As a member of the US Federal Communications Commission, I often hear how fed up Americans are with the news media. Too much, “if it bleeds it leads” on the evening news and not enough real coverage of local issues. Too little, high-quality entertainment. America lets radio and TV broadcasters use public airwaves worth more than half a trillion dollars for free. In return, the US require that broadcasters serve the public interest: Devoting at least some airtime for worthy programmes that inform voters, support local arts and culture and educate children.

Using the public airwaves is a privilege — a lucrative one — not a right, and I fear the FCC has not done enough to stand up for the public interest. Our policies should reward broadcasters that honour their pledge to serve that interest and penalise those that don’t.

The FCC already has powerful leverage to hold broadcasters to their end of the bargain. Every eight years, broadcasters must prove that they have served the public interest in order to get licence renewal. If they can’t, the licence goes to someone else who will. It’s a tough but fair system — if the commission does its job.
The problem is that, under pressure from media conglomerates, previous commissions have eviscerated the renewal process. Now the FCC has what big broadcasters lovingly call “postcard renewal” — the agency typically rubber-stamps an application without any substantive review.

Just recently, the FCC made news because it fined the Spanish broadcaster Univision a record-breaking $24 million. Univision claimed that its stations offered three hours of children’s educational programming per week — one of the few public interest rules still on the books — in part by showing a soap opera involving 11-year-old twins. That was the right decision. But, viewed closely, it also illustrates just how slipshod the renewal process has become.

The fine was not levied at the ordinary time. In fact, the licence term for one of the two stations initially at issue had expired 18 months earlier. This is typical — applications opposed by watchdog groups often languish for years while the broadcaster is permitted to continue business as usual. Then infractions are commonly disposed of with a small fine.

The commission paid attention to the Univision complaint because the station was part of a chain of 114 TV and radio stations being transferred from a public corporation to private equity firms. Without that, it is unclear when, if ever, the violations would have been acted upon. This even though scholars believe that one-fifth of what is billed as children’s programming has “little or no educational value” and only one-third can be called “highly educational”.

A lot of people claim that because of the Internet, traditional broadcast outlets are an endangered species and there’s no point in worrying about them. Broadcast outlets are still primary, critical sources of information for the American public. Nearly 60 per cent of adults watch local TV news each day. And so it’s imperative that broadcasters continue to provide high-quality coverage of local and national issues.

But ensuring they do so means putting teeth back into the renewal process. To begin with, shorten the licence term. Eight years is too long to go without an accounting.
NYT