Friday, April 13, 2007

Imus schmimus!

When I first heard about the Imus thing, I was inclined to write a nasty letter deploring his actions and demanding his firing. After a few days of media frenzy over the issue, I realized that, as usual, we the public are being led to focus on the wrong thing: ie Imus the individual acting wrongly.

The more important issue is that the American people's airwaves have been handed over by Congress and federal regulators to mega-corporations whose actions are driven by their bottom lines and who, in the merger frenzy of the last 25 years, have caused an increasing concentration of media ownership in the hands of fewer and fewer. And people like Imus serve the interests of those media moguls who, after all, pay their salaries. Imus says things that are what Joe Sixpack is saying day in and day out at his local bar because this is what Imus' handlers have decided makes for good (ie profitable) radio. Oh, they may express outrage at Imus' “unpredictable” behavior, but that is just standard procedure when an employee has done something that embarrasses his employer.

The question here is whether it is good for Americans that the Imus (and Bill O'Reilly, and Rupert Murdoch, and FOX and Rush Limbaugh et al) point of view dominates the airwaves to the exclusion of more progressive, tolerant, enlightened points of view which may be less profitable to air. The rich, mostly white, mostly men who control the airwaves claim that they only put on the air “what people want to see and hear” and, whether true or not, this claim is consistent with a risk-averse approach to making money. Could the goal of a more balanced media in general and more open radio broadcasting in particular be met without recourse to regulation is an open question, but history should not make us sanguine; every industry de-regulated in fact or in law since Reaganomics has suffered a precipitous loss of quality. Expecting the media moguls to buck this trend on their own is unrealistic.

This is why real regulation is so important – contrary to the idea that it strangles innovation and competition, it actually provides a safer space for businesses to innovate, knowing that certain bottom-line economic realities are protected by a regulatory safety-net. For example, if the FCC ruled that all TV stations had to provide a full one-hour commercial-free news show every night at 6PM, there would be no competition-based argument against it, because every station would be required to do it. If the FCC mandated free equal airtime for all political candidates and banned paid political advertisements, then all media would be equally “inconvenienced” and we the people could hear the opinions of candidates not rich enough to afford to buy airtime. We would also see an immediate improvement in the content of political discourse as the candidates could not resort to attack ads and slickly-produced distortions about their opponents.

In addition to re-regulating content, the American people need to re-think ownership of the media. Freedom of speech and of the press was never envisioned by the founders to mean control of speech and the press by a small group of Plutocrats – quite the opposite. By allowing essentially unfettered mergers and acquisitions (albeit with the usual smoke and mirrors by the FCC that they are “concerned”) the number of possible different points of view aired by all media have necessarily lessened. If the NY Times and Boston Globe are owned by the same company, I don't care what claims they make to the contrary, there is going to be less difference in their outlook than if they were truly independent. If Sinclair Broadcasting owns 50 TV stations (and they do) then they will have an undue influence on the news and other content of those stations (as they already have done).

The above is what we should be focusing on, not whether Imus is a good guy or a bad guy, whether he can apologize enough to make people like him again. Because Imus is only the tip of this iceberg.

No comments: