By Robert W. McChesney

This fall, with little fanfare, the Federal Communications Commission has proceeded with plans to overhaul and possibly eliminate its remaining ownership regulations for media companies. These include prohibitions against owning newspapers and TV stations in one market or TV stations and cable systems in one market, restricting the number of TV stations one firm owns so that it cannot reach more than 35% of the nation's population, and restricting the percentage of the nation's population that one cable TV company can reach to a similar level.

Michael Powell, the Republican FCC Chairman, is on record as favoring the elimination of all these regulations. Republicans now hold the majority of the five-person commission, and they are gung-ho as well. Unless there is significant political opposition, a vast relaxation of ownership regulations is certain to ensue. The process should be completed early in 2002.

"In every corner of the market," one analyst noted, "the big will get bigger and broader, changing the underlying economics."

Considering that the last wave of media ownership deregulation under Bill Clinton spawned a massive round of industry consolidation, this is a startling proposition. Already all the major films studios, all the TV networks, much of the cable TV systems, the vast majority of cable TV channels, most of the music companies, much book and magazine publishing, and much else, is controlled by the 10 largest media conglomerates. Another 15 to 20 firms own much of the rest.

Most of these 10 giant media conglomerates rank among the 200 largest firms in the world; several are in the top 50. Forty years ago only a couple might have ranked among the top 500. These firms barely existed in their present form as recently as 1985; they are the product of deregulation.

And these firms are about to get bigger, a lot bigger. After deregulation, look for the largest newspaper chains – there are now five or six chains that dominate the industry–to link up with larger firms, and expect the giants to gobble up the remaining independent TV station-owning companies.

The media giants claim that deregulation will spur competition, lower prices, and better service. Were there any truth to that proposition, these corporations and their lobbyists would not be pushing so hard for it. The truth is that deregulation simply permits these firms to get so much larger that they have less fear of direct competition and more ability to hyper-commercialize their content to extract greater profit.

Radio broadcasting, which was significantly deregulated in the 1996 Telecommunications Act, shows this process clearly. In the past few years, radio stations have been gobbled up by a handful of colossal firms, like Clear Channel and Viacom, that own hundreds of stations and up to eight in each of the cities where they operate. They use their market power to increase standardized fare, lower the amount of more costly local programming, and jack up the amount of advertisements and overall commercialism. Small stations cannot compete so they sell out, and listeners everywhere pay the price.

The media giants also claim that the emergence of the Internet makes concerns about media concentration moot. After all, what does it matter if a few companies have massive empires when there are millions of websites competing for our attention, and when the cost of launching a website is nominal?

The problem with this argument is that the market-driven Internet has not spawned a new generation of commercially viable media content providers. Capitalism trumps technology. It is now clear that if we wish for the Internet to provide a well-funded alternative to corporate media fare, it will require explicit policies to encourage that development.

There are some, even among those who are critical of the US media system, who believe concerns about media concentration are overblown. After all, they say, media was not any better a generation or two ago when there was greater competition. Or, along these lines, the type of output of the romanticized small commercial media is often worse than that provided by the huge media giants.

These comments are beside the point. It is true that market concentration is not the only factor that determines press conduct. Even more competitive markets have flaws as they are commercially driven. That is why we need to develop a significant range of independent, nonprofit and noncommercial media. And in some instances, concentrated ownership is not an especially important factor in explaining media performance. But in nearly every instance where concentrated ownership has a clear effect–as in radio broadcasting–the effect is almost always negative. When in doubt, there should be a very substantial bias toward multiplicity in media rather than concentration. It is a core liberal and democratic value.

Nor is the effect of media concentration merely on media content. It also means that the largest firms become that much more powerful in Washington D.C., more able to have their way with our elected representatives. Insofar as our media system is far more the result of government policies than it is of some alleged free market, media concentration leads to exceptionally corrupt policy-making. Laws and regulations are made in the public's name, but without the public's informed consent.

The proponents of media ownership deregulation do make two valid points: First, the emergence of digital technologies, which undermine the distinctions between media, is making traditional regulations obsolete. Second, it is not fair that some media companies and industries cannot compete on equal terms with firms that have the good fortune of being in less regulated media sectors.

The solution to this problem is not to abandon media ownership regulations, but to revise them to take into consideration the new technologies and then to generate regulations that apply across all media and that serve the desired values. Such ownership regulations can never be generated in forums currently provided by the FCC, where high-roller lobbyists make their case before FCC members with virtually non-existent public attention or debate.

Robert McChesney is the author of Rich Media, Poor Democracy, and a member of the Chicago Media Watch advisory board. This article appeared in the public i, the newspaper of the Urbana Independent Media Center.