 Good afternoon. Good afternoon. My name is Deborah Rogers. I'm the executive director of Falmouth Community Television and the chair of the National Board of Directors of the Alliance for Community Media. We're pleased to be joined today by Commissioner Michael J. Cops. Commissioner Cops joined the Federal Communications Commission in May 2001 and was sworn in for a second term in December 2005. He served until January 2001 as assistant secretary of commerce for trade development at the U.S. Department of Commerce where he was previously deputy assistant secretary of commerce for basic industries. Commissioner Cops came to Washington in 1970, joining the staff of Senator Ernest Hollings and serving for over a dozen years as chief of staff. He has also held positions at a Fortune 500 company and at a major trade association. Before coming to Washington, he was a professor of U.S. history at Loyola University of the South. Commissioner Cops received a B.A. from Wilford College and earned a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. On behalf of the members of the Alliance for Community Media, I want to thank Commissioner Cops for his support of local community media and the services we provide. Local news and programming and outlet for diverse voices, youth training, workforce development skills, public safety and information that is critical to a civil and informed society. During his tenure on the FCC, Commissioner Cops has stood his ground to protect localism and diversity. With the understanding that democracy's premise is a well-informed citizenry, he understands and publicly states what few in Washington are willing to acknowledge, that the support of local community media is absolutely necessary for democracy to flourish. We thank Commissioner Cops for his work and his service. His strong voice will be sorely missed when he leaves the FCC. Please join me in welcoming Commissioner Michael J. Cops. Good afternoon and thank you, Deborah, very, very much for the very warm and very generous introduction. I'm the one that should be thanking you instead of you thanking me because it's always so nice to be with folks who do so many good and wonderful things to bring local information and news and music and just plain diversity, really, to the communities they serve. And that's a wonderful word, communities, because it's where we live and work and raise our kids and try to be good citizens. It's the immediate world that surrounds us and we need to know about it and understand it and be a part of it and help improve it, and that's what you folks are indeed doing. And yet many of the major trends in media over the past 40 years now have pushed community aside, pushed diversity aside, local culture aside. It has not been good for citizens, it has not been good for media, and it has not been good for America. So being here this afternoon with folks who are working hard to provide platforms for diverse and unique perspectives, that's exactly where I want to be and I'm glad to be here and I'm always pleased to come over to the Straight Thinking New America Foundation, which always does such a stellar job in bringing issues and intelligence and civic-mindedness to our national dialogue. These are challenging times for our media. I spent the last 10 years on the FCC working to ensure that every citizen in the land has available the news and information that they need to be informed, to be contributing participants in the affairs of the nation. We made some progress on a few fronts. We've stopped some bad things from happening and I'm happy about that. But overall our public policy has not come close to matching the media needs of our people. I want to stress one critical aspect of that, my remarks today, my particular emphasis is going to be on the news and information America gets and doesn't get. And right now it's not getting enough, not enough to inform us as citizens and not enough to provide us with the information we need to make good decisions for the future of our country. We have to be a news literate society, understanding and engaged with the substance of public issues if we're going to keep this experiment and self-governing democracy afloat. Unfortunately, as this audience understands better than most, too often real substantive news has been replaced by fluff. Democracy is not well-served by fluff. Democracy cannot be sustained by fluff. What we need to do as citizens is some hard thinking about how to better inform ourselves in the digital age, how to provide the news and information infrastructure to make sure that this happens. In the same way that Washington and Jefferson and Madison built the information infrastructure of their time, so we must build a new in our time. The founders knew they were embarked on a risky experiment preserving that fragile young democracy that they had fought so hard for and finally won. They knew how important the spread of information was to the success of this experiment. They wrote a First Amendment to ensure that the American people would be informed and they went on to build postal roads and to subsidize the cost of distributing newspapers, all kinds of newspapers so that citizens everywhere in the land would have the news and information they needed in order to make good decisions for the future of the country. And to keep that democratic experiment going. So they built the information infrastructure of early America and now it's our time to be information infrastructure builders just like the founders were back then to provide ourselves with the tools and the resources that we need to sustain self-government and to safeguard and prosper our nation. It's a time of new tools and new technologies, of course, compared to two centuries ago, but it's the same enduring democratic challenge across all those years that has not changed. And we are not meeting that challenge very well today. More and more we see the perils of a hyper-consolidated commercial media and the damage that that has wreaked on our civic dialogue. And on top of that came some bad public policy choices with successive federal communications commissions not only first blessing all that mega-media consolidation, actually encouraging it, but then going on to pull the props out from under almost all of the public interest oversight that it had previously performed. As newly consolidated companies tried to pay off the huge debts that they had incurred in order to combine and as they strove to satisfy the ever-escalating expectations of all street for those bottom-line quarterly reports, the news media was the first to feel the pain, first to feel the axe, actually. So newsrooms were shuttered and journalists were fired and investigative journalism was put on the endangered species list. The inevitable result has been to be blunt about it, a too often dumbed down national dialogue on issues that are vitally important to our country's future. The result has been ever more glitzy infotainment masquerading as real news. It's been thousands of journalists walking the street in search of a job instead of walking the beat in search of a story. It's been shouted opinion replacing solid fact and as the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once reminded us everyone is entitled to their own opinion, everyone is not entitled to their own set of facts. Meanwhile the challenges we face as a nation are so deadly serious. Our economy founders, our global competitiveness, has clearly lost its edge. Nearly a fifth of the workforce is unemployed or underemployed. Our education lags with teachers suffering almost as much as the kids. 50 million Americans have no health insurance and our children enter a world more challenging by far than the one where you and I grew up. If we don't have a media that can dig for facts and tell the stories and cover all the beats and separate fact from opinion and hold the powerful accountable then tell me please how in the world are we going to meet and master all of these challenges. How are we going to overcome? To me getting our journalism and our media right is step number one in getting our democracy right. The information needs of communities report that the FCC staff released last summer, I'm sure many of you are familiar with that identified some enormous gaps that exist in our media environment particularly the fact that there's a serious dearth of local accountability journalism. But I was disappointed that the report didn't put forward a more robust set of recommendations for action particularly actions that the FCC could take by itself under the authority it already has you know we suggested Congress do this the IRS do that Philanthropies do this we didn't suggest all that many things that we could be doing it's kind of like a doctor identifying patient's symptoms but then prescribing no medicine. But there are plenty of worrisome symptoms that the report did do a good job of illuminating for instance one-third of local TV broadcast stations do little to no news one-third or this institutions paying stations for favorable coverage including that report of a hospital out west and paid a TV TV broadcaster I think a hundred thousand dollars for a series of good and favorable and positive stories. And this although it's a revelation that was no surprise to anyone working on media reform the FCC is doing very little enforcement of broadcaster licenses during the renewal process. I think we all knew that the last time we took a license away on public interest grounds hasn't happened since I've been there that was 10 years didn't happen for 20 years before that's over 30 years ago that that happened. So what can we do about all this? Well here's one ill that the commission could fix right now instead of that current FCC rubber stamp license renewal process we're in every eight years a broadcaster sends in his application and we grant it without doing any serious review about that station's public service performance. How about a policy that demands licensees to come in every three years and we take a good hard look at the licensees records and match them up with some guidelines like we used to have to demonstrate that they are providing your communities and the citizens of your communities with real local news and information that they are reflecting all the wondrous diversity that exists in every one of your communities that they are open to the expression of diverse viewpoints and that they're actually going out and talking with people in the community about the kinds of programs that they want to see and hear. Is that asking too much? I don't think so and if we find that a station is not serving its community of license in a significant way then I'm for taking that license and giving it to someone who will. And with that kind of approach I don't think it would take very long for the word to go forth that the FCC after many years in the wilderness is back in the business of enforcing the public interest. Here's another action we can take saying no to some of these mega media mergers that have done so much to eviscerate localism by allowing a few big medium ogles to gobble up more and more of our broadcast outlets. In mega media the bottom line so often trumps the public interest. Or how about this in positive steps to strengthen community media? Why can't the commission make that a priority? Why can't we understand its huge potential to both enhance the media and to empower communities? How about dealing properly with the issues and petitions that you bring us? How about finally determining that carriage of peg channels on the basic tier is a public interest obligation that cable companies need to live up to? We need to ensure that this obligation is being met and if a company insists on all the benefits of cable without being called so we should insist that if they walk like a duck and talk like a duck they ought to be called a duck too. The cable duck is still a duck. This has been sitting for way too long at the commission while peg channels get moved to digital Siberia. Let's talk about new media for a minute or two. I know you folks are community media now and not community radio or community traditional media and that's exactly as it should be and if it works as it should the internet can provide us with a wonderful new town square of democracy paved with beautiful broadband bricks. Bear used to entry on the internet are low the links are ubiquitous and there's an opportunity for all of us to be participants. Interesting innovation and entrepreneurship are obviously taking place out there so the future holds tremendous digital promise but let's be candid the promise of new media is far from fulfilled. Nothing is guaranteed and in truth to my mind what has been lost in traditional media has not yet been filled in by new media now by long shot. Just stop and realize this the overwhelming bulk of the news that we get well over 90 percent continues to originate from where from the newspaper newsroom and the broadcast television newsroom. The problem is there is so much less of it because of the factors that I enumerated before. So if our goal is that every American should possess the skills to discern real news from infotainment and trustworthy sources from untrustworthy and fact from opinion then we've got a lot of work to do. If kids and seniors like me too are going to harvest the awesome potential of our media tools and technologies then we have some serious educating to do. And it's tough lying it's hard work figuring out how to make media work for all of our citizens. I see a huge role for community media centers pigs and others to play here and already you're helping to provide the skills the country needs in the new literacies. Call them digital literacies or media literacy or news literacy or whatever you want they're all kind of grouped together under new literacies I guess. And I know that for several decades your members have been out in the neighborhoods providing a platform for programming that would otherwise not have been seen reaching out to citizens that the mega broadcasters never even see and I know the great work you're already doing to provide critical training to fill the many literacy voids that exist and to work with schools and anchor institutions and all sorts of other community organizations. Now I think the time is ripe for us all to pull together to strengthen our partnerships with media outlets and communities across the land including public media I think there's wonderful opportunities there and I think there's a great opportunity for your organizations to be hubs of a new media revolution. The FCC shows signs of being a willing partner to take some forward-looking steps on the digital literacy ramifications of broadband adoption and you and your members can do a lot to make this a reality and to help ensure that our initiatives have some real clarity of focus on local communities and specifically on the kind of news and media literacy that I talked about today. It's easy to dedicate ourselves to digital literacy but you know you've got to make progress and you have to start somewhere and you have to identify where it is to begin and what are some of the interim steps that you can take if we're really talking about digital and media literacy across the land in this country of ours you're talking about long-term prospect and retraining teachers and redoing a lot in the educational system that doesn't mean we have to wait for 25 years there are things we can do right now there are down payments that we can make I would love to see a k-12 media literacy program up on online within the next year 18 months something like that I don't see why we can't do it there's a lot of groups out there you probably know many more than I do that are really doing interesting innovative things on digital literacy and media literacy the problem is there's so many of them group 8 doesn't know what B is doing B and C and so on so you know the FCC would be a wonderful place to convene a dialogue find out who's doing what have that dialogue take place among public and private sector participants make it a partnership that's how we always meet the great challenges that face this country of ours maybe try to get a little seed money from a department of education or government is as broke as they tell us it is maybe from some of the philanthropic institutions just to put that program up online it's a down payment put that k-12 program up in the line if the school jurisdiction wants to use it fine if they don't or they say oh you're trying to force some federal program down our throat they don't have to take it but at least let's give them the opportunity to do that our future is so tightly interwoven with the new media all media that if we can't feel something like that k-12 program in the next i say 12 18 months two years whatever then we are really hobbling the ability of the next generation and of all of us in in this room to to really take advantage of all of the new tools out there to understand how to use them to appreciate how they can misuse us if they are wrongly used and to just inform and better our communities i've heard some thinking about calling a youth media symposium this fall or winter to bring together the disparate groups who are working on literacy programs and to actually get a coordinated effort up and running that strikes me as eminently sensible eminently worthwhile and i believe that community media folks can be at the epicenter of getting this moving and keeping it moving and as i said developing some clarity of focus attracting participants developing a program leading to early action again there's a huge role i think you folks can play so the kind of things i mentioned and they surely don't exhaust the list of my concerns would go a far piece down the road and bring the public interest back to life the FCC should be and must be in the vanguard of this many problems call out for commission action i know that but none call out more urgently than these and after all we have a statutory obligation to serve the public interest to foster localism diversity and competition which are the three pillars of the public interest and to encourage that information infrastructure that i talked about earlier and that our democracy requires so there's lots to talk about there's lots to do i just want you to know that i intend to keep working on these challenges in the months and years ahead as was noted i will be leaving the FCC later this year but i am not leaving these issues that we have discussed here and that you and i have worked on for so long i could never do that so i will still be out there trying to do my part maybe stopping by some of your communities uh to visit and to see what we can get moving i know you'll be doing your part and i know how instrumental community media can be in confronting and helping us overcome all of these many challenges you know we we can get all this done it's a big job but we can get this done if we have the commitment if we have a strategy if we can get some down payments now and then strive for some long-term solutions there's no reason we can't get it done as my late great friend walter crown kite said this is a quote america is the most prosperous and powerful nation and perhaps the history of the world we can certainly afford to sustain a media system of which we can be proud end of quote and all i can add to that is say amen so i thank you very much i'll be happy to entertain some comments here take a question if we have some time to do that all right we get the ball rolling here thank you commissioner crops you um you mentioned youth media and many of our members do in fact offer some incredible youth media programs in their communities for for children but also specifically middle school high school and college and part of this is a comment but also a question we would i think be thrilled to be working with more organizations not for profit and for profit in order to grow our programs and expand their reaches within the community do you any thoughts or suggestions just off the top as to where we might go from here well i yeah i think there's lots of places we could go i think number one you could try to be something of a convener or maybe work with the FCC or some department of government there is an interagency for example media literacy or a digital literacy program that could be focused on things like this but i think it's just understanding the possibility of those public private partnerships and emphasizing this is how we always face up to the great challenges that that face this country of ours i think there are a lot of philanthropies out there that are uh potentially interested i know there's they're hard times right now but this is a priority and i do detect some interest out there there are these literacy programs going on in disparate places so those so some of the resources we know are there because they're being expended and it's just how do you put them in a in a hole that has some sense of strategy and purpose and and near-term outcome and and down the road outcome to them so i think it's just kind of right now is kind of networking but in and pushing i think in kind of an insistent fashion that the responsible agencies of government really bring some focus and clarity and leadership to this i mean the government has to pay for the whole thing doesn't mean it's necessarily going to be all that expensive to get that down payment up there so i think uh possibility is limited by our own sense of of creativity i think there's lots of things we could be doing other folks in the room may have some other ideas how to do this but political action is always a result of a game of addition and getting lots of players involved pushing for the for the same thing and i think that's where you need to to be thinking which are the commercial broadcasters out there that might be willing to sign on about the public broadcasters and we just met with them up in Minneapolis the other day so i think there's lots of folks lots of folks out there mr. copso erick mulvur in forway in indiana is there can you give us some kind of an idea of when the commission might come forward with some rulemaking in regards to the petition that the alliance has had before the fcc for a while nor what we might do to assist you in moving forward with a ruling on that petition uh no i don't i mean that's under the prerogative of the chairman's office and uh not mine as i said in my remarks i think it's important that the commission be responsive and react to petitions uh sometimes things get settled by themselves and that's good but if it leads to the idea that everything is going to get settled by itself then some things go unintended uh i think in the particular case that i think you're referencing uh it's an important decision i think it's one that's past time that is is made and we get on with the job but exactly when that is going to happen i cannot tell you richard turner from the maryland area um thanks again for your continued work and vision in this area of public interest and communications and particularly i wanted to reflect and get your reaction 30 years ago um the a case was made that the funding for public interest provisions and cable should be tied specifically to the franchising process and so there it gave a funding base in order to create these public interest opportunities within communities do you see such opportunities as we look into the future does that same kind of opportunity exist today and where should we be focused to ensure that the funding mechanisms can be in place to create sustainable options for these public interest obligations well it's a tough one right now both in the uh economic and the political environment in which we live uh so i think what we really have to be focusing on is kind of designing incentives that really give people reason to do these things or some reward or recognition for for doing them it's not a favorable landscape out there i mentioned the private sector depredations that have taken place the public interest public sector uh uh refusal of up to its responsibilities over the years so everybody's kind of had a hand in it we met the enemy as Pogba said and uh and it's us but i guess number one maybe number one is just making people aware of uh of the challenge and understanding the importance of the media challenge and i think going around the country for the better part of 10 years now that people understand something is wrong with the media and that something is missing in the media and something in the way of community coverage and local news and covering local minorities and diversity groups is missing and it's not that they necessarily understand all the details of that because the media hasn't done its responsibility in explaining these issues sometimes it's their own ox that's going to get gored like in the media ownership movements that we saw but even when media didn't cover that when my friend Jonathan Adelstein and i went around the country holding media ownership hearings sponsored by members of congress and public interest groups one or two by the FCC but that's all we could ever get out of the FCC we saw that people were concerned we saw that they'd stay until 12 one o'clock in the morning nine-hour town hall meetings and we saw the three million of them were sufficiently interested to write to the FCC and congress and say we don't want those new rules that the commission just passed and eventually there was political and judicial action against them they're back at the commission many years later still waiting for resolution as we all breathlessly wait for a new 2010 quadrennial review to to help these issues further so i think number one is understanding the problem and and the community lacks and number two and understanding that these problems although they're serious and far-reaching can be resolved there are solvable problems we can kind of put the brakes on some of this ongoing consolidation the FCC without having to go to congress or asking for any more authority can do all the public interest stuff i just talked about in the way of licensing terms and having some public interest guidelines so that's that's resolvable too but i'm not trying to underestimate the problem you're talking about and i know what's happened with the franchising authorities and the other calls on money and all that and it's it's a serious problem but it's one that ought to not cause us to despair but really to redouble our efforts and double our action and double our commitment to trying to get it done just realizing how important it is if you really buy any of what i said i mean i think this is this is probably reform of all reforms that would do the country some good right now commissioner if i could following up on on eric's earlier question the alliance for community media is now waited 32 months for the commission to rule on whether or not a channel is a channel or can be a web stream whether or not a channel's got to have the same capabilities as a broadcast channel or it can simply be a web stream and and for 32 months we've tried to be polite we've tried to go over and and build our case based on facts and we're just we've gotten no response and we you know the response that we've gotten from our friends at the commission has been you really don't want this answered because we feel that would probably be answered against you and by doing nothing we're in fact helping you and i think where we come out today is we'd rather have no continue to wait and and i guess commissioner our our question to you is how do we politely say enough's enough it's been 32 months we've had hundreds of peg centers closed we've had hundreds of channels either be lost de facto or de jure because people can't find them they don't want to find them i mean you know at the same time we're fighting for things like lpfm and other community outlets we already have community television stations that are disappearing how do how do we express that frustration doing it respectfully because that's always been the knock against us that we're militant and we're not professional in our presentations how do we do it professionally but nonetheless do it forcefully enough that maybe we get an answer well i feel your pain i've been waiting for 10 years to get the commission to call telecommunications telecommunications and all that without much success and i've tried most of the time to be polite maybe not always and not in everybody's eyes hasn't worked i don't like that council you're you're getting of i don't push this you might get the wrong answer because that's just a council to further inactions and you need to be a part of the process decisions without you or in decisions against you and decisions that are denied just things that don't ever get done so i don't know some folks maybe think i'm an agitator maybe i'm not an agitator enough in some ways i don't know there people are getting more attention now on television and the nightly news by doing some things that aren't necessarily polite to to every viewer so i think every citizen has to make up his own mind and decide what road he's going to go down from my standpoint you know as i said i intend to keep talking about these issues and might even be a little bit more obstreperous about them after i leave the commission than i have been thus far we'll have to have to wait and see but i think you need to push and urge your friends or whatever they may be to push toward a resolution of this and then try to mobilize your friends or your communities to express to decision makers how important this is in terms of local media and the ongoing experiment of democracy it's maybe not a prescription from action when that's about the best answer i can give you right off the top of my head commissioner jeff wheeler from the town of york town in new york thanks very much for your remarks today i'm heartened to hear your support of of journalism um and i i'm wondering you talked about the mega media mergers uh do you have any hairs on the back of your neck standing up over mega unified communications companies mergers we're getting to a point now where um if more and more people are getting their their news from from the internet um they're only going to be a handful of recognized outlets for that i don't think it's any question about it and i've said uh a more than one occasion that there are very worrisome signs out there that new media which is the product of this most freewheeling opportunity creating technology and perhaps the history of mankind could be hitting down and show signs of hitting down that very same road i mean if you go to the top 20 news sites on the internet who runs those news sites the same folks basically that are running the other media too so you know that would be a disaster of a tragedy of historical proportions to have a technology like that that's capable of so much in building a new democracy in a form for people to speak and and hopefully to be heard too to let that go down the same road of consolidation so no i'm i have not been a friend to consolidation in telecommunications and traditional media or or a new media either it's a serious problem and don't believe those you know for a couple years we heard oh we've the media's learned this lesson we've learned a lesson no more consolidation but then you stop and think about it and just this year in media we've had comcast mbcu we had cumulus citadel we've got some claire coming in buying more stations now and i'm convinced that as soon as the economy gets off the downside starts going like that you're going to see many more people looking to make a buck and do deals and then combine so i think this consolidation across the media and communications platform is alive well well but not good it's alive and well and needs to be dealt with and will require some courageous policy decisions in order to to put the brakes on but we've gone way too far way too far down that road thank you i enjoyed it thank you for having me over