Molly Ivins April 16AUSTIN — The Telecommunications Act hasn't even taken effect yet, but its consequences are already showing for all to see. For one thing, your cable bill has already gone up, or soon will. Congratulations. For another, the concentration of ownership of the media, which was already moving at Warp 6, as they say on "Star Trek," has picked up. Viacom, the Baby Bells, TCI, John Malone, Rupert Murdoch — who can tell the difference between those who provide content for the media (now known as "product") and those who provide the delivery systems? Huge mergers and acquisitions are yet to come, the behemoth-sized competitors are working on global networks, and this raises the question: At what point does a company reach critical mass, become dysfunctional and then come apart? One irony of the Telecommunications Act is that it was supposed to give opportunities to "small" players. Nothing remotely resembling small remains in the field; we are getting stultified competition between giants. But I am more interested in what I quaintly call "content," the package of news and entertainment that shapes our view of the world and of one another. Some of the poisonous effects of the concentration of media ownership are apparent to all. What happens if General Electric commits fraud on the Pentagon and NBC has to report it? This is not a hypothetical case, since GE, which has recently taken to singing to us lovingly about kitchen appliances in "the heart of the home," has perpetrated defense fraud — 15 cases, according to the Project for Government Oversight. According to the National Journal, Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole noted acidly on Feb. 1, "We see a lot of stories on the networks about some member of Congress going somewhere on a 'junket,' they always like to say on the networks, but I have not seen anybody, except for CNN, not a single story on what could be the biggest giveaway of the century." Dole was referring to the proposed giveaway of an entire broadcast spectrum. Ervin Duggan, president and CEO of the Public Broadcasting System, is concerned about the decline of the "lone creator, especially the one who is not good at selling himself or herself." Quite a few creative people have gotten good at self-promotion, going on talk shows to plug their books or ideas or films or plays.
Duggan also foresees the triumph of commercial entertainment over everything else. "It is a tremendous moral and human challenge to defend the small and the beautiful against the large and commercial. PBS exists to nurture the lone creator. As consumers and as citizens, we have a responsibility to care for the lone creator." The free-market fundamentalists, those who believe that what Ronald Reagan used to call "the magic of the marketplace" will solve all problems, think competition will expose bias. If NBC doesn't report on GE fraud, ABC and CBS will. But look at the degradation of local news. There is tremendous economic competition in local news, but for that very reason, television consultants urge their clients to ignore important stories and go with prurient-interest stories. "If it bleeds, it leads." Where does competition for excellence come from in a commercial market? Duggan points out that in the past we set aside part of public wealth for the public good; when we gave away land, some of it was set aside for land-grant colleges, public schools and wilderness areas. Why is no one talking about setting aside part of cyberspace, part of the new digital broadcast spectrum, for public purposes? For education in the broadest sense, for art, for the examination of how cultural and moral issues are related to the economy. A non-commercial set-aside hardly seems too much to ask from what Dole correctly called "the biggest giveaway of the century." Far be it from me to join the neo-Luddites, who actually held a convention recently; the reason you didn't see any pictures of it was because they wouldn't allow cameras. But before long, cyberspace hype is going to pall on us all. Wireless telephony, cellular telephony, digital broadcasting, the Internet — none of them produce food, clothing or shelter. It may be that we are moving from the Industrial Age to the Information Age, but as they used to say of love, you can't live on information. I've no doubt that the new communications technology will change our lives in ways we can't yet foresee, but to the extent that we can foresee, we owe it to ourselves and our posterity to ensure as best we can that commercial interests do not own our brave new world in its entirety. *** Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. COPYRIGHT 1996 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
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