuing new rules when it does not know their impact on minority
ownership?

Those same studies
showed that minority owners are less likely to be found in more
concentrated markets. But Chairman Martin doesn’t seem to care. He’s pushing forward with his plans
to issue new rules by Dec. 18 that will result in greater
consolidation, further placing the future of minority ownership in
jeopardy.

The full text of the letter is below:

The Honorable Kevin J. Martin
Chairman
Federal Communications Commission
445 12th Street, SW
Washington, DC 20554

Dear Chairman Martin:

We are writing to call on the Federal Communications Commission to
address the issue of minority ownership. Assembled together here as
leaders of minority communities speaking with one voice, we request the
creation of an independent task force to conduct a specific inquiry
into the impact of market concentration on female and minority
ownership before moving forward with issuing any new ownership rules
for broadcast media. On its face, the Commission’s movement toward
eliminating media ownership limits appears to severely undercut its
statutory and moral obligation to promote minority ownership of
broadcast stations. The failure of the FCC to even acknowledge this
contradiction is deeply troubling, and this letter is intended to
highlight the problem and propose a course of action.

We appreciate that you are open to the idea of creating a task force
to thoroughly study the policy goal of promoting minority ownership of
broadcast stations. But we are alarmed by recent reports indicating
that you will not wait until the work of such a task force is completed
before issuing new rules that may permit further media consolidation.
This is not acceptable. An uninformed rush to eliminate ownership
limits may set back the expansion of minority ownership by a generation
and leave us little recourse.

The Commission already labors under a credibility deficit on this
issue. Minority ownership is in crisis precisely because the FCC has
long neglected to consider the issue as a critical public policy goal.
The frustration is not limited to our community. The U.S. Third Circuit
Court of Appeals admonished the FCC for failing to address the issue of
minority ownership. The available evidence indicates cause for deep
concern. According to the best available independent research—which,
unfortunately, has never been duplicated by the Commission—women and
minorities own broadcast stations at roughly one-tenth the level of
their representation in the population. This statistic should have set
off alarm bells long ago. We simply cannot understand how this is not a
top priority for your agency.

Yet for many years, the FCC has failed in its responsibility to
examine or address the impact of market consolidation on communities of
color and broadcasters of color. The Commission has never even managed
to conduct an accurate count of its own data on the race and gender
characteristics of licensees to determine the true number of women and
minority owners. Economists hired this year by the Commission to study
the problem were unable to do so because the data provided to them was
unusable. They wrote: “The data currently being collected by the FCC is
extremely crude and subject to a large enough degree of measurement
error to render it essentially useless for any serious analysis.”
Without this information, it is impossible to have an adequate
understanding of how different policies governing media ownership in
general would impact minority ownership specifically.

We call upon the FCC to elevate its commitment to the promotion of
minority ownership. The Commission should create a task force on the
issue which would, at the very least, conduct the simple steps that the
agency has inexplicably failed to accomplish to date. First, the task
force should ensure that an accurate accounting of the FCC’s data is
conducted on the actual number of minority and female broadcast station
owners. Second, the task force should perform an analysis on this
accurate data set to determine the likely impact of policies which
permit further media consolidation, policies which tighten ownership
limits, and policies which may offer incentives for expanding minority
ownership. Only when the work of this task force is completed should
the FCC move forward with any changes to the rules governing media
ownership. Only when it is well armed with the facts and analysis
provided by this task force can the Commission expect to determine the
appropriate policies which will further the goal of increasing minority
broadcast ownership.

The legacy of race and gender discrimination in the broadcast
industry is a disgraceful reality in America today. It is not a problem
that will be solved quickly or easily. But we must take the first step
by truly understanding the nature and scope of our present crisis.
History will not excuse ignorance as a justification for policies that
further depress the level of minority ownership. We ask that the
Commission take adequate steps to ensure that it makes the right
choices to reach a long overdue justice on the issue of minority
ownership in the broadcast media.

Most sincerely,

Rainbow PUSH

National Hispanic Media Coalition

National Council of La Raza

Asian American Justice Center

Hip Hop Caucus

National Congress of Black Women

Native Public Media

National Institute for Latino Policy

Urban League

Industry Ears

League of United Latin American Citizens

Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund

National Association of Hispanic Journalists

Independent Spanish Broadcasters Association

Black Leadership Forum

Cuban American National Council

Latino Literacy Now

National Association of Hispanic Publications

National Association of Latino Independent Producers

Latino Gerontological Center

National Coalition on Black Civic Participation