Understanding Media Monopolies with Laura Flanders (Episode 45)

After many years in public and commercial radio, Laura founded the Laura Flanders Show in 2008 as a forum for in-depth conversations and reporting about policy, economics, business, and the arts. The show is distributed via several networks, and you can watch it by going to the show’s website, lauraflanders.org. I also encourage you to check out the Laura Flanders Show podcast. And in addition to the show, Laura regularly writes for news publications, including The Nation, and she’s appeared as a commentator on television, including on MSNBC and HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher. Laura, thank you so much for taking the time to be here.

But in terms of concentration of access to audience for a slim sort of margin of views, a slim slice of opinion, if you will, that’s been a problem for as long as I’ve been in journalism. So that’s, what, 30 years or so. We’ve always had a situation where there were certain mainstream outlets that reached millions of people and then what I refer to as kind of “media on the margins” that did a lot of the core reporting. We would say it was the media on the margins that brings issues to the boil and the mainstream that inhales the steam, and we would always complain about the lack of resources in one end and the huge concentration of wealth in the other. I mean, this is a massive, massive industry earning something like $83 billion a year.

We would always complain, but in a way, we had a kind of cobbled together system that worked, and I think what we’ve seen in the last decade, really, is how that system is not working. And it’s not working not for information, for the public’s level of ability to understand what its options are. It’s not working for journalists, as we see our jobs shrivel and our options shrink. But it’s mostly not working for our democracy because you really can’t have a society with a free flow of ideas if you don’t have a media with more diversity. If you have a media in the hands of so few, we have a real democracy problem as well as a media problem, and I think that’s where we are today.

And then you saw in the 1990s with the Telecommunications Act passed under the Clinton administration doing away with many of the limits that existed on how many stations a single owner could own in a single market, and it went from six to more like 60. And today, you’ve got one broadcaster in the United States, the Sinclair Broadcasting Corporation, that at the moment owns 193 stations, reaching seven out of 10 of all US households. And if a pending merger continues or a buyout continues, they want to buy the Tribune Group, they’ll own over 200 stations and really be a universal carrier from coast to coast.

This is the network which was revealed not so long ago in a wonderful bit of activist media by Deadspin to have required that its local news anchors read a message, read a commentary ironically about trust and fake news, but it was all about, “Don’t trust what they tell you in the New York and Washington media.” But to see 40 or 45 local news anchors all basically reciting the same message in unison was pretty chilling, and people got it I think.

The power of a single broadcaster today, not just to own and influence programing but literally to tell anchor people at the local level what they should be saying on their local news, this is new. This is called a “must-read.” We always had must-carry, you have to carry some content that the monopoly owned or wants you to carry, but must-read, what that does is get the most trusted piece of this news ecosystem, the local anchor person that you might see at the store or at the PTA, get that person to mouth what’s the agenda coming from head office, and that’s really insidious and dangerous.

So, yes, there have been legislative changes. They happened in the ’90s. There’s been corporate and financial changes that happened a lot in the ’80s. Over the years, government has receded from the role of regulating any aspect of broadcasting. In the piece that I wrote not long ago for The Next Systems Project, I tried to remind people there was some history here. Government used to intervene at a very large level to regulate not only questions of ownership but local news coverage and local news broadcasting. We’re out of that business. We’ve been out of that business now for half a century, pushed, I think, by the very same advocates that dominate some powerful media. So you see why this is all so complicated, because media is both the way that we communicate about changes, and it’s also the way that we close off that communication and close off that change and intimidate politicians.

Just to layer one more big structural problem onto this, how do you think we should think about the role of Facebook and Google? I mean, a lot of people are getting their news now from Facebook or YouTube, which is owned by Google. And those companies are extracting a larger and larger share of the ad dollar, not only not supporting journalism with those ad dollars but also, because of the nature of their algorithms and sort of the invisibility behind them, really have become these machines for, as we’ve seen, for distributing fake news for the sort of outrage and things that aren’t productive at all.

So just think about it. I mean, 30 years ago, again, at the very sort of beginnings of the internet, people imagined, “Wow, we have this new world of free communication and decentralized control, diversity, democracy.” People felt like a whole new world was opening, but it coincided with a period of corporate consolidation that was happening everywhere and happening in media, too. And that corporate consolidation, that monopolization is driven by profit.

So when you have the same gamut going from the, whatever they say now, 400 individuals versus eight and a half billion people, when you have that contrast happening in the media sphere, you have a very dangerous outcome because what we’re talking about is not just the products that we buy but the ideas that get into our heads. And Facebook and Google, they never, I think, in their wildest dreams would’ve thought that they were the arbiters of our democratic communication system, that they were going to become the gatekeepers on our democracy, but that is exactly what’s happened, to the point that mainstream, old-school media giants like The New York Times are in no place to negotiate good terms with a platform like Google or Facebook, because they’re so dependent on the eyeballs that come to their website through that channel.

And the consumer feels, “Oh, I’m getting all this diversity. All these different news sources show up when I put in a search term.” But more often than not, they’re receiving the same article under different headlines served up from many different sites, and the profit, if there is any, is not going back to the original creator of that content. It’s going back to the purveyor of that content. And, therefore, the organs of journalism are made poorer and poorer and more and more vulnerable and more and more kind of subservient to corporate interests, and the monopoly control that algorithm-driven platform gets ever greater.

So, I mean, I think it’s hard to even kind of get it through one’s head just what a monopoly situation this is. Media is not different from Amazon. Media is not different from Walmart. This is a monopoly problem in a economy of inequality, and what we’re losing is information that is critical to our health. The other end of the consolidation is the desert. So you have the Sinclair story, for example. What is not being said when those Sinclair reporters, those Sinclair anchors are mouthing what head office told them to say? What’s not being told is the local news. What’s not being carried is the local story.

And I saw a really chilling report by a health reporter recently who talked to epidemiologists, people who study disease. And they said when you’re tracking the trajectory of something like the flu or H1N1 or the Zika virus, epidemiologists use all sorts of sources, and one of them is local news — the school was shut down because of an outbreak of flu, the local library is serving up new information about flu prevention. You get sort of wind of it at the local level. With the absence of local news — newspapers, radio, television, it tends to go together in similar areas — you’re losing that capacity to track epidemics. We’re losing our tentacles, the tentacles that absorb critical information about where, I don’t know, white supremacist militia organizing is taking off, where climate change is eroding the coastline, where bird patterns are changing or plant life is being affected.

So I try to turn things around. I say on our program, in the wake of the election of last year, a lot of people woke up, and they realized, oh, my goodness, we have the world’s most wealthy, powerful media industry, but half of us seem as if never to have met the other half, the most well-paid journalists in the world seem to have had no idea what was going on, and we were fundamentally wrong about key things in the election of 2016. And in the meantime, in the vacuum, profiteers and propagandists were making a killing giving people almost the craziest things to believe.

What we say on the show is it’s not that we need a new algorithm or a new app to protect us from fake news; we need a new level of attention to the media that we have, the media on the margins that still exists as your local community store does or your local small, family-owned business or farm. It’s not that we’ve lost it yet, but we are on the verge of losing it. I don’t think that we have more than three or five years of our current kind of wacky ecosystem with the little over here and the big over there because, while the little could really be flourishing in this new technological age, reaching an audience and integrating itself into public consciousness, it’s far more likely to be bulldozed by the monopoly in the town over.

And that’s what I’m really afraid of, is that we’re actually living on kind of borrowed time for this media system that we’ve cobbled together over the years, and it’s time for a real rethink. If we want a next system of anything, of agriculture, of transit, of communications, if we want a next system of economy, we need a next system of media because there’s no other way to raise the issues and the options and get that conversation started. We can’t wait until we’ve changed other things to change media. It’s almost like we have to change this one first. 

In terms of journalism, how do we break up the old monopolies? If you go back to the 19th century, you had Ida Tarbell blowing the whistle on United Steel, you had people like Ida B. Wells blowing the whistle on white vigilante groups, you had journalists really crusading out there talking about what was wrong, and you had governments that responded. I mean, to Ida Tarbell’s reporting, the result was the breakup of one of the biggest monopolies in US history. You had the same thing in the early part of the 20th century with the breakup of one of the large television networks into two networks because you had a upswell of popular attention and concern.

I think this is an issue that politicians can be forced to think about if they know that there’s a constituency there for them. There is certainly a job for journalists to continue does that kind of muckraking. There’s a job, I think, for we the public to say we’re not satisfied with what we have. It’s going to be a tall order because this isn’t a problem, I don’t believe, with a market solution. I think that we have to lobby once again for media as a public good, for part of our infrastructure for democracy.

At the local level, that means, I think, that our organizations, particularly those that think about new ways of structuring our economy, need to put, well, how do we imagine journalism in this picture? There are models out there. For example, the Dutch model, for example, for broadcasting is that the public television channels, the non-commercial channels are supported by taxation on the advertising that appears on the other channels. In the UK, if you own a television set or you want access to the British Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC content online, you have to pay a licensing fee. And there’s a fine if you don’t pay that fee.

There are lots of ways we could fund public broadcasting. Dean Baker has suggested that every taxpayer in the United States gets the same amount of a check off on their income taxes, say, a $200 voucher that they then get to choose who it goes to, which non-profit outlet does it go to. So there you have kind of public support, government support going to independent media without government determining which independent media get the support. That’s a reasonable model.

There are lots of potential things we could argue for out there, but the very first thing, I think, is that we need to unravel 30 years of propaganda telling us that government has no place in communications or that this is all a free speech issue because it wasn’t. It wasn’t in the 1920s when church groups and educators and progressives got together to demand that the public airwaves belonged to the public and, therefore, should be regulated as a public asset. It wasn’t out of the question in the 1940s under the New Deal, where you had the FCC regulate local broadcasters by requiring that they carry an hour of local programming every night, that there be a local station in every community, that all sides of an issue were covered over the broadcast day. These were things that we accomplished through organizing, through advocacy, and through basically shaming our government into taking action, but we’ve been sold this bill of goods that it will all work out in the wash. It won’t. It’s not working out.

And you come through to the ’60s, you had cable coming in. And again, you had organizers at the local and national level demanding something back from the cable companies. They said, “If you are going to be digging up our public streets, using the public thoroughfare to lay your cable, and that cable is going to give you access to profit making off a fairly” … Usually it’s monopoly access in any given community. That cable company is going to get monopoly access to a population that have put something into this mix with paying for the infrastructure that that cable company is using. Activists at that time said, “We want something back,” and they demanded full-equipped, non-profit community television stations with training capacity for local citizens.

And those were the PEG stations, the public information, education, and communications stations, often called the community access stations, which some of them not that great. They are run by free speech principles, first come, first served. But they’re a local outlet for communication that was obtained in a quid pro quo with the cable companies in perpetuity in the sense that their appropriation happens through, usually, city-based taxation on the cable company’s profits. And in a place like New York, we have three major television stations operating on this principle in New York, in Manhattan, and in the Bronx. And they’re good stations. It’s different from place to place depending on how the regulations have changed.

So you’ve gone from the postal service to radio to TV to cable. We’re now in the digital age, and we have not made our demands. We haven’t made our demands on the digital companies, and we’ve not required that they give anything back. Not only have we accepted a sort of quasi-deregulated or quasi-neutral net, which is not very neutral at all when it’s run by huge monopolies, but we’ve not demanded anything in terms of a protected sphere for non-commercial communications.

And we have another opportunity possibly now to make more demands because 5G is coming, the next level of internet communication, the next level of broadband. They will need to erect new antennae all across the country, and something … The 5G will actually be how the wireless and how the driverless cars with operate and how they’ll communicate, so it’s quite likely we’ll need these antennae and these new services very soon. They will once again want to lay and erect those antennae and erect their equipment on public land. In lots of parts of the country, that’s what’s on the side of the highway. What are we going to demand for that? What are we going to require back for that?

It’s really time that we stop accepting this bill of goods, as you put it, that our consumer power is enough. No, we have citizens’ power here. And in a monopoly media, we don’t just have the choice to pick another channel. We’re not given that option. I think as people are seeing now, their news is increasingly being served to them by algorithms. There’s not free choice of what you get access to. And in a democracy, we don’t just need free choice for ourselves; we need free choice for everyone so that there’s a level of information that’s going to everyone, not just those who search it out.

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And we’re back with Laura Flanders. I think that this argument that we have not made the demands now, that these technologies and these companies have continued to evolve, and yet we’re not making public demands of them the way that we did in all the generations before, of media technology. I’m thinking about Facebook and Google. I’m thinking, well, in exchange for being able to have our attention, which is an incredible public resource and all of the —

But there are some interesting models. In New Jersey right now, there is a interesting struggle going on around the state’s, under Chris Christie’s decision to sell off some of the public spectrum. Some of the public television spectrum was sold off under the last administration. And they got something like $350 million for the sale of just one station’s license. There’s now a whole community organizing, saying, “We just want 10% of that to fund a community reporting fund,” as you mentioned. And we’ll see how it plays out, but it’s a very good example, a very good experiment.

There’s also the idea that you could have a local tax on local businesses that would fund communications in a given community and that the given community would have a certain amount of journalism funding it could decide together how to spend. Sort of like participatory budgeting, how would we just throw it in the mix? What are we budgeting for for local media? And that’s another idea, that you could just extract it from the local taxation pool.

But I think there could be a lot of ideas out there. We just have a lot of intimidated politicians, and they’re partly intimidated because so much of our campaigning happens through the big media that we’re critiquing, so I always think, what network is going to raise the question of public financing for elections, for example, when they receive such a handsome proportion of all of that money? Well, this is the same thing. It’s like, how do we get our organs of communications to communicate about how to change a system that’s working so well for them? This is going to have to be a fight that’s bottom-up.

But I think as more and more people are learning, as you are and I do, about what comes from being in control or owning your own means of communication, I think we realize both how powerful it is and how critical it is and what the potential is. I mean, extraordinary potential going back to those years of the first Gulf War. I remember when I was working there at the media watch group FAIR in the late ’80s, our only means of critiquing The New York Times or other influential media outlets was sending a letter to the editor. Our only way of knowing how newspapers in other countries were covering what we were covering was getting a manila envelope of clippings in the mail weeks later.

I mean, today we have such incredible potential means of communication globally and spectrum-wise in terms of the array of ideas that are out there. It’s an exciting time to be fighting for media rights, as well as a very critical one, and maybe it’s another chapter that is brought to boiling point by the Trump administration. I hope that’s what’s happening. We certainly saw it right after the election, a lot of people talking about subscribing to their local … Well, they were mostly subscribing to the big, most powerful media. I hope they also subscribed to their local media. But I think this is a conversation that is bubbling up.

Meanwhile, I happen to live in a place that still has a daily newspaper despite being a relatively small city that’s pretty good. And we have a weekly newspaper that goes out and covers school board meetings and planning board meetings and the like. And the temptation to turn on the TV and watch news that I can have no effect on, and it puts me in a different kind of space versus actually reading about stuff that’s happening in my community that I can affect. I mean, how do you think about what our responsibility is, and how do you advise people to navigate this space?

And this sound so corny, but I got a dog not so long ago during the Trump administration. I thought, well, after Donald Trump was elected, and I thought, “Oh, god. I’m going to finally just go and get the dog that I wanted for a long time.” So now I spend a certain amount of time walking around and talking to people and not plugged in and not looking at a screen. I’m happier. I’m more engaged in my community. I know more about what’s happening in my block than I ever did before.

I mean, this is not the same as going to a community board meeting, but I do think it’s given me a little bit of a wake-up call where I realize, wow, I need to think more carefully about how I’m spending my time. And am I doing the due diligence of imbibing a variety of news sources? Am I reading in depth anymore? Am I actually reading books anymore? I do think that there’s a different quality of attention that we get in an engagement with a page than a screen.

And then I think the point that you made at the beginning about, how much of my value am I giving to media that I also hate, that I really do feel is leaving me feeling shallow and sort of polarized from my fellows? I think we do have a responsibility, absolutely. It sounds a little bit like, “Eat your vegetables,” but maybe think of it a different way, which is there’s a whole lot more going on than you think. And a lot of it is actually pretty exciting when you’re going out and seeing what’s happening at the local level.

I mean, I’m fascinated by how many people show up for participatory budgeting meetings. I was excited the other day to be York in the UK where about 80 people showed up for a local town meeting on the first nice day they’d had in that part of England in months. The sun was actually in the sky, and you had 80 people in the local town hall going through a process of trying to decide their priorities as a town for the next election later this year.

I think the people want engagement of the sort that they’re not getting through just absorbing the sort of hatred on the screen, and I think that we’re beginning to realize that our media is setting us at each other through its constant focus on DC-based party bickering. Even the Russia scandal. It’s like, we’re not talking about what is actually going on that led to the election results of 2016, what’s actually happening in our communities.

American democracy has always advanced on the backs of storytellers with their ears to the ground and local publishers and broadcasters who were willing to fund and carry those storytellers’ stories. The civil rights movement was brought to us by the black press that was covering Rosa Parks and Dr. King long before white people had ever even heard the names. Low-power FM radio stations are expanding in number and in scope. They’re broadcasting in multiple languages to farm workers in the fields about their right.

In Detroit, you have local residents weaving together an internet system that is serving a population ignored by the big cable companies at a price people can afford. And in creating that inter-knit, meshed network, neighbors are having to meet each other and communicate and trust one another. And it’s enabling them to communicate with each other, not just with the internet, and they’re sharing information about immigration raids and pollution outbreaks.

I mean, there’s some amazing things happening right now, too. The Highlander Center, the civil rights school in Tennessee, just erected a new antenna on the top of its famous mountain so that it can actually receive bandwidth and beam it down into the hollows of that part of Eastern Tennessee, serving a community, again, that had been underserved by the big companies.

So in the sort of shadow of monopoly, in the places where the monopolies have no interest in going, you see people meeting their needs in new ways that’s actually putting communications power, not just of the word but of the wire, in people’s hands. And that’s exciting. I still think that we have just begun to think about, how do we share information and the new technology, and how do we create our own networks that serve our audiences other material we think they might be interested in? And some challenging material, too. And I hope that not too long from now we will have developed some platforms where we can do our own evening news, and we come to you for the local economy reporting, and we go to other people for weather news.

I think we could do this. I’m hopeful. And the energy and urgency is at our back. We just have not all that much time, I don’t think, so these are critical moments, and I’m really glad that this conversation around media is beginning to happen in circles that haven’t really engaged with this yet. 

This show is produced Lisa Gonzalez and Nick Stumo-Langer. Our theme music is Funk Interlude by Dysfunction_AL. For the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, I’m Stacy Mitchell. I hope you’ll join us again in two weeks for the next episode of Building Local Power.