"Don't think the media system is ... ordained by God. We're entering a new digital frontier where all sorts of rules are up for grabs," Eric Klinenberg, an associate professor of sociology at New York University told an audience in Eaton Hall yesterday.
Klinenberg, whose book entitled "Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America's Media" was published this year, highlighted the ways in which corporate interests are increasingly defining the content and variety of media available to American citizens.
Media deregulation has caused smaller, local media operations to be eclipsed by larger and more centralized providers that are fuelled by more capitalistic goals, he said.
He said that the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which the U.S. Senate and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) worked to draft and put into law, has contributed to this phenomenon.
Prior to the act, a company could own no more than four stations in a city and no more than 40 nationwide. Its passage increased the city limit from four to eight stations and removed the national limit.
"After that, 40 percent of the radio stations [in the nation] changed hands," Klinenberg said.
To illustrate the effects of this turnover, he used a story from Minot, N.D.
In 2002, a train accident in Minot unleashed a cloud of poisonous gas that threatened residents of the town. After the emergency radio broadcast system failed, Klinenberg said that the town attempted to call the local radio stations to broadcast a warning message.
But not a single one of the six commercial radio stations picked up the phone, because Clear Channel Communications had bought every one of them and had reduced their staff to lower its labor costs. Their acquiring all six is an act that would have been illegal before 1996.
"[They] picked up the phones and called [the KCJB radio station], but KCJB didn't pick up," Klinenberg said. "No one was available, because no one was there."
Although Congress created the FCC to engender competition, diversity and local engagement, he said that actions such as the passage of the Telecommunications Act have betrayed this goal by allowing media giants to force smaller competitors out of the field.
"The FCC and Congress have abandoned that goal," Klinenberg said. "They have worked against creating more competition. They have reduced diversity of voices in the media and undermined the authority of local media."
As larger companies began acquiring radio stations, they also replaced live local content with syndicated content, reducing labor costs but creating a rift between the programming and the people it seeks to inform, according to Klinenberg.
"This was about the time that radio started to lose its connection with the people listening to it," he said. "This is also when you start to see 20 minutes of ads for every 60 minutes of airtime, because radio operators were confident that their listeners couldn't go anywhere else."
Radio was not the only type of media to experience this transition. According to Klinenberg, Sinclair Broadcast Group applied Clear Channel's strategy to television to cut costs while content appeared unchanged.
"[They] had a station in Baltimore with five meteorology studios and the weather people would pretend that they were actually in the city they were reporting about," he said. "They would report on many different cities and force their local affiliates to carry the programming."
Klinenberg had serious doubts about such practices, which he said seem acutely disingenuous.
"When does someone ask the question, 'Is this ethical?'" he said. "It's fine. Do a weather report in Baltimore, but don't fake like you're in Pittsburgh. That seems improper."
Newspapers have experienced a similar reduction in sources of reporting as the firms in charge seek to merge resources and cut costs, according to Klinenberg.
He said that one unfortunate consequence has been that many newspaper companies have been getting rid of their international bureaus, which he attributed to the papers' realization that more local coverage adds value to their papers.
Still, readers have not benefited from the money that dropping foreign bureaus has saved, even though many newspapers have profit margins are up to four times larger than many those of Fortune 500 companies, he said.
"The system of publicly traded media, in which media companies attempt to get the highest returns for [their] shareholders is not the best for good journalism," he said.
At the same time, Klinenberg cautioned against over-reliance on blogs as an independent alternative. He called them "great supplements to the mass media system," but made it clear that they could not act as a substitute for more conventional forms of media.
"I'm a big blog reader. They often deepen conversations," he said. "Sometimes, they suggest something that needs to be covered better, but bloggers aren't journalists. They aren't going to uncover anything or do any deep, serious undercover reporting."
Klinenberg's talk was sponsored by the Communications and Media Studies Program and the Department of Sociology.
