Freedom of the Press

"Freedom of the press belongs to the [person] who owns one."
--A.J. Liebling

Liebling was nobody's Marxist. But he was shrewd enough to smell the dirty little secret behind America's much-vaunted freedom of expression. It don't mean a thing if you ain't got the do-re-mi.

The cliche has it that knowledge is power. And that's true as far as it goes. But for knowledge to become power, it must be disseminated in useable form among a broad public. In our society that can only be done through the institutions of the communications industry. And in the communications industry, no less than in the steel or automobile industries, the operative cliche says capital is power. And so it is that the ruling ideas happen to be the ideas of those who rule.

Ironically, this should be the best of times in Liebling's formulation. According to the dimly comprehended catalogs and brochures on the subject that come across my desk, new advances in computer technology have brought us something called desk-top publishing which makes it possible to produce professional-looking printed material for a mere fraction of the former cost. The number of those who own this technology is about to expand geometrically.

The irony, of course, is that almost no one in America reads anymore. Desk-top publishing may yet bring a revolution in the oppressed, but still literate, societies of Central and Eastern Europe. But over here the only information power that counts anymore is access to the airwaves and the tube. And on that front, if you care about democracy, the situation is going from bad to dismal.

There's a lot of talk in the news media these days about the lasting impact, or lack thereof, of the Reagan revolution. The one example usually given in the case for Reagan as the FDR of the Right is his record of judicial appointments. Less covered, but equally significant, is the deregulation mania that has struck the Reagan-appointed Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

The FCC was established to exercise "public trusteeship" over the airwaves. Early on it was recognized that radio, and later television, was different from the print media. The difference derives from a fact of nature: There are only so many useable frequencies on the broadcast spectrum. Not even everyone who has money can have a TV or radio station.

It was decided that to preserve the values of pluralism and democratic debate, the broadcast media had to be regulated. Radio and TV operators were required to buy a license. To prevent monopolization of this scarce public resource, limits were enacted on the number of licenses that could be held by one company. And with the license came certain requirements to serve the public interest. Quotas were set requiring regular public service programming--news and community forums, for example. And broadcasters were required by the Fairness Doctrine to air all sides of "controversial" issues.

THE FCC UNDER REAGAN has moved steadily to ease the rules on license ownership, creating a speculative market that has driven the cost of broadcast outlets through the stratosphere. And the public service requirements for broadcast licenses went out the window early in the first Reagan term. This opened the way for that apex of First Amendment free expression, the 24-hour-a-day home-shopping channel. It also drastically reduced the access to the airwaves provided by locally produced public affairs talk shows and the like, which were virtually the only forum for grassroots community activists of all stripes.

During this past summer, the Reaganaut FCC finally delivered on a longstanding threat and repudiated the Fairness Doctrine as well. The Fairness Doctrine never meant a great deal at its best. Mostly it gave broadcasters an excuse to avoid "controversial" issues entirely. But it did at least provide a legal tool for dissident groups to wield against overwhelmingly conservative media outlets.

Ironically, the Fairness Doctrine was overturned in the name of free speech. The FCC, repudiating its very reason for existence, maintains that the editorial content of the broadcast media should be as free from regulation as the print media have historically been. Given the scarcity and expense of broadcast outlets, that is a legalism of the sort which, as Antoine de St. Exupery noted, "in its majestic equality forbids both rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges and steal bread."

General Electric (the owner of NBC) and the GE boycott committee have an equal right to spend millions of dollars for a broadcast outlet with which they can air any views they please to their heart's content.

Danny Duncan Collum is a Sojourners contributing editor.