Three year licenses: The road to better political coverage?
Today we discuss a very complicated problem, but we promise to keep it brief. For openers, we don't remember the name, but one of the laws in the original "Murphy's Law" book goes like this: "For every complex question, there is a simple, easy to understand wrong answer."
We don't think the proposal from Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) to change the broadcast license cycle from eight to three years even rises to the level of "wrong" implied by the quote. That's because we think he's so wrong that we don't understand his proposal at all. How will shrinking the license cycle improve campaign coverage?
The FCC already stands accused by many, including sitting Democratic commissioners, of a scrutiny-free wave-through renewal system. If the FCC doesn't have the time to examine the record of each station thoroughly once every eight years, how on earth can it be expected to do so every three? The process would have to go from wave-through to blast-through just to keep up with the workload.
Then we come to the question of the public interest. Just what is the public interest? Some members of the public like "Music of Your Life," and would find the local owner who provides that format to be serving their needs. A MOYL station won't necessarily be providing a heavy dose of local political coverage, but it's still serving the public interest in its own way. The same goes for all stations that fill a niche, as all stations strive strenuously to do.
Conversely, are all the stations in the Washington market supposed to compete with one another to interview Hilda Barg, our neighborhood representative on the Prince William County Council? In our area - - the Washington DC market, we have three major political jurisdictions, two governors, one big-city mayor, four senators, eight-ten US representatives and countless state, county and municipal officials to cover. How do we divvy up responsibility among the stations for all of these political offices?
As for requiring each station to post its public interest programming on its website, assuming we all can agree what the public interest is, wouldn't we first have to require that each and every station ESTABLISH a website??? We'd love to see the Senator get THAT past the Supreme Court.
The Lear/Annenberg study which incited McCain points out some serious problems, but it is narrowly focused on local television. The problem of decreasing news coverage, and the tendency toward a compensatory increase in political advertising, is serious. It deserves serious study and debate in search of a solution.
The McCain proposal is no such thing.
Are you reading this from a forwarded email?
