 Okay, we're going to get started here fairly soon. I think we're looking for maybe another 100 people to come in filing in, so I think we've got plenty of seats. We're supposed to start at 2 o'clock, and I think we'll get there relatively on time, not for television time, but I think enough for Washington Conference time. I think we'll be fine. I am rambling for just another second, assuming that we don't need to do my checks, and that we're okay, see lots of friendly faces in the audience, in the room. So let's start. My name is Mark Lloyd. I'm the Director of the Media Policy Initiative at the New America Foundation. We are very, very proud to be able to put this program together in association with the University of Southern California, Annenberg Program. This is an issue of great importance, I think, to me, and also to our nation. We are not taking a position on this one way or the other, and we really do hope to have a nice, lively conversation, civil conversation. We've got some very smart people on the panel, and I will let our moderator introduce them. And I just wanted to say part of what happens with these programs is that the audience is rarely recognized for the important part that we play, but this would be a very different program if none of you showed up. So thank you very much for showing up. Cold, snowy day in Washington, and I got a call at, I think, six o'clock in the morning from the German school telling me not to worry about my children going to schools, but I don't have any German children going to the German, so I'm not quite sure what that was about, but I think they are set. Again, thank you very much for being here. This is a program on media ownership and the public interest. We did invite Chairman Genekowski to be here. I understand that he is either traveling to Davos or maybe even in Davos at this period of time. We do think this is a very important program. We've had some interest from a few members of Congress to come and speak. We understand that occasionally they get busy doing other things, and if they come in at some point in time, we will try to provide some opportunity for them to step up to the microphone. So the program may change a little bit as we move along. We want to try to preserve as much time at the end as possible for some question and answers, and so very much hope to do that, and given that, let me make my remarks short. That's it. Let me introduce a friend and mentor of mine. I think it was almost, God, 15 plus years ago that Wade Henderson said, communications policy is a civil rights issue. Wade was and is leading an organization, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. That is a combination, a coalition of a broad range of civil rights organizations, including unions, church organizations, women's groups, minority groups, a wide variety of organizations working on equal justice under law for all Americans. Wade has been a friend and a mentor to me, and has expressed some views, not so much about, I think, the final determination, which we don't know yet at the FCC, but about the importance of taking the interests of all of Americans into account as these decisions are made without stealing too much of his thunder. Let me introduce Wade Henderson. Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Good afternoon. Mark, thanks for that introduction, great introduction. I also want to thank our friends at the museum for allowing us to use the night studio for this very important program, so they're very gracious. Thank you for that. As Mark said, I'm Wade Henderson. I'm president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. The Leadership Conference is the nation's premier civil and human rights coalition with more than 200 national organizations working to build an America that's as good as its ideals. I want to thank Mark, the USC Annenberg Center on Communications Leadership and Policy, and the New America Foundation's Media Policy Initiative for inviting me to be with you here today as we discuss our vision of how bringing more diversity to media ownership impacts the public interest, and the key role that the Federal Communications Commission plays in shaping that vision. Today's event about media ownership and the public interest is critically important because it goes to the heart of American democracy in the 21st century. The 21st century is the age of information. We are inundated daily with media so much so that we have a hard time not looking at our cell phones, smartphones, and tablets every 10 seconds. As such, who owns and controls what information we get via our cell phones and via traditional platforms like television and radio are central to a conversation about the very health of our democracy. As James Madison once said, and I quote, a popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both. And yet the FCC is failing to carry out its responsibility to ensure that communication in America remains an essentially democratic open opportunity for all. The racial and gender disparities in media ownership that date all the way back to the beginning of the civil and human rights movement are well within the powers of the FCC to address, but that is not happening. Women more than half the population own less than 7% of broadcast TV stations and rapidly growing minority communities are even farther behind. Hispanics hold less than 3% of these licenses and Native Americans, African Americans, and Asian Americans all have less than 1%. These disparities are not an accident. They date back to the era when most broadcast licenses were awarded in a flagrantly discriminatory manner, an era when many people of color could not vote and women could not even obtain department store credit cards in their own names, let alone full power broadcast station licenses. Over the years, the few media conglomerates that received these licenses created huge empires by gobbling up local independent outlets so they could homogenize and recycle programming, slash news budgets, and virtually stamp out local input. Now that they've maxed out of the legal limit, they want these limits raised of the effect of which will be to continue to keep licenses out of the hands of a new, more diverse ownership. We in the civil and human rights community care about media ownership because the way the public looks at issues, indeed whether the public is even aware of issues like voter discrimination, immigration reform, or fair housing is directly related to the way these issues are covered by the media. The way the media covers issues is directly related to who the reporters and producers and anchors are. In other words, who is actually employed by the media? Who is employed by the media is directly related to who owns the media, and who owns the media is directly related to public policies that determine who gets a federal license to operate and who does not. Now this media landscape has led to a distorted view of our nation that reinforces stereotypes and misinformation over facts. The same media that trumpets demographic gains of minorities struggles to paint accurate depictions of them. Studies have shown that media suggests to all Americans that African Americans are less likely to be doctors, Latinos are more likely to be gardeners, and Asian American men are either nerds or kung fu masters. Correcting this disparity in ownership is squarely within the powers and responsibilities of the FCC, which began talking about the problem 35 years ago, but has consistently failed to address the matter in a significant way. Now time and time again, the civil and human rights community has asked the FCC to do the research to understand the needs of all Americans, and specifically to do the research to understand the impact its rules have on opportunities for more diverse ownership. Now we're still waiting. And now instead of promoting diversity in media ownership, the FCC is now preparing to vote for an order that would increase consolidation, thus making it even harder for women and people of color to catch up. Now the media conglomerates themselves personify an ironic truth. While their newsrooms are declaring that demographic change will require institutions to diversify, their boardrooms are fighting tooth and nail to remain as homogenous as ever. And unfortunately, the FCC seems to be siding with homogeneity in the boardroom. Today's event presents an important opportunity to highlight the issue of media diversity, because what is really at stake equal opportunity and equal access to communication, as well as the very health and well being of American democracy. The demographic shifts are real for our country. They're real for business. They're real for politics. It's time for the FCC to recognize that they're also real for the media. And thank you so much for being listeners and being here today. I now have the privilege of introducing the moderator for today's panel. It's my pleasure to introduce Adam Clayton Powell III, Senior Fellow of the USC School, the Annenberg School of Communications. Please join me in welcoming him to the event. Thank you, Wade. And just before the program began, he and I were talking. We realized we met 40 years ago in the Supreme Court. So I hope that our paths cross again before 2053. And thanks also to Mark Lloyd for his hard work putting this program together. I should give you a disclosure. I was on vacation until a few days ago, so you know who really did the work. Mark also neglected to mention that he is going to be having a formal tie with the University of Southern California. He'll be joining the USC Annenberg School later this year. As a faculty member, he'll be running academic programs here in Washington, and as always, making a difference. Our panel, I'm going to be very brief. You'll see their biographies in your packets, so I'll be very brief and just introduce them quickly by title from your left to right, Craig Aaron, President of Free Press, who has written and spoken about these issues for years. Bernie Lunzer, who was elected in 2008, President of the Newspaper Guild, so he was elected just as the recession hit, so he knows what a fight is. Jane Meagher has been also in fights in courts in, what, five different circuits, I think? She's the Executive Vice President of Legal and Regulatory Affairs and the General Counsel of the National Association of Broadcasters. And Steve Waldman, who is now a Visiting Senior Media Policy Scholar at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Steve, let's begin with you, because before you went to Columbia, you were the Senior Advisor to the Chairman of the FCC, so I think you may have some insights on what he's up to and why. Well, first I have to say I'm not going to be lip-syncing my comments today, including from Chairman Jannikowski. The FCC can speak for itself about what they want to do, but I do want to put this in a broader context. When we talk about public interest and policy that affects public interest, Wade Henderson talked about one really key element of that, which is minority ownership. But it's not the only element of discussing public interest, and I think the important context for this discussion or one of them is that we are in a crisis of local accountability journalism. Newspapers are contracting dramatically, and the effects on local communities are severe. Bernie was just saying that the head count at the Baltimore Sun is now under 100. It used to be 400. Nationally, we now have about as many reporters as we had before Watergate. News magazines have cut staff in half. Network news have cut staff in half. When we looked at a particular example in Raleigh Durham where they had cut the newsroom in half as well, and we said, well, what does that mean? Why does that matter? Who got cut? Well, the beats that got cut were courts, schools, hospitals, issues of really profound importance to American communities. And so I think that that is the context that we have to look at this whole debate. And by the way, the populations that are most hit by these cutbacks are low-income populations. Upper-income populations are going to find the information that they need. We can see that WallstreetJournal.com and FinancialTimes.com and many different business models related to personal finance are doing fine. It is the accountability journalism that is really dealing with problems in the core guts of municipal government in state houses. Georgia, state house, used to have 15 people covering the state house, now it has five. So you see this across the board. People are, the watchdog function of journalism is eroding. So what can you do about that? First of all, I think that you have to start with the right diagnosis of what caused this. Now, I think as sort of a, perhaps a premise among some here is that the cause of that is media consolidation. And I disagree. I think media consolidation may have exacerbated it, but I would say the cause of it is the internet and the fact that readers and advertisers have other places to pedal their wares and get their news. It wasn't Rupert Murdoch who created Craig's List and caused classified advertising to drop by 70%. So if you start with that assumption that this is a seismic shift resulting from digital media, it leads to, in different directions, for media policy. My personal view is that the media policy, both at the FCC and in Congress, ought to ask a question which is that will this meet, will a potential merger that's being proposed increase the investment in local news and local content, including from minority media startups, or will it not? And I would do that, you could do that either through the waiver system, or I would suggest Congress consider something even more dramatic, which is to say instead of this system that we've had operated under in the past, we allow for the possibility of a wide variety of different mergers, but only if they pay a transaction fee on the merger, which would go to create an endowment in each community that would help subsidize local media. So that's just one idea, but I think the key point is that in addition to minority ownership issues, we need to look at the context of the broader collapse of journalism and try to think creatively about media policy in a way that could actually help with that problem. You're nodding. You approve of what Steve's suggesting? Well, in the current situation, we need innovation. And I think it's great that Steve talked about ideas for innovation, because for me, the question about this current shift, potential shift in policy is, will it fix anything? Will it solve anything? And it's my concern, from a guild point of view, practitioners were there in the field, and we've seen our newsrooms cut by half, by a third, like the Baltimore Sun, by a fourth. We do have people in broadcast as well, and we've been working on websites since 1995. We're looking for that kind of innovation. We've tried to build co-ops. We've got one employee stock ownership in place in Portland, Maine. But at the end of the day, there is not enough thinking about new ideas. This current idea seems to me, it increases the value of the current properties, but it's not going to add to any employment. It's not going to bring anything back to communities. It may actually stifle innovation. My concern is that we not do policy that actually makes things worse. And that's my concern here. I would love to see a number of these venerable mastheads, where there are legitimate problems, whoever you want to point at, whether it's the internet or other forces. And we know the web is the primary factor, but the economy and paying too much for some of the properties has also contributed. But in effect, we need innovation, real innovation. And I think that in many respects, possibly getting these, especially print products that are not both print and web products, tying them back to the community, whether it be through universities, through consortiums with public broadcasting, we're seeing a lot of that around the edges. We're seeing things like MinPost, Voice of San Diego, the base citizen, different projects where things are coming together. And we think that's great. So if people said to me, is this a great course, what the FCC, what they're proposing, is this going to really fix the problem? Not really. And it could potentially make it worse, at least for a time. That's my thought. Jane, if it could make it worse? Interestingly, I think that an awful lot of us, we agree on a number of principles here. And I think what we're disagreeing on is the way you go about doing it. And just starting from what Bernie just said a moment ago, I think that you have to define what the this is. You know, what is it that the FCC is doing? And I think that one of the things they're doing, and it's based somewhat on a report that Steve did more than a year ago, is to look at the market and say, look, there are some natural synergies that can happen that actually do make a difference and do increase some of the innovation and increase the ability to provide news in the markets. We found that when you can have some efficiencies that are brought out in the market, sometimes in the case of a TV duopoly, sometimes in the cases in the studies I've looked at where there are some grandfathered situations where there's newspaper and broadcast outlets, that in fact you do have more news that's serving the local community that's addressed. They're able to use the reporters in multiple ways, and that's something that helps. And the this, according to the reports that the commission is thinking about right now, are things like relaxing slightly the newspaper broadcast ownership ban, not taking it all away from the television, but there's some potential waivers that might happen in the television world. Looking at the radio industry, which is very much in a hurting situation, and a local radio and news talk radio station being able to work with the local newspaper, I would think, would be a real benefit. And so it seems to me that the kinds of things that this that we're talking about is not against innovation, it's for innovation. I think it's also for some to promote some of the minority ownership and minority interests that are involved, because I think a stronger broadcast industry is something that can be an opportunity for everyone. One of the things that we noticed in the recent reports that the commission came out in the three to three reports, three to three areas of form that the commission has, and they were looking at trends in broadcast ownership. And one of the things that we were able to see in that is that some of the positional interests in some of these companies have been, there's been a significant increase in the number of women and minorities that have been moving up in the officer and some of the positions within the companies. And I think that leads to more ownership and more ability to get into the industry, as long as you've got access to capital. That's where you get back to Steve's point. I'll stop here for a minute. I can go on for a long time, but I don't think, my bottom line here is that the evil that I think people see is ascribed mostly to many times to things that we're not really sure are real. And we ought to take a careful examination of that before jumping into those conclusions. And this we're talking about is top 20 markets right now? Well, just to, so we all are operating from the same set of facts about, because I think, free press has referred to this as the gutting of the media ownership rules. The industry asked for an elimination of dramatic relaxation of the broadcast limits, which my understanding is the FCC basically said no on that. They asked for a broad relaxation of the radio rules in the industry, and the FCC basically said no on that. They asked for relaxation on the network rules, and they basically have said no about that. So where they are relaxing is one is, or at least based on the report so far, is allowing for cross ownership between newspapers and radio. So, which I think is maybe a good thing. If you have CBS wants to go in and compete with Citadel or Cleo Channel and create some local news channels, that might be good thing. And then on cross ownership, the reports said that they're keeping markets 21 to 220 or whatever we're up to the same, and they're considering relaxation in the top 20. So that's really what we're talking about is, and as I understand it, the proposal is that for the top 20, they might allow a merger between a newspaper and a TV station that is number five or worse in the ratings in the top 20 markets, if allowing that merger still allowed for eight voices to exist. Am I getting that right? Somewhere in that range. It's a waiver test. So that's five or worse, meaning not ABC, CBS, NBC or Fox. Precisely. Depends on the ratings. Right. And so you're saying this is the evil incarnate. Yes, I will take the position that evil is afoot. Look, we can look at what's happened to the news industry and the internet has something to do with it. Absolutely. Does the economic downturn have something to do with it? Absolutely. But I think we can also say that a lot of the worst things that have happened in the media industry have been self-inflicted wounds. And the FCC has looked the other way for decades and allowed consolidation and concentration again and again and again. And every time we're told it's just a little tweak. It's just a little change. This isn't a big deal. The market is changing. And the results again and again and again are tens of thousands of working journalists losing their jobs. We're seeing the number of minority owners, diverse owners dropping. And so I think continued relaxation, more media consolidation, is a big deal. What's the FCC's proposing would allow somebody like our friend Rupert Murdoch, owner of News Corp., someone who's come under a lot of attention over in England for the activities of his empire to buy the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune. Because his TV stations are outside of the top four, at least some of the time. I think that's a big deal. I also think it's a big deal that you can look at the history of this media consolidation that every time the FCC moves to do it, the public opposes it. So there might be some lobbyists that think it's a good idea, but 99 percent of the public comments on the record say no more media consolidation. And that's happened in 2003. It happened again in 2007. It's happening again in this round. Every time the FCC makes this move, Congress opposes it. The Senate has voted several times to overturn these rules. The courts oppose it. The FCC has now gone to court twice and lost the case because they didn't consider what the public had to say and because they didn't consider diversity. And these rules have thrown out. And yet here we are again in Barack Obama's America just days after his inaugural and we're looking at the exact same broken and failed policies. The state of the news business isn't good and I think media consolidation has a lot to do with it. My last point would just be to reiterate some of the things that Wade is raising about diversity because I want to be clear that when the courts last throughout these FCC rules, they said to the FCC, deal with diversity first. You need to go and find out what the impact of further rule changes are going to be on the diversity of ownership before you change the rules, which seems pretty simple. And yet the FCC is refusing to do it. But what we do know is that very few people of color own television licenses, very few women own television license, 7% for women, 3% for people of color. And we know that while the FCC has been studying this, the numbers are actually getting worse. TV stations owned by people of color have declined 20% since 2006. We've lost six minority owned stations in just the last year. And now there are three, three African American owners of television stations full power in the whole country. I just think it's the wrong direction. And I think these rules are a big deal because the stations that are going to be targets for acquisition, many of them are minority owned of the 43 stations owned by people of color in this country. 20 of them are outside the top four in the top 20 markets, 19, 19 of them outside the top four in the top 20 markets. These are the stations that the big guys are going to come after when we relax these rules. So for the FCC to not even stop and study and look at these things and just to say, no, we have to do it now, you can wait till later diversity. Well, you know, I think people who care about diversity as in the vast majority of the American public are kind of tired of waiting and don't believe that media consolidation is going to have all these hypothetical benefits because they can see the very real world harms that we've seen. We've seen its damage to journalism. Tens of thousands of journalists lost their jobs. We've seen it's bad for business. Look at the state of the Tribune company, a company that got so big, took on so much debt that it's drowning in it. And now it took not only that happening, not only in Chicago, but LA and Baltimore and Florida and Hartford, Connecticut too because of media consolidation. So I just find it impossible to believe that the thing we need to solve the crisis in journalism is more of the same bad medicine that got us so sick in the first place. Sure. I'd like to get a chance to just point out a couple of things. One is that when you talk about the things that have happened over the last few years that you need media consolidation, first of all you have to recognize that the rules that are on the books now haven't changed since 1999. All of the things that you decided over the last things, these rules have not changed since 1999. There was some consolidation that happened in the, because of the 1996 Telecommunications Act which did open up the market in the radio industry, but that was based on a lot of findings from the early 90s that showed that the industry was in serious trouble. When Congress made those choices and put those numbers into the act, it was looking at an industry that the commission had found was that half of the industry was losing money. There were reasons why there was some opening up of that market. Let me turn to the other point which is with regard to the minority ownership. I think that Steve made the same point that I think I would on this which is that you have to look at it. You can't simply say okay these numbers are bad and if someone sells their station then the number gets worse. You have to say what is the real problem here? What are we dealing with? And so at NAB for example we have looked at the minority ownership situation and said it's abysmal. We agree. It's terrible and what have we tried to do to address that? We have a program that's called broadcast leadership training and in broadcast leadership training we've had some more than 200 people who have come through the program learned the basics of how to get into the broadcasting business. What do you have to do? And a good, I don't have the number off my head I should, have turned into broadcast owners. One just recently sent a letter to the commission today who was one of our graduates from our BLT program is on our broadcast is actually on our board owned the Fox stations, owned a couple of Fox stations in Texas and said look the real problem here isn't the structural rules that we've got the real problem is access to capital and what we have to deal with is that access to capital. You can't deal with the fragmented market by simply saying okay we can all still be one station. You've got to deal with the access to capital issue you've got to have the training through the programs like the BLT. You have to have incubator programs like what we've been proposing on the record at the commission. You have to have a reinstatement of the tax certificate program which NAB has been fighting for since 1996 when it was taken down in the in the Congress and I know that the commission is in support of that as well. You have to have creative financing approaches not just saying okay these structural rules somehow will solve the problem when they haven't. Dan Gilmore when he was writing at the San Jose Mercury News had a wonderful phrase that he used every day which is my reader is no more than I do so in this case the audience certainly knows more than I do and we want to get to your questions and comments. We'll have I believe two microphones two handheld microphones so if you raise your hand we'll get to you while the mics are in place let me just throw something out. Television viewers here in Washington as a result of cross ownership rules the major change they saw is that the CBS affiliate here went from being owned by the Washington Post to being owned by the Gannett company so not to pick on Gannett certainly not in the museum but but but or the Washington Post but how were the interests of localism or diversity served by Channel 9 going from one newspaper company to another newspaper company any thoughts? I don't know the answer to that but I think I would reframe the question a little bit which is that I don't think that the FCC has the power to block mergers just because they don't know whether or not it's going to help they actually have to have evidence that it will hurt so the fact that that happened and it was a wash would probably be viewed as a neutral factor by the FCC but I would also say that I actually don't just as I don't believe that that every consolidation will lead to better journalism I also don't believe that not doing it will lead to better journalism in other words you can see examples that have cut both ways you can see examples where they got it where they the cross owned entity did have it did have efficiencies but they just pocketed the money and it led to you know greater dividends or executive bonuses and you've seen other instances where the cross owned entity did invest in local news this is one of the challenges I think for for media policy and that's why I would prefer approach that tied it to a specific commitment to improving uh improving local coverage or investment and let me just add to that Adam I mean I the problem let me be to the cynic on the ground is that everything we've seen in the last five or six years suggests that any kind of synergies is the term that's often used any combinations that take place are almost always done to create efficiencies and to create more profit one of the biggest problems especially for print but I think it's true in broadcast as well is you know people don't understand how immensely profitable these companies have been over a period of time they've got hooked on that profit they really are trying to sustain that profitability at a time when that may not be the best thing to do to further the industry and as a result it's really hard to accept that any kind of further consolidation could result in additional content coverage or increased employment. We talk about you know ownership we talk about diversity ownership which is what the law requires what I look at on a regular daily basis is diversity within employment and I can tell you that since the the recession and the huge downturn that on an anecdotal basis women have left newsrooms in a in a large way as well as people of color and we've tried to be very careful as a union to not exacerbate that through our layoff provisions and so I assume that diversity of ownership was put in as a mechanism to try to create this further diversity of content coverage and employment that's what I would like to see more of and that's what I'm afraid will not come with the solution. Questions and comments from the audience. Can I jump in real quick and say that you know I mean we're talking here about oh there was some consolidation in the 90s there was massive consolidation in the 90s that 96 telecom act threw away the limits on radio ownership and that has been a disaster for journalism so if we're talking about wanting to you know hey now we need newspapers to get into radio because you know maybe they'll have newsrooms because radio stations don't have newsrooms anymore because you know Clear Channel used to own 60 stations and now they own a thousand stations that's what we've watched happen again and again and again is when we open the door to consolidation it's been bad for journalism so if our goal is to save journalism the first thing we should stop doing is opening the door to more consolidation. One is as I recall the advent of the cross ownership rules in the late 60s or early 70s in fact imperiled a number of major print operations because they lost the revenue from their broadcast outlets. The second is my question that in the age of digital television with multiple channels on one frequency and the internet and cable is there a constitutional basis to support the FCC's meddling in ownership where in other industries the government can't do the same thing fan scarcity no longer justifies that. I think that's an interesting point that raises another interesting issue which is that one of the great benefits that we've gotten from the digital transition are these multicast channels and it's been an entree for a good deal of minority oriented programming and women and minority networks that have sprung up that are on these multicast channels at this point with recently we've seen a huge increase in the numbers of the channels that are on those D2 and D3 channels. The Bounce TV network is one of the one of the examples is a African-American-owned network new network that's on the channels reaching 80% of the African-American audience now as a result of the digital transition I think that's been a very positive factor and I think there's a lot to be said for focusing on that that aspect of the industry as well. Probably no chance of the FCC deciding not to regulate. I don't think anyone says don't regulate at all but I think that that's a I mean these are still incredibly valuable properties with a huge reach they're the number one source of news broadcast television still number one source of news they made billions of dollars from this election for a reason 80% of all election spending broadcast television remember that when they go to the FCC pleading poverty but fine you know so the idea that there this doesn't matter and where it really matters local news the dominant local news sources are these daily newspapers and these daily television stations so the internet's a wonderful thing it's done a lot of great things it's complicated some things for the news business but when it comes to where people get those local news the FCC's own study show those are the dominant outlets and these rules still matter there too because we we start losing owners we start combining newsrooms then we've got even fewer sources of local news because of these of these very rules and that's what we don't want to see happen we don't want to see the few remaining sources the few people who still go out and go to the school board meetings and cover local government being shrunk and disappearing even further. I think you have to remember the size of markets also makes a difference and you just cited the some of the numbers with regard to the political campaigns I can tell you based on what my membership told me that depended a lot on where you were if you were in a battleground state Ohio did very well you know amazingly North Carolina and Virginia had did pretty good themselves but that that isn't true across the board and if you get down into Steve said there's 210 television markets across this country and not every one of those markets is one where people are making money hand over fist and I would even contend on many levels that they're not but in the smaller markets which is particularly where I think you need to have some of the kind of relief that we're talking about here I think you could have the biggest impact the advertising base that on which the television stations depend has been fragmented it's not just the internet it's also the cable the multi-channel providers that have been taking a larger and larger portion of the advertising base in order to continue to provide the public interest programming that the stations want to do and they want to do the journal local journalism they've got to have that they they have to have the kind of size and scale to be able to to fund it so would there be a does it have to be ownership though I'm thinking of a number of situations where people sell a station and or stations in combination sure and that's one of the the the issues we of stations in fact have joined it going on into joint sales arrangements or sometimes a shared services arrangement and that actually is one of the issues that we've got some concerns about the reports on what's in the the commission's order that they want to create a joint sales arrangement as an attributable ownership interest which would mean that then you couldn't continue those kinds of efficient joint sales arrangements and we think that that has that would be something that would be very bad in fact on the record in the proceeding we have a number of of our groups that have gone in and have effectively explained that this is how they in fact are funding their local news and how they're managing to to stay above water and they think that that's very important. Steve you look troubled. Yeah well no I just wanted to throw out a kind of a specific example that shows how a kind of theological approach to this of consolidation, good consolidation, bad doesn't necessarily reflect the nuance of the modern media market. If you take something like New Orleans New Orleans Times-Picune by the way a merger between the Times and the Picune just went to three days a week printing and cut 200 newsroom staff. Half of the minority reporters were laid off. So point A is that one of the main factors determining minority employment and journalism is not actually minority ownership. It's the health of newspapers in certain communities. They're both important but that second thing is is also important. When the community got together to alarmed at what was happening the Archbishop of New Orleans was part of the the coalition to try to save the Times-Picune. His reason he said cutting back on the Times-Picune will hurt the poor and we need to help make sure that their voices are heard. So again this wasn't a matter of of an ownership issue in terms of diverse ownership but it was a matter of is there an institution in the city that is covering these issues. Finally this is a bit hypothetical but when the Newhouse announced that they were doing this the owner of the New Orleans Saints said I'll buy the newspaper and I'll keep it printed five days a week or seven days a week. Now Newhouse didn't want to sell it so it became a moot point but even if Newhouse had said yes they wouldn't have been allowed to because the owner of the Saints owns the Fox affiliate in New Orleans. So that's the case where being allowed to potentially own the newspaper there, someone who had owned a station in the year, may have actually helped to have more minority employment, more coverage of of important issues in the community. I see some hands in the audience. Yes, could you introduce yourself please? Yes I'm Cheryl Lianza I work for the United Church of Christ Media Justice Ministry and we've been fighting for civil rights and media for more than 50 years and I wanted to bring it back because we work so hard alongside our civil rights allies. I wanted to bring it back to what Wade started off this discussion with which is the failure of the FCC to conduct analysis and collect adequate data about women and people of color's participation and ownership of the media. The FCC what I think Craig made this point but I want to make sure that we get a response to it because the courts told the FCC you have been you articulate a concern about diversity of ownership and then you ignore it you don't collect the data and then you throw up your hands and say oh we don't have the data we can't do anything about it so we're just going to go ahead and make these tweaks over here to the other ownership rules but we continue to ignore the need for the data to support minority ownership and women ownership and the industry keeps talking about the tax certificate but the tax certificate has not moved in Congress and in fact if the if the Congress was going to adopt a new tax certificate policy to re-adopt the old policy that they had we would still need these studies that the FCC continues to ignore because if you don't have data to support a race conscious policy it's not going to withstand constitutional review so we need these studies and and so the civil rights community is still waiting and the only thing that we have been able to hang on to is that the court told the FCC you can't consolidate media until you get these studies done and um you know Adirand the Supreme Court Adirand case was in 1995 it's been a long time we still have the studies and at best this time we still have is another future promise of the tentative maybe we'll get the studies done in another couple of years but nobody's ever been able to hold the FCC to that and I'm sort of looking for support from folks who want consolidation well where's the studies where is that where is that work that needs to be done I see three universities represented in the audience uh any one of which will be delighted to try to get you can can I just respond to Cheryl's point which is that uh in fact we agree that this is exactly something that needs to be done uh I can't say it often enough it's one of the points no I don't agree with the first point because I think that uh you have to look at what is the issue uh and you have to say are there mean how are we going to do this and is it that by keeping rules that have been on the books for a long time and haven't done anything to help means that that we have to assume that they they're going to do something that they haven't done for 10 years or 14 years uh and before we can move forward now we should be focusing on what are ways to actually move forward and the NAB in our comments and those in our industry have endorsed any number of different kinds of ideas let's do the studies and and and get some information in the meantime let's start an incubator program uh that is based on a race-neutral approach that we may be able to to move forward with right now that may be that's something that you can have a current owner of a station that helps to to bring in minority female participants into the industry why not have some sort of a revision of the way that you can have the owner financing so that you can have someone who has an interest that can then again bring along new owners into the industry there's some huge number of ideas uh and we have been talking with others in the in the community with the with some of the folks from the MMPC uh and many of the other groups are saying okay let's focus on what we can do to move this forward uh in a positive way and let's be responsive to what the what the third circuit had to say we're not opposed to that so i mean to question the NAB's motives here because i think that they probably do want uh greater diversity i've heard gordon smith said on a number of a number of times but the question i keep coming back to is then how come these consolidation policies are always the first priority so the court's been very clear the court has said you need to look at this first the NAB is saying we agree you should look at it okay well let's do it we don't we don't need to rush through changes without doing it let's go ahead and look at it minority tax certificate that's something the NAB and free press can agree on let's work on that let's put our energies toward those changes i think that sounds great let's put steve's ideas on the yeah i will shape on the minority i will i will absolutely let's go let's go in together and work on that let's get it passed that sounds like a fantastic idea capital hill is six blocks from here well right after this i i think that would that would be a great thing for us to work on let's put steve's ideas out for discussion let's have the public debate but the FCC is not doing that right now what they're doing is saying well we got to move on this right now and let's lift these rules and lift that those rules and maybe we'll come back and have these conversations later and i i think that's the real fundamental flaw here is that they're not weighing these new ideas they're not looking toward the future what they're doing is saying hey let's just do more of what we've already been doing because that supposedly worked out so well when all the evidence that i can see says it didn't work out that well in fact it was disastrous for so many local communities maybe new Orleans is an exception if that's a truly failing paper then then we can talk about waivers on these case specific things the FCC already has that on the books but i think by and large uh we haven't done that we haven't created the incentives let's create incentives for local ownership so that these big companies is they're drowning in debt let's give them reasons to sell to local owners people who are actually going to be in the community i think there could be a lot of great work done on those issues but the first thing we have to do is do no harm and we can't go back later and say oh it would have been great if we'd done that stuff but sorry it's all been snapped up well i think a couple responses that have to be made to that one i i think it's unfair to the uh chastise the FCC so much on this i think that we've had the various diversity committees have tried to move this forward uh yes we can do better uh and i think that that's important the FCC also has an obligation it's a statutory obligation to look at these rules and come and evaluate them in light of competition in the industry uh and they as i said before the rules haven't changed in since 1999 as despite the statutory requirement i think you do have to look at the rules and if you can look at them and say this is not what is the the issue with regard to minority ownership then maybe we should be looking at the competition side of it and look at what's happened in the industry and actually address those and i think that those things can move forward uh you keep saying that we've that's the same thing we've done before we actually have not uh i don't think we've actually really looked at what are the real causes of the problems in journalism since the things that you've cited the changes have happened in light of rules that the newspaper cross ownership rules have been in there since uh 1975 that's that's been that long it hasn't helped the newspaper industry or the broadcast industry point of information are there are there are there any hearing scheduled in this uh no i had the last hearing i saw in this well that commissioners attended was 2007 i think what your when steve did the uh future pd report there was a lot of analysis of this issue a great deal of it uh there were some other on media ownership i think there were hearings all over the country that were i can't remember i was at the mall but in 2007 without the current i did i did attend the mall uh by hand up in the audience well i i have the microphone so i'm going to ask a question hey andy this is andy schwarzman this is for steve waldman first a point of information uh actually uh a broadcaster or an applicant to purchase a broadcasting station has an obligation to demonstrate that the transaction is in the public interest an affirmative obligation it's not only if the FCC finds harm it's the other way around you have to demonstrate it's in the public interest my question jumping off of that which craig has foreshadowed a little bit is right now they're under existing rules waivers are permitted indeed rupert murdoch got a waiver uh to save the new york post from uh from what he alleged was was an imminent death uh that would work in your hypothetical new-worldland situation in light of that why do you see any need for change in the rules which is what you've advocated well this is an area where i don't know if i would do it exactly the same way that the FCC is doing it i would probably have a criteria a waiver criteria be the heart of the policy um having said that the there was a real lost opportunity in the in this process which was the in the proposed rule the FCC said hey there's this idea out here called the four-factor test which said if you invest in local communities that could be an important factor in favor of the waiver now there were lots of problems with this particular four-factor test i was very disappointed that that uh in their comments free press not only opposed the four-factor test but didn't propose an alternative as i understand it in fact neither did the broadcasters in fact when i talked to the FCC about this and said hey you know i think there may be problems with the four-factor test but at least it had the idea of uh maybe we could tie policy to some demonstrable proof okay they said well everyone opposed that uh it seemed to be the one thing that everyone agreed on was that the four factor test which i think me it was a bad idea which which i think is a lost opportunity because i think if if if free press and and nab had put their heads together to come up with an idea for okay maybe the wording and that particular thing wasn't right but if we were able to come up with language that tied media ownership decisions to whether or not there's investment in the community that would have been a step forward and instead we ended up with a sort of washington game forgive me um where in order to establish i i would assume the kind of bargaining position free press was against everything and nab was in favor of everything i'm overstating it but um and what we didn't end up with was a creative policy solution well you know what you talked about policy going back to the 70s and i think it's important to look at uh what happened in the 70s with newspapers the effort to create joint operating agreements it was an effort to allow consolidation but to maintain newsrooms so it was an innovation like steve talked about one where there was some incentive uh to keep something alive within a community now we know in practice that the joes kept some papers alive for a while in some cases for a long while they didn't necessarily work in the long run not not in the current environment but those kind of policies do matter one thing i don't want to be lost in any of this fight over policy and certainly over profitability is that journalism itself is in trouble you may think that there's plenty of plenty of journalism on that web thing but the truth is there really isn't and the studies that have been done have shown that uh the amount of original sourcing journalism is extremely low in the united states compared to what it has been and the numbers show that um so the question is do we solve the problems for the owners who want more profitability remember profitability that may go into the 20 30 range which is what it used to be they don't want to have eight or nine percent in the case of new house in new orleans i don't know what the times picayune was doing i new house didn't want to sell because i suggest they're making money now we're trying to keep new house from taking the cleveland plain dealer down the same path there the community is in strong support of our campaign to save the plain dealer but again they're gonna do what they're gonna do in the name of profitability and there's no incentive for them to be concerned about journalism just to be clear what's your plan for cleveland well we're trying to keep seven-day printing of some kind you know the general feeling is it's cool to say print is dead i don't believe print is dead i believe that it print is challenged you know when tv came out that didn't shut down the movie studios although some of the current publishers might have done that if they own the movie studios at the time so the in cleveland what we want to do is at least keep some kind of printing present on a daily basis to supplement whatever happens on a digital basis remember that there's a huge digital divide in the country if you're in an area that has files and you can afford a broadband you'll be able to get the website a lot of poor communities don't have that kind of access and they can't afford internet so when the when the publication goes out of business the joke in detroit when they made the change to three or four day delivery was don't die on a monday because you're not going to get your orbit in the paper until the following weekend and gannett made that change in detroit along with media news and there's every indication that detroit has been profitable in the print operation not as profitable as they'd like to be but therein still lies the challenge so how do we have we bring this together policy journalism and profitability and you know this since i since i've been sort of defending potential relaxation of ownership rule in this case i want to come back and i actually say this is the reason why i mostly think the consolidation rules should not be relaxed and the bigger issue that you see and it's really not something that the fcc can even get at with ownership rules is that you do see time and time again that newspapers even though the internet is what caused this ownership structure of media companies did exacerbate the problem and did make it harder for them to respond there are newspapers out there that are break even which from a community point of view is fine they may not be making 30 percent margin anymore or 40 percent margin anymore but they're important institutions unfortunately if you're a publicly traded company that doesn't really cut it which is why in the fcc report and other people have made the same point we need to have innovation from other sources including from the non-profit sector and that was partly where my idea you know points to but there's a lot of other things pointing toward that that we're not going to be able to create organically growing media without new players and without the non-profit sector frankly playing a greater role and you really can't continue to say that to focus only on one aspect of the industry and pretend that the rest don't exist the rules that we keep talking about here are applicable to broadcast radio and television there's a lot of other outlets out there that are not subject to these kinds of restrictions and are out there searching for the same advertising dollars the same support the same profitability and profitability really isn't a bad thing in this country uh is that you have to have uh you have to recognize the true environment that we're in and if you have to be on multiple platforms and it's interesting when you ticked off the stuff you talked about well you don't want to be on a website you want to have different kinds of platforms you have to recognize that that's the reality where we are and we should be evaluating these rules in light of that reality thank you i see somebody else with a microphone the white sweater hello i'm robert charrette president of international investor and and i'd like to just make two quick points and and get anyone's reaction to them the first is as we look out in the future we see an increasingly complex world of ownership of media private equity players institutional investors of all sorts many international working their way into the media of every nation all driven by economies of scale low-cost production is uh their ultimate goal but when necessary they'll supply whatever amount of money is necessary to capture large global audiences if need be and they'll do this largely in the entertainment space once again we'll be giving up the opportunities to create worthwhile news worthwhile international news worthwhile local news so the only way i i can even imagine dealing with this at the national level or the local level is by going back to an era where we insisted that a certain portion of broadcasting a certain portion of our newspaper coverage be devoted to those local issues i i don't pretend to think that there was uh maybe there was a golden age but i don't think there was any ideal that went on forever so here's my question we it's the public that grants broadcasting licenses they have to be renewed should we move toward a platform where we insist on a certain number of hours even in prime time not only be devoted to local news but be devoted to alternative voices diverse voices same with newspaper coverage should we insist on a certain number of pages within the local newspapers be devoted to not only local news but diverse viewpoints as well everyone does this to a certain degree because they find it's in their interest to say they're doing so but i'm talking about something where you take a sizable portion of prime time a sizable portion of the real pages of a newspaper and we as a public insist that they cover the issues we think are important i think we may need to separate a couple of things because the FCC can regulate broadcasting but not newspapers right and there's never been any requirement of specific things specific content in newspapers uh of any kind uh largely the first amendment would really be turned on its head if you were to try to go there um but uh in terms of should we be doing that you know interestingly i think that uh this is happening i referred a few minutes ago to the uh the d2 channels the the the diverse channels on the broadcasting television and what you're finding in there is that you are getting uh some a lot of diverse programming in there it's it's language the foreign language programming that's that that's coming in in certain markets a lot of the hispanic programming aimed at the hispanic audiences the the african american programming that's coming in that's being devoted on those channels now you're you're taught you keep talking about a a specific area of of local news and i think that is something that is dependent on the market and what we've seen over the last few years is that there's actually been an increase uh in the local news markets where where the stations can get the kind of uh scale and scope to be able to do that that's i think the better way to do it than trying to dictate that there be some specific amount because i you're just not going to be able to afford that the fcc is also occasionally let's say loudly suggested going back some years when i was at cbs we were certainly responding to uh things that the fcc suggested might be a good idea but there hasn't been as much suggesting lately well i think i i actually agree with the idea that broadcast is different despite the changes in the marketplace because the the license is to the public airwaves the problem and so i do think there should be an obligation that broadcasters have to give the community something for that the problem with having it be you know a number of hours is first of all as jane said uh local news is increasing its number of hours the problem is that they're doing that by repeating the same news that they did at five o'clock so you could do if you did an hours count i don't think you would achieve very much and in fact i don't know if you um requiring that station number eight nine and ten in the community also have a local newscast and probably what would be a pretty lousy local newscast uh would necessarily you know help society so i think that you want to look for something one of the things i thought was a really easy thing that the broadcasters could do to help show their good faith was to put the political files that they had in their filing cabinets online uh as the FCC proposed i was disappointed that uh the broadcasters actually fought that which would seem to me to be a kind of bare minimum uh expression of of serving the public interest in the community sorry you know i'd like to say that uh so the ideas you brought up would you know would take a pretty radical change in our culture to ever get to that point but having said that there are some things we could do with policy uh that could really change the landscape in a very constructive way and one of those is universal access to internet and remember that this was a problem with the telephone as well back in the day and electricity and electricity and so there were uh there was a lot of money spent as a country to make sure that there was in fact universal access if the same thing was happening right now uh with broadband whether it be a wireless technology or a wired technology and you took down those barriers uh we might not even be here talking about traditional media because it may not matter the new technologies would just come in and maybe you serve uh you could then broadcast over the internet knowing that you could actually have an audience we do know i know from my own children that they would much more rather have a la carte choices of media than buy into some big cable package uh i think that there is some hope in a new technology but that again is going to be a question for policy and whether we want to make some changes i see a hand in the front row and probably somebody who has a microphone can you hear me all right many tourists will be pressed have a couple of points uh first of all um newspapers as as andy was uh i think was saying are still remain profitable if they uh want to on the tv station ask for a waiver request right and lay off steve they've been happening for a long time the accelerated recent years remember what j. harris famously resigned in 2001 because the san jose mercury news wanted him to push the profit margin beyond 30 percent and he refused uh state houses have been cut for a long time uh state bureaus have been it's not a new trend uh companies have been we lack uh been laying off workers for a long time to order to maximize profit so that's one thing that's nothing new 25 of the 26 stations minority owned stations that are no longer minority owns since 2006 uh they no longer already owned because they had to sell because of financial distress and none of them got back into the market so this is a crisis a real crisis and to and to say that news the newspapers can own tv uh tv stations and yet the FCC all they have to do is actually why don't you study to see what the impact is before you change a rule study it that's all we're asking study the rules prove it prove it there's going to be no harm to minority ownership if you can't prove it then the court say you shouldn't do it that's another thing um newspaper diversity that's the other thing it's like 1978 as the had a goal of reaching diversity by 2000 newsroom diversity it came no way no way close they pushed it to 2025 where are these newspapers when it comes to newsroom diversity so the idea that people of color have to wait for companies that are profitable to get the last remaining minority owned stations potentially to increase their profit while people of color can't speak for ourselves and own our own outlets when with 37 percent close to 40 percent of population i think is a very very moral question we ask what kind of country are we when we are people of color can't even speak for themselves when other people have to tell our stories and then the content that we do see about us is marginalized and marginalizes our community but yet these are the owners like the Rupert Murdoch's that we have to turn the last remaining stations we'll give it to Rupert Murdoch so he can further demonize our community it just doesn't make sense is it not a it's a question of it's a not only this is a policy question i i truly believe it's a moral question as well so i'm exacerbated my friend here from the other side of the street i know it's exacerbated too so i told not i was going to give him a mic too thank you i see um two people in the front of the water Dwight thank you is it on uh Dwight Ellis former NAB exec and current six-year college professor at Bowie State University uh i i find a lot of deja vu here uh having been there before with most of you uh one thing that i i see having served on both sides with the NAB and now with the collegiate community and been in private industry after NAB it looks like we what we need is and someone mentioned it up there we need to get back to the development of new ideas this is a new place uh the the whole the whole game plan is very different yes it is about economics yes it is about money but it's also about the marketplace of ideas and and i have a question in relationship to that many years ago from the seventies forward the NAB as the industry representative took a leading role we were a major at that time a major marketplace of ideas since we consistently hold the largest and probably most well known convention in the world in the subject now my question is is the NAB still providing that level of leadership which is even greater than ncta and if that is so then since i will be attending the NAB convention this year along with the BEA i'm going to be very anxious to see if the NAB is going to have a session minor or major on this topic there because and i close with this not only do the new leaders of the of the whole digitized community of media whether it's uh uh broadcasting or or newspaper whatever the other legacy into the all of the players are new now and many of them in an age of convergence will be at the NAB along with the lawyers of MMTC and the others who provide that now is the time for the NAB because we have the history we i'm not with the NAB anymore but the NAB has the history and the relationships much more so than cable and now we can step up the NAB legislatively and otherwise to begin to make a difference once more that's what i want to say we don't have michael powell here to respond for the cable industry but let me let me let me just say quickly back to you dwight that uh absolutely uh i mean this is i i started down the road a little bit before NAB has been trying to take a leadership role in increasing the minority and female ownership in our industry for some time we do it through the programs through our NAB education foundation the broadcast leadership training that i mentioned before the executive development training program that we've done at the NAB we have a major session for uh for getting together with people for job opportunities the BEA program is is definitely a huge part of of all of this we have uh we consistently supported trying to get back to tax certificate and i'm talking to craig after here to see how we set up the uh the the program to keep this to keep it moving we have endorsed any number of ideas that are on the record at the FCC for some other types of regulatory reform that address the real issue that we see which is the the access to capital issue and so yeah i think we're there and the sessions on ownership on on access to capital both on the radio show side and on the tv side are always there let's go from NAB to NAA i see a couple people from the newspaper association hi paul boil with the newspaper association of america and this has been a great program thank you very much i want to talk about radio so uh we've seen a lot of changes in the radio environment over the years and there's been a decline in local news on radio and as national companies could come in in a local market and buy a radio station uh that local news provider in that market the newspaper has had to sit on the sideline since 1975 and we are in the best position to produce local news that's kind of in our dna that's what we do so from our perspective it makes sense if there's a radio station not producing local news that the newspaper could potentially be a buyer and produce local news public affairs programming interview community leaders and get different viewpoints out there in the community but my question is uh is regarding this waiver standard it's been raised several times so if you're a seller of a house and you have two buyers and both come in at the same price but one has a contingency who are you going to go with you're probably going to go with the buyer that doesn't have the contingency and this waiver process takes a long time i i'm not that familiar with it i was going to ask jane as far as the realities of going and seeking a waiver at the FCC uh is that an impediment to folks to actually investing uh and how long does it take i mean from our perspective it's it's kind of a non-starter but it absolutely is an impediment to people if you have a rule that works and i don't know if he's still here i think i saw david oxenford up in the audience somewhere who represents the media brokers uh and they they're on record at the at the commission uh to say that they're having the bad structural rules of the kinds of things that cause problems with the with the brokerage deals and i think that's exactly what you have to to look at but but structure aside uh do you think that newspapers should just be openly free to buy radio stations well i mean i guess that uh it's the kind of we haven't seen a lot of combinations like that there have been some in the past clearly uh and i mean i'm talking 20s 30s earlier on um again uh it it may be part of the solution but i think there has to be somewhere in this if you're going to allow the combinations in the first place it's i think it's right to build in some criteria for expectations and uh you know i think that's what we'd like to see so it's not about what are you against it's what are you looking to solve what are you for and how do we get there i think there's a lot of agreement here on the stage in terms of ideas uh and things that would be constructive uh now how we get there is is another question entirely i mean i do want to leave this in a constructive place we do have a commitment to uh to a democracy here that depends on journalism and if that means trying some things that we wouldn't consider otherwise then you know maybe we need to go ahead and try some solutions on the other hand uh you know the the fear right now and it's just a really basic fear and i know people say well you know you can't shouldn't just be against uh combinations and amalgamation but there's little evidence right now that shows that uh there's more there's no real commitment you talk about diversity when the money got tough in in the newspaper industry and a lot of industries diversity went out the window i mean that was just a sad fact and you know i i get it i don't like it um it doesn't solve the problem if you look at the most recent election if you learn anything from it the country has changed and people better wake up to that but we're so far behind right now uh you know we have got to have some solutions so we've had a good kind of fistfight over policy here on the stage but i still would like to see some better dialogue about things that are going to actually create new content bring in new voices uh and really create some kind of way of getting new messages out that that currently we're not even discussing Craig how to go forward so no i mean i certainly agree with a lot of what Bernie said and and i'd be happy to entertain a lot more of these discussions if i didn't feel like the FCC was rushing to just do everything on one side and push for more consolidation and i it's in from my perspective uh that needs to be stopped it's not in the public interest they haven't made the case uh and the courts and congress and everyone else have been very clear uh that they haven't done that if we want to step back and have a have a larger discussion and work on things that are more of a trade-off actually talk about how we're going to invest in local journalism well i think that's a different a different discussion but you've got to actually make the case we have to get past this sort of hypothetical well if you just allow us to merge some more then that's going to magically improve newsrooms create more jobs because the evidence has been on the other side with all this consolidation so now so so setting aside those objections sure let's talk about the big ideas let's talk about what kind of public investment we actually need let's talk about redirecting some of these things you know the nab says they spend billions of dollars every year to meet their public interest obligations maybe we should redirect some of that money toward journalism and make non-profits and for-profit eligible for that funding we can get really creative here um but what we've got to stop doing is the the damage that we know that media consolidation has caused we've got to set that aside and then there's actually room for this conversation those billions of dollars are spent on public interest programming so whether it's uh the messages that go out to your local community whether it's your local news all of that is how we serve the basic public interest obligation that broadcasters do have and take very seriously and and try to address every day i see two hands right over here okay larry i guess next let's the mic sorry i i've got the mic i mark gruenberg from washington baltimore newspaper guild which is prior to the newspaper guild i'd like to turn the discussion back to um the the link between um hugeness for lack of a better term and media ownership and lack of diversity by using an example and that's the tribune company which i'm familiar with both as a chicago and as a member of the newspaper guild it's top four papers the tribune chicago tribune baltimore sun la times hartford current covered and cover heavily minority communities they were also owned by one huge conglomerate and tribune company and this is typical of these huge conglomerates owns everything from cable to broadband to the biggest job search engine in the country to do it to to uh the biggest to uh regular over-the-air broadcasting to you name it it covers those four communities but to say that the tribune company is not diverse is putting it mildly uh the newsroom percentage in baltimore not only did the overall um nose count go down but the minority nose nose count went down same thing in chicago same thing in la same thing in hartford so that's the linkage how do you flip that linkage so that you get both minority more minority ownership and more minority participation hand in hand any response um you know one one thing is that the um tax laws and bankruptcy laws need to be looked at in a way that would make it easier for newspapers to disaggregate to peel off from large media companies i think that's an area where you could potentially have companies being more rooted in in their communities i wanted to also mention you know the rationale for why the FCC is looking at being looser in the top 20 markets than in the other so again they're basically as i understand it agreeing with craig on markets 21 to 210 they're disagreeing on markets one through 20 um the rationale for that is that there are more players in the larger markets so that if you go from if to take a hypothetical if you go from nine stations to eight stations but it were to help uh the a combined entity of a newspaper in a tv station to do more local news that would be a good trade-off i would take that deal now as i said there's a question of how can you be sure that that would happen the study that the scc actually had said that uh based on the academic studies combined entities of newspaper and broadcast did produce more news than they were before now i don't want to put huge amounts of stake in this particular study because my view is that this it probably cuts both ways but uh but there is some evidence that in limited cases and the reason that you would if you wanted to experiment that the place to experiment with it would be in the top 20 markets is that you can have mergers like this with less of a potential negative impact on the diversity of voices simply because there are more voices to start with in communities like that i would think that that is the rationale for why they're looking at relaxing just in those top markets i i also think that by the way we probably would have been this has been a great great panel but um having someone actually from the fcc to defend the fcc's position he's in davos i canceled my trip to davos there are all sorts of very talented people at the fcc besides the german uh what can i answer that question about that is there some magic to top 20 not 25 or 15 was there some break point there that you know there's a kind of history and economic analysis that has pointed to that breakdown not just now but i think in the past but someone else it actually depends on the rules i've seen it top 50 i've seen in top 20 uh and i'm not sure exactly what was the rationale before the for the 20 versus 25 50 whatever it's um i'm just not sure larry where does public media fit into this discussion of uh solutions for local news uh npr has proclaimed that diversity is its number one priority race ethnicity age and geography uh there are their opportunities to link uh public radio stations in particular to newspapers at the local level i think the answer to that is absolutely and uh and that's the whole question of what how we can mix nonprofits and profits we even for a time and we're still pursuing it the idea of a new limited liability corporation called an l3c that allows for nonprofit investment into prop for profit companies uh obviously right now talking tax stuff with the congress is not a real popular kind of thing to do but uh the fact of the matter is there's some things that could be done to encourage this and we've seen some experiments around the country where public radio and television are cooperating including through and with universities uh and creating cooperatives the base citizen is like that in san francisco and there are other projects and i would say that uh public radio and television are very much especially because of their model and their connection already to the community all of this comes back to connections to the community the problem in journalism really only happened when especially newspapers became very corporatized so anything we can do like these models to get connections back to the community and yes public radio and television are perfectly poised to to step in right now and be part of the solution and there is actually a public policy angle to this which is without in any way saying anything about the Comcast merger's overall merit or demerit there was a very interesting and little known condition in the Comcast merger which was that uh part of the conditions of merger was that NBC affiliates had to partner with local non-profit media organizations in one case i think it was a local radio station another case it was pro publica another case it was voice of san diego i actually don't know how that's turned out i think it would be a great question to ask is like what happened with that i mean i know on paper they did it but i would love to know did it work out did it really was it good for the non-profit entities did it really lead to more you know investment in the in the community if if the answer is yes that might point might have some lessons for public policy issues and similarly if the answers no that might be a very interesting precedent actually that you're raising i think it's an interesting point too because i think one of the reasons that that was an ability to have that as a condition in the merger and i think it was volunteered by Comcast was because they in fact had already gone down that road with one station and they found it to be something that was a a good model and thought that that was something that they could expand so these are ideas that can be generated in the uh in the commercial space and can can help to to create new ideas i think that's a great but we do have to be careful with the trade-off because we did allow one of the biggest media mergers ever to happen in exchange for an interesting pilot program which is indeed interesting well i don't i don't think they viewed that as the trade i think that was probably maybe a little bit i would absolutely i would absolutely say even if it was a wonderful success that wasn't a good enough reason and look i think that if we want to talk though about what public media needs is it definitely needs investment and we should be talking about you know why we spend far less than any other leading democracy on our public media system something like four hundred million dollars a year about a dollar fifty per person you know in canada at twenty seven dollars per person in england it's eighty in the scandinavian countries is a hundred dollars per person i think if we spent five dollars per person on public media we could get a lot of interesting local news we might combine that with some of these other revenue sources that steve's talking about and suddenly we've got some real money that we could earmark and commit to local journalism i think that would be a great thing to explore and we can figure out there's a lot of figuring out to do how do you spend the money how do you make sure it doesn't just go to the incumbents and actually encourage innovation that's the kind of creative policy i love us to move toward uh you know once we can get past this one i can't resist a shameless uh a plug that larry kirkman at american university and uh we at usc have been doing a joint series of research projects for the last couple of years which will keep going on exactly how public media radio and television and online can fit in with with commercial media but that's and we found i guess to our surprise one of the first studies was a public radio is doing better than anyone thought public television is doing much worse than anyone thought so who has the microphone now i see him i see someone waving in the back someone in the shadows in the corner yes seat hello ciao seat and molly with less government um two quick points one uh if you want to watch a watchdog become a lapdog have the government buy the dog food um i didn't think there was too much room to obama's left but public media has found it so i don't think you can get a lot of analysis of what government is doing if the government's paying the bills for the journalism so that's that's a problem with public media and public journalism and second of all the public interest is best served by what the public is interested in and if local news brought in a ton of money because a lot of people were watching it they'd be running it eight to eleven every night seven nights a week the reason they're not is because people aren't tuning in so you might think it's a good idea and i found it kind of a frightening authoritarian thought that we should dictate to stations that they broadcast and print what we think is important but i think at the end of the day the audience gets to decide what they think is important and believe me if the stations and the newspapers were making money doing what you guys wanted them to do they'd already be doing it the fact is they don't make money doing that and therefore you want to subsidize it and have the government pay for it and mandate that they do it at the end of the day the public interest is best served by what the public is interested in if this stuff were get running gangbusters with the american people it would already be happening well yeah i you know just to response to that first of all you can build firewalls i acknowledge that i too would be concerned about a direct connection between journalists and and how how things are funded in fact you can make some make an argument right now that public radio has actually made a swing to the right because of the pressure from the republicans that have made an effort to try to kill public radio and public television so yes i i share that i share i share that concern but i think there are ways for public the public money to be invested in in a public good like journalism without attaching conditions uh if it if you do though have the only condition being whatever is most popular without making any effort at local news then i think it would be all britney all the time and i'm not sure that's really a solution either i mean and i think the same argument can be i mean look first of all the rest of the world has figured out how to support public media new quality journalism without government interference we can take the best examples from elsewhere and come up with a way to spend money that gets government further away from the purse strings in fact which is what we should do secondly the idea that people are just getting what they want one local news operations are vastly profitable some of that has been done by of course getting rid of journalists but they're making a ton of money billions of dollars in the selection years as we as we already talked about and so the idea that people are turning away because they're getting too much news or too much quality reporting from their local outlets i think is completely backwards and i think that they were probably you know yes there are more things to distract them but you know the outlets that are doing quality work are going to get eyeballs and look no further than npr whose numbers are rising whose journalists uh they're hiring more journalists they're opening foreign bureaus and that seems to be something that we might want to emulate on the local level instead of running away from them and domestic bureaus there's a big npr investment in norlands right now after the times picking on that on the philosophical point there are there are certain things that we call public goods which are types of products and information that have broad public benefits that don't necessarily pay for themselves in a particular commercial economic cost benefit analysis museums don't pay for themselves and yet society supports museums a lot of what we refer to as accountability reporting fits into that category when we were doing the FCC report someone brought to us an example from rally Durham the newspaper and rally Durham had done a series about the probation system being broken and all sorts of murderers basically getting out of prison and and killing people so the newspaper spent six months on this lost a huge amount of money not very many people read the article a lot of the people who heard about the article hadn't even bought the newspaper from a pure economic point of view of people will buy it if it's important to them it was a total failure that series and yet there are people walking around rally Durham alive today because they weren't murdered by the people who weren't pro who weren't paroled inappropriately because of that series there are certain types of journalism that have broad public benefits to society as a whole and yet which are not captured in the in uh commercial uh media economic models and in fact that problem is getting worse getting worse because well from the disaggregation of content now it used to be that you know that series never paid for itself the foreign bureau has never paid for itself but because the newspaper was a bundle the stuff that was popular the whether it's the sports pages of the crossword puzzle or whatever was cross subsidizing the investigative stuff that's now broken apart you can just go to espn.com get your box scores they move and change as you're watching them which is better than the newspapers and you and there's no and there's no uh there's no cross subsidy newspapers can do that too it doesn't have to be just espn. You know as we sit here in the news eam i feel compelled in all of this discussion just to mention that there is we continue to have a public good that's in the first amendment and at some point you know you can't let the discussion go to the point where it sounds like there's government either dictating content or you you have to remain you have to retain that journalistic freedom and the ability to choose and i i think that's just an important value that i i suspect we all agree with and and ought to keep this part of this whole conversation do i see another is that carol would have the mic now yes so i run the newspaper association of america so if you guess what my comments are going to be i have to but i do take i have i i take a little bit of a fence a remark that newspaper owners or media owners only care about profit i mean i i think that's really not fair um sure they care about profit they've got to care about profit they have to you know pay salaries you're absolutely right on the minority the questions that we've talked about i just don't think that it's too simple to suggest in my view that consolidation of ownership is a proxy for a lack of diversity i think it's much more complicated than that um and i think just to add to the you know we're gonna fight these rules you're gonna fight for them we know where we come out on these issues okay but what we'll keep fighting them but we should get together and talk about what we can do because you know we can do things that can be effective and i frankly this is my own personal view i don't think this is going to make a huge amount of difference and sometimes i look at all this and say all the money we've spent on this you know in this in this media environment where people have so many choices we're spending all this money on this where basically you know our lawyers are getting rich and i love them to death but i mean we should we know we're not i'm not going to convince you of your point of view and you're not going to convince me representing our members but i think we can get together and try to do something well i mean first of all the question is always what can you have dialogue on and what can you work on together uh we've met with paul boil of naa recently and we're we certainly are trying to find issues of commonality i'm not here to offend publishers maybe to scold them a little bit uh but i would say that i mean it is a proven fact and and broadcast sort of has its own economics but in the newspaper industry for years the expected profit return was 20 percent and above and and and and what i'm really trying to say yeah yeah no what what i'm saying is it became a problem because the expectations not just for the publishers but for everyone around them including the shareholders and what you know Steve talked about with with public companies so the question is how can you just kind of create a different climate where people know that if they can just get through a period to get to the digital transition and accept eight or nine percent it's more of a criticism of american business in general that we're always looking at the next quarter instead of the next five years no and i understand the current environment is horrific and no one can argue over that but not not with all companies because some of the companies yeah even make these blanket i mean two or three years ago uh we had booked we had companies that were begging us to look at their books uh those same companies are now saying we don't want to show you the books which is actually a good thing i guess because it means they're making money it also doesn't mean they want to necessarily share the revenue but but there is a soft kind of recovery happening in print right now very soft it may not be maintained uh and and what we're still saying here and i agree with you wholly on this idea that let's try to find things that we can work together on even if we're going to disagree on some of the bigger points right it's just it's just the problem here with this particular policy if and and and i'm not trying to be cynical about understanding my own personal experience is that when these kind of efficiencies are created certainly in the last five to six years for me on a personal level as someone overseeing the newspaper guild all i've seen are massive job cuts and i'd like to see something else uh is really what it comes down to that's that's my concern and and so if you can find a way to corrupt me to your point of view uh please do i i think uh that you should circle the date uh what's the day uh january 24 that we have craig and jane ready together and now we have carol and for any working together uh next uh question or comment i saw somebody with a microphone i think over there no in the back yes i see a hand straight ahead getting there it's going to be yes yes people in the aisles always have the easy yeah hello my name is john boyer and i'm with a new entity called the media stewards project um the question in my mind um has to do hedrick smith has a new book out who stole the american dream one of his basic ideas in there is that american business has departed from what he called the virtuous circle of growth where profits were shared in a more equitable way i think this is an underlying issue here with the discussion today about what is the right level of profit for something that really is a public good it's a real conundrum in order to try to figure out what this is but hedrick smith i recommend that to everyone here this book because he wants citizens more involved more engaged and one of the issues is how do you pay for this journalism that really does serve the public interest may not always serve a commercial interest how can profits can be be more shared more equitably with journalists and editors who need jobs that the local community needs you know let me take us in a weird direction as a response to that which is i heard on the radio and i don't know i think it may have been npr the other day that they did a survey of where people get their news and who they trust and they're finding that more and more of the younger generation is actually thinking they get their information from internet sources and they don't really care whether it's true or not and it's an interesting phenomenon to think about that i had always thought that perhaps that where you really had the value for newspapers for broadcasters and such is that we were the trusted source the groups that could actually say that we we do in fact check our sources and be able to to know that this is where it's coming from and i think what you're finding is that that isn't seeming to be as much of a value as it used to be and that's perhaps affecting where where all of this is going and we should perhaps have a conversation about that as well one of the things that worries me about this particular moment is that we've had this i think noticeable substantial contraction in the depth of accountability reporting and yet it doesn't feel that way because we're awash in news you can't you if you stop someone on the street and say does it feel like we don't have that much we don't have enough news no one's going to say yes to that we have tons of news but when you look at the size and common sense would tell you that if you if you probe and say oh well you know a lot of these articles are based on two facts that came from the now bedraggled newspaper reporter who's the one left in the bureau which is often what what is happening you realize that there's a kind of court of this that is not going to be necessarily very obvious to people the more i've looked at this the more i think that you know to some degree it really is about body count in the sense that there needs to be a critical mass of journalists full-time professional journalists doing this work and i say this as someone who ran a started and ran a website i'm a big digital evangelist and i think that the internet has created all sorts of tools for doing journalism better but at the end of the day if there aren't enough people uh spending full time as profession working on this then everything else uh it becomes a little bit like a hollywood set where you have the facade but there's nothing behind it but in order to support that you have to have industries that are able to have the profitability to be able to sustain it and whether it's newspapers or broadcast what you have to have is a structural environment where they can in fact make the the profits to be able to pay for that journalism and i think that's what it comes down to i see a couple of hands does anyone have a microphone in the back way in the back on the shadows there yes i'm i'm tim robinson i work for congressman bobby rush and congressman rush has been very vocal about diversity of ownership diversity of content amongst the different platforms broadcasting digital in in others i just wanted to respond i guess to to the comment that was made suggesting that that this is much ado about nothing i think and and and i believe that congressman rush would would also share the view that for for too long uh too little has been done with respect to these issues sure we can be ambivalent as to whether uh or not the effort that we're expending will actually move this needle or not but i don't think we should we should be that dismissive because the public interest is comprised of a complex of factors i don't think any of us are suggesting that profitability should not be a part of that formula but there is something to be concerned about with increasing consolidation there is a lack of connectedness to communities that once existed when you had local business owners that that owned the radio broadcasting property or the television station or or the newspaper that served that community and by allowing these rules to go forward without more forethought more thinking out the box with respect to how we can move the needle to improve diversity whether it's content whether it's diversity of ownership or or whether we're doing more to advance localism you know those are the things that that we need to remain focused on and and and we need to look at the marketplace to see what what uh influencers what what drivers can take us back to that paradigm because i think where we are now uh you know just proposing rules without developing a record uh that um substantiates the predictive judgments that uh regulators are making when they're developing these rules you know that that's that's not enough and and i think we we just need to do more uh to to come up with new ideas uh kudos to dwight in the front i think more needs to be done um at these conferences uh then is being done you know to have perennial to have series on a perennial basis about lack of access to capital without anything more is is not moving the needle um i've said a lot and can i ask you a question don't don't give up the mic yet i know that many members of congress have been signing letters to the FCC on this issue do you know if congressman rush is one of those uh yes he has uh but but but to be more specific they're they're they're different different letters uh being submitted um and taking different views and and congressman rush uh would uh would would would would would join uh the course of members uh who who take the position that more needs to be done and in in terms of studying what the probable effects would be uh if if if these rules in in in their current form were to be uh adopted by the FCC steve what happens when letters from congress come to the FCC uh how seriously are they i think they take letters from congress pretty seriously no i i i i i i think this issue is an important issue and they're and they view it that way but i i don't know what the response to the specific question is i spent 26 years at the FCC and uh i can tell you they they do in fact take letters from congress very seriously and and and do take them into consideration let me say a couple things one is uh i think congressman rush has done a uh a lot of work on the tax certificate and we should say thank you to him for that that's been one of his uh initiatives that i think has been very important here but also i i think that i'm a little bit uh i have to push back a little on the idea that there was much to do about nothing i don't think that was the comment that was made i think there was a the comments have indicated that we've all we all have a great deal of agreement on on a number of points and one of them is the importance of diversity of ownership and in different ways of approaching that and different ideas of how you get there uh and i also take the issue with the fact that uh with the notion that the commission doesn't have a record on this the commission has a very extensive record uh before it on the uh on on all of these rules and they've been looking at them uh over and over again since 1996 um the uh i gotta tell you i feel like a stage avu all over again and many many times because i've been through this both from the commission side and from the the broadcaster side for a number of years so there's a fairly significant record uh and one that shows that this the the particular rules that the commission is focused on are not the ones that are focused on diversity but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't do the studies to move forward to uh try to address the real problems it's just just making an assumption uh that rules that haven't changed in the last 14 years are somehow necessary to address a problem that you that you've seen here is uh is just not a correct one and the commission should be able to work on the record that they've got what i mean i i think the problem is is that in the repeated times that the court has sent these rules back to the FCC for their failure to consider the public input to for their failure to address they say diversity is a priority but then they don't explain how their changes are going to affect those rules and i i brought a little bit of the court decision because i think it's important because the court has said to the FCC despite our prior remand requiring the commission to consider the effect of its rules on minority and familial ownership the commission has in large punt part punted yet again on this important issue and that they want to reemphasize that the actions required on remand should be completed within the course of the commission's 2010 because we're actually still in 2010 somehow but 2010 quadrennial review its ownership rules so the court's been i think explicitly clear in saying FCC diversity is your priority demonstrate to us if you want to make these changes what the impact on diversity is going to be and yet the FCC has failed to do it now the the obvious solution the one that i think congressman rush 47 other members of the house 13 senators has said is just do it do the studies do independent studies make the case before changing the rules and what they keep hearing back from the FCC through various leaks and other things is no we'll do it later and i think we've been hearing for years and years and years we'll do it later suddenly we don't have the money we can get to davos but we can't do the study and i think that's what people are getting fed up about how many months just 2010 how in FCC time i think that one of the things that you have to uh let me just respond to that because it's really not quite fair to say the what the court said was that the commission needed to look at the diversity of interest again we all agree i absolutely think that the commission has to look at that that does not mean that every rule that they have is one that is specifically related to that diversity minority diversity there's no direct assumption if the commission analyzes a rule and says this rule is not one that is intended to promote diversity of minority diversity interests they can look at that and they can say that that can that that can change while they're doing the the other studies now in the case here i think that what some of the things the commission's looking at the purpose of the might of the newspaper cross ownership rule when it was put in in 1975 was in fact to say that there should be a diversity of viewpoints there was a concern that having a local newspaper that had control in a community and and combined with the local voice would have too much power we've kind of flipped that in in our current world that it was never intended to be a to promote minority and female ownership it was intended to to address the diversity of viewpoint what the commission the studies that the commission has done over time have looked at that issue and said in fact it appears that there's a better relationship when in the community and better service to the community when you have some of these combinations so saying you're relaxing that rule on on some level is not related to the issue that you're identifying from uh from the court case and i think the commission can look at that and look at the records that it has before it and reasonably make some judgments and i hope that they will i mean i think if the FCC wants to say that diversity of ownership has nothing to do with diversity of viewpoint they should be very clear about that and then we'll go see them in court again because we'll have to go back to court again as we did last time around and and have the third circuit set you should look at the case law and and this case is the one you're this is Prometheus two versus the FCC which was the the case that overturned the changes made in the republican administration circa 2007 um i'm at this point in the role of the moderator asking who has the microphone which is an interesting role no one has the microphone okay so i see mark over there on the side mark is shaking his head and mark has the microphone so what i have to say is that we understand that senator sanders is actually on his way uh so we are we are waiting for senator sanders to come in because he did express some interest in speaking i do not have an interest in speaking uh but would love to hear more from the audience i think there's been a a very great and balanced panel and i see that there's a there's a young man up there there's another one here there are plenty of people who want to talk my name's Pedro hi my name's Pedro Morias i work for fenton communications um i wanted to go back to the issue of accountability and i the idea that a the shrinking number of reporters affects the accountability in the news space was really interesting we're going to talk a little bit about the number of owners uh or the number of companies that own news stations and if that has any impact in your minds on accountability well i mean i i i think it certainly does and we've seen is we've allowed more consolidation a shrinking of newsrooms fewer reporters out there on the beat uh we see it on television right now something we sort of skated around but the shared service agreements where stations are combining their newsrooms producing one newscast that's broadcast on even two or three channels at the same time same news same people same coverage i think if you have you know multiple ownerships and competing newsrooms you're more likely to get more of the stories that you you would hope to see as a citizen find out about find out what's happening in your community certainly if there are fewer reporters on the beat you're getting less coverage there's no question about that i think the academic studies suggest you know fewer reporters mean you know less accountable members of congress less corruptions exposed etc etc etc and i would argue that consolidation has contributed negatively to that obviously some of my colleagues might disagree but that's where i would this is a very confusing issue and and there's all sorts of facts that just what i think i've come to my own mind on this some new fact will come up that disrupts it for instance the fact that the golden age of newspaper investigative journalism happened at the period when monopolies were being created in local communities that it was the monopolization of local newspapers that ended up creating such lush profit margins that they then invested some of it and investigate it which is not an argument for monopolization but it is an argument for this being you know sort of some somewhat more complex and confusing another example is certainly up to a certain point having two newspapers compete with each other two tv stations compete with each other usually produces better reporting but having nine stations instead of eight stations if that means that those nine stations are dividing up the advertising pool of that community thinner and thinner and as a result some of them may have less money to do reporting it is not the case i i don't think that more voices in a community is always necessarily better i mean i certainly wouldn't say that taking it down from two to one but when you're at the point of going from nine to eight there may be situations where that's an improvement which i never would have thought you know before working on the study that i would have said but i think it's it's a kind of a counterintuitive thing that we have seen what about the situation where you have cbs nbc abc fox well wb isn't around anymore but then your number six station which may be number one actually our audience is univision and then telamundo and and maybe here in washington northern virginia uh korean language does very well certainly is the case also in los angeles san francisco other places so so the station seven eight nine may be addressing other niches with with journalism in the case of the univision uh they are but the fcc report if i'm remembering the numbers right said something like 25 to 30 percent of local tv stations do no news do no local news they do reruns in seinfeld and since i remember going home one day from the fcc and railing against how outrageous it was that these local stations weren't doing news and of course i went right to channel 11 to watch the seinfeld reruns and i thought okay that's a useful that's a useful public service too so i'm not necessarily saying that every station has to do it but we should be aware that you know that not every station in a in a market is necessarily adding accountability reporting to the mix but it's important that they are serving the some local interest use that's what you pointed out korean programming uh in in this area and some of the other language there's i think there's a channel that has farce as well uh that they're they're serving a particular niche and that's very important too and it is a matter of serving the public interest that ought to be recognized even if it's not a local newscast and and we're not having to have the uh steve's quandary right now anyway it really is at this point about whether the one newspaper is sending anyone out to cover the courts uh david simon who's well known co-writer of the wire and some other things and a long time guild member in baltimore uh his famous comment recently is it's a really good time to be a crooked politician and uh and he's right i mean essentially there are a lot of things school boards city councils uh i just recently learned of a big argument in uh tremolo wisconsin over fracking and and some question about corruption uh and a part of the wisconsin that is just never going to get looked at i'm aware of it because uh my my wife's family comes from there uh those are issues that are going to really be important and i suspect that five or six years we're going to start hearing some things that really shock us because they just basically got overlooked so how we get there uh and how we create sustainable news organizations is still that i think the fundamental uh issue poll just continuing with this conversation original reporting accountability journalism is really expensive to do you know you've got to send a reporter down to city hall comb through records it may take six months a year the milwaukee journal sentinels want to appeal it's a couple years ago looking at city employees who were uh doing double jobs you know working for the city and working in the private sector and and uh they had an employee go through records for six months and and so uh we talk about ownership we talk about the profit grab but i think it's important to point out that over the last five six years newspapers have lost 50 percent of their advertising revenues and people often point to digital as being the answer but for every digital one dollar uh brought in from digital revenue 45 dollars lost in the print advertising revenue side so digital is not the answer largely because advertisers are buying audience audiences across a lot of different websites through targeted advertising and that kind of thing from our perspective you know we want to support the diversity initiatives that have been put out there by mmtc and for the first time on this issue since we've been working on it we put in our into our comments support for many of these proposals which which i think advance the ball significantly on diversity and gets at that ownership issue but from the cross ownership issue the tv relaxation really doesn't do much because newspapers are not going to buy something outside of the top four newspapers are not going to get investment from companies that don't don't do news outside the top four the the radio newspaper cross ownership piece of that could provide the cross subsidies from radio to newspaper journalism to continue to that accountability journalism that we talked to about especially if in Ohio Virginia and any other swing state or you know you could see where that could be the ability to shift revenues from one side to the other so i just want to point out the revenue part of this which i think personally is the main thing that's driving unfortunately decisions to cut back on editorial and cut back on jobs i mean we should ask a question though i mean these guys you get we're making a lot of money before and everything you describe are very real factors in the industry but i think there was a time of 40 50 60 percent profit margins and up and and and yet the cutbacks were happening then too not to the degree the industry is changing uh i think that there there were things i think the FCC hasn't helped uh in that uh what happened was that they there was a lot of consolidation and so the problems of one company started spreading to another and again and again and all those huge profits got invested in taking on other outlets and now and now everybody's drowning in the debt so we have to look at you know i think largely or partly encouraged by what the FCC and other policymakers were doing so i think now if we're going to solve that problem i guess i question although i would settle for let's study the impact because there's not that many owners and women owners people of color owners in the radio side either but let's go ahead and study that and see if there's some more flexibility versus tv i think that's something we should certainly look at whether those always need to be tied together uh you know and and furthermore that uh on on the newspaper side uh anyway i'll leave it there yeah i think i'm not surprised by steve's statistic about uh that period of time when the monopolies were coming into place yes that's a period of time when everything would have been most flush and people were still living under some of the old structures i think when some of the corporatization sort of ran out and then of course the overall economics really went under remember there were a lot of papers that were sold just before the crash of the economy so there are a number of contributing factors but we do know that things like craig's list and also paid search google's dominance in paid search and pulling advertising away from even other even websites you know where we can't replace that on a web because the money really is going to a different place those are all factors but but but as we said before there's some really exciting things that are going on and can we then can we find a way to get to the new period without sort of throwing the baby out with the bathwater and the jury's out what i was going to say is that we should think about also how can we incentivize that good work that is happening and i think bernie's looked at that through you know are there ways to if there are bankrupt companies to package it in a certain way to encourage local ownership to encourage minority ownership are there tax breaks we need to be looking at that would benefit the newspaper industry because of the role they play in local communities i think lots of those things need to be on the table if it's if it's about supporting more reporters working more people out there on the beat i think we need to look are you know are there other streams of money that could be put toward that i think we should consider those things i happen to think doing it through the fcc with consolidation is is bad it's going to have bad results but it doesn't mean it's the only option we've mentioned it briefly and it should be noted that that public radio has become a major major force in some local communities i was stunned when i asked the general manager of of the npr news station in los angeles kpcc at pasadena how many reporters he had and he said one hundred the size of the bolton war song it is and that's up from i think four uh not that long ago well you know there's a couple things that the public media world could do that would help which are tough politically for their own reasons one is they have a uh i can't remember if it's statutory or policy they decree how much of the money goes to public tv versus public radio and the lion share goes to public tv even though public radio is actually the one that is is investing in local communities and i think the corporation for public broadcasting should have the flexibility to shift the shift that money more towards where it's needed and not be locked into an old standard similarly they currently almost all of the money that cpb spends on public media must go to someone with a radio or tv license if you're a non-profit website uh or for that matter a satellite tv show the satellite tv show you can't be public media but if it's going through the other kind of airway then you can uh that doesn't make any sense at this point cpb should be allowed and open and experimenting with funding a variety of public media not just radio stations and tv stations i think they're looking at that i know the national endowment for the arts has significantly shifted its assistance away from broadcasting uh or not away from broadcasting but they've reduced their broadcasting support and they've put a significant investment now into online arts someone there seems to be okay thank you board um what you've said is before that uh do you think consolidation uh hurts the ability of the people of color to get uh access to capital if there are a correlation in your view or you know if there's not a correlation the inability to get access to capital because one of what what i've always yeah uh the response is that you have to have a healthy industry and you have to have an industry that can have a certain scale scale and scope to be able to be healthy to have access to capital and having that whether it's some level of consolidation may be appropriate for that interestingly in um one of the things that uh i was reminded of this a few minutes ago clear channel when you mentioned that clear channel had a lot of uh of stations in the market uh that they had been in consolidation after the 96 act they were because the nationwide cap on uh radio ownership of radio was lifted they got to a point where at one point they had 1200 stations uh most recently they've been donating stations uh to women and people of color uh that through the mmtc they have an active program uh where they're running the stations to be able to be sold uh which is kind of an interesting thing and having it it's actually become a little bit of a means of itself on its own i don't what i what i respond to i guess is to say that you can't just say consolidation is this or consolidation is that some aspects of i think having a healthy industry is good for everyone to get into it thank you money um money politics and uh and also the the population that we need to begin continue developing uh the younger people who are going to our colleges and universities and many who are not the human capital factor innovation the president has talked about it innovation which goes into technology all of that is relatively missing now the whole business about diversity which you know is a moral good moral argument forget about the morality of it let's talk about the monetization of all this the reason why the nab is on is is a major target right now over cable is because the nab has to respond to congress much more so than than ncta so so nab is going to be on on the tip and nab can provide the leadership and has provided the leadership let me just give you one idea that has wasn't brought up when you somebody mentioned thinking out of the box how process works to make things happen in washington in 1989 there were a large population of minorities who were producing content these were independent producers locally and hollywood and all that who weren't getting any kind of play the nab is not in the business of providing content that that belongs to naffi that's the marketplace i went to eddie fritz and i said eddie we're doing a great job at ownership you remember all that eddie was head of the nab eddie fritz was head of the nab all right i said look we don't we don't touch that we don't touch content we don't touch anything that's hollywood that's but anyway i said look mickey lealan who was then congressman and very concerned about what was going on in broadcasting and what was really going on with the nab said look the nab isn't doing anything for minorities i said eddie look everybody wants to get into the business of making movies or making documentaries public broadcasting this and that and the other why don't we have at the nab the largest form of this type in the world and and was not as and it wasn't as as diverse then as it is now i said why don't we have a major a major showcase of minority programming minority produced programming produced by independence eddie says you're crazy he says nobody let go to go to naffi i said naffi isn't going to do it we can do it it isn't going to cost us a lot of money bottom line we did it mickey lealan and two other members in the congressional black carcass game as a result of that 35 and we were in a partnership incidentally with a lot of the public interest groups that represented here today to include the newspaper industry and and include public broadcasting mickey lealan and three other congresspersons came to the nab the first time ever toward not only not only the exhibition and we had about 45 to 60 minorities including latinos asians and blacks and he was so impressed he went back he made a statement uh uh and congress you know you know when they come in the morning that that five minute he he praised he praised the nab what it was doing political kudos we picked it up we developed a relationship that later benefited us the nab at the time in doing the other things that we do minority entrepreneurs benefited from it and out of that came the first asian american broadcaster a guy named named uh uh lou who is now one of the the only asian radio broadcaster in existence who is also in television in california he was one of those originals who came to that came to that thing so the whole point of the matter is that we talk about thinking out of the box the nab provides leadership has to form i know that we have i know the nab has we're going to have something on our management and all that and somebody will mention minority ownership on it but that's not going to be the principle of thing we need if you haven't done it already just an idea and i know it can be done a special form comprised of some of these people to talk about this issue because it involves a lot a lot and it's not going to be covered in a generalized broadcasting management panel i know it is now we can do it we don't want to do it that's fine you know this guy standing over there who refused to talk who is one of the most resourceful people who's a former nbc he's an nbc anchor one of the first and a lawyer and is one of one of the greatest people in what we're doing here he can add a lot to what i've just said and i brought him to the nab when he at the time he had never been to the nab he says they won't talk to us they don't like us didn't you come to the nab at my invitation and i made sure that he met some of the king pens at our vip reception and he don't went away thinking a little bit differently about the industry so this sort of a thing out of the box can be done and we can go around the circle talking about you know i understand the legislation i understand the regulation but it is relationships that gets the job done relationships to light you up to light you up the last word i'll use that as an introduction uh senator sanders is here uh we have a few minutes he has asked for an opportunity to speak on these set of questions and with that senator bernie sanders and senator vermont please thank you very much i will be very brief because i've got a got some big votes coming up in a few minutes um for many years now all of you are aware that there has been a great debate going on uh about media consolidation uh and the free press among many other organizations have rallied millions and millions of people to make the case that it will be a disaster when we have in a given community one large uh multinational media conglomerate owning local television stations uh radio stations and newspapers and essentially being the only voice of information for that given community uh some three million people signed petitions and made comments in opposition to that proposal when it was brought forth uh by the uh bush administration and the news that i bring to you which i hope and expect that all of you know is that unless we act very strongly and very effectively within the next few weeks it will be uh chairman jenekowski's FCC which in fact brings forth those that resolution uh they have done it in a way which really not only am i very bothered by the content of what they are doing uh but the process is also a disaster they have really tried to operate under the radar screen uh and uh we are where we are and where we are is there is a likelihood that within a next few weeks very quietly that decision will be made uh i am further concerned that a chairman of the FCC appointed by president obama will do exactly what president obama spoke out against when he was a member of the united states senate so the first point that i make is that uh we have got to do everything that we can to raise consciousness about this issue and see if we can uh defeated second point that i make which also all of you are very familiar with is that many people are not aware that if you are concerned about the economy if you are concerned about health care if you are concerned about foreign policy you must be concerned about the media let me just give you a couple of examples right now everybody in america knows there is a great debate taking place about deficit reduction and in my view deficit reduction given the fact we have a 16 trillion dollar national debt is a serious issue you know what the american people consider to be far more serious which gets very little attention how many of you aware that real unemployment in america counting people underemployed and given up people giving up looking for work is close to 15 percent for people of color for young people that number is much higher when you ask the american people what issue should we be dealing with you know what the issue number one is it is jobs and the economy now how often uh do you hear that uh in terms of uh media not very often our right wing friends have been able to set the stage that spending and deficit reduction on the major economic issues facing america when in fact recession mass unemployment decline in income growing gap between the rich and everybody else is in fact according to the american people a far more important issue in terms of media if we're concerned about health care how many people in this country know that there is one nation in the industrialized world that doesn't guarantee health care to all people how many americans do you think know that when's the last time you saw that being discussed on uh television um i have seen time and time again media pundits telling us that we all know social security is going broke don't we well guess what social security ain't going broke could be solving for the next 20 years but again it is a right-wing agenda which has been incorporated into a lot of media dialogue here's the bottom line bottom line is that in 1983 90 percent of american media was owned by 50 companies today that same 90 percent is controlled by six multinational media conglomerates that's g e news corp disney viacom time Warner and cbs and if these new regulations go into effect the amount of media being controlled by these guys will be even greater so i look forward to working with all of you in making the point that a vibrant democracy is not going to survive unless we have a vibrant media where we hear different points of view where it is owned by different segments of our society women minorities etc that a nation in which a handful of multinational media conglomerates control what we see here in reed is a very dangerous situation for what many of us believe democracy should be so that's the message is pretty simple we've got a lot of work to do and i look forward to working with you thank you very much mark is always shy to take the microphone well i'm i'm i'm not shy i i am retiring um i think this has been an excellent program i i hope that those of you who wanted an opportunity to speak have had an opportunity to speak this is an extraordinarily important issue i think both for our country we really hope to have presented a variety of sides not just two but that you've heard from folks who are both owners of the industry and also folks who work in the industry from newspapers from broadcasters from scholars from public interest advocates from a wide variety of perspectives about these sets of issues it is not settled here it won't be settled today chances are it won't be settled tomorrow we do think the discussion is important and most importantly we really thank your engagement in this discussion and i really thank usc annenberg and adam for really making this this happen at at the museum and an excellent panel and for kreg erin and bernie lunser and my friend jane maygo and of course steve waldman please thank you all very much it's a wonderful and thank you