One way to determine when people in power begin to feel threatened is by listening to how they try to defend themselves as being true public servants. On September 14th, I attended a public hearing in Detroit, organized by a media reform group called Free Press that included 2 members of the Federal Communications Commission. What follows is a summary of what took place at this public hearing and what it says about the difference between commercial broadcasters and citizens.

The forum was organized as a public hearing, but there were also short opening statements from FCC commissioners Copps and Adlestein. In addition, there were 2 panels made up of commercial and community media organizations who provided some perspective on the issue of media ownership consolidation and what is referred to as localism.

The first speaker, Charles Glover, spoke to the importance of having minority owned and operated broadcasting outlets. He said that currently in the US minorities own only 4.2% of all radio stations and 1.5% of all TV stations, which means only 22 out of 1,444 TV stations are owned and operated by minorities. There were other minority media owners, such as Wally Jadan and Osama Siblani, both Arab media owners/producers. Both spoke about the need for more Arab media outlets in the US and the dismal record of news media when it came to it's portrayal of Arabs and Muslims.

The audience also heard from Stacie Trescott with Radio Free Ferndale. Stacie spoke eloquently about the problems of local news, information and music not easily found on local radio. Radio Free Ferndale is a Pirate Radio station that will begin broadcasting soon, since they feel that "they have no alternative" than to defy FCC regulations. Stacie spoke passionately about the need to re-open Low Powered FM licensing for sectors of the community that have no voice in the current radio landscape. (See the Prometheus Radio Project)

Another panelists was Bruce Golden, who, along with his wife owns several radio stations in the Jackson area. He was completely opposed to efforts to re-issue LPFM licenses, and even felt that there was no real problem with media ownership consolidation. In fact, he thinks there should be no government regulation of broadcasters, since the "market would take care of things." At this point FCC Commissioner Adlestein reminded Mr. Goldsen that if there was no regulation he would not be able to compete with the bigger conglomerates. "Regulation is what has allowed you the opportunity to own stations to begin with," stated Adlestein.

There was tremendous representation from the Public Access TV community at the public hearing as well. Dirk Koining with the Community Media Center in Grand Rapids provided some proposals about improving citizen access to media, such as securing 5% of all bandwidth for public use, 5% of commercial media revenues to pay for using the public airwaves, and other new technologies that could level the playing field. It was interesting to note that there were at least 8 different independent Public Access producers taping this event and only 1 commercial broadcaster who left after 15 minutes.

Larry Garcia, with the Detroit Country Music group also spoke about the difficulties local musicians face in getting their music played on local radio. In fact, several musicians from the Detroit area addresses this issue during the public comment, underscoring the point that Motown existed because local musicians had a chance to be heard in the Motor City. If many of the great Motown artists lived today, the world may never know about them, since play lists are often faxed from a corporate office from another state. (See the work of the Future of Music Coalition)

I counted about 60 people who got up and spoke during the public comment period, most were citizens, but some were commerical broadcasters in Michigan. Most of them addresses the issue of serving the public interest by saying that they do public service announcements for community groups and occassional fund raisers for charity organizations. This is all fine and dandy, but when you are a news broadcaster you can not supplant charity sponsorship for journalism. The station manager from WOOD TV 8 here in Grand Rapids even spoke. She was on the defensive from the get go and stated that broadcasters "should not be punished," when refering to the licensing renewal process. She also said "I'm doing it (broadcasting) because it's the right thing to do!" At this point I almost fell out of my seat from laughter. Commercial Broadcasters do it, because they make money, and if they don't make money they will be replaced by someone who can.

As the night wore on more and more people kept coming forward with testimony as to why they opposed further media ownership consolidation. Several people associated with a small Black owned radio station in Detroit were concerned with the difficulties in competing with the big radio companies in the area and pleaded with the FCC commissioners to do everything in their power to stop re-regulation and to make it easier for citizens to file petitions to deny broadcast licenses to stations that do not serve the public interest.

Most people who came forward were just citizens who were disgusted with what one retired auto worker referred to as "the abismal state of community news" on local broadcasters. He could not find out any real information from TV and radio stations about an upcoming school funding proposal. At about 11:00 pm I got up to speak briefly about what GRIID does in Grand Rapids with media monitoring. I said that we have logged thousands of hours of TV news monitoring and could safely say that when it came to issues like race & gender representation, economic stories, crime and war coverage that people could not rely on local broadcasters to keep them informed.

I concluded with 2 examples about local election coverage. It is not difficult to find information on the Presidential race even on local TV, but their primary function during elections should be to provide us with deatails on local races. In 2001, during a GR City Commission election year, we documented more stories during a 30-day study period about ostrieches who got loose from a rural Kent County farm than all candidates running for local office. The other example is from 2002, where we found 44 stories about the DC sniper on local TV news, but not one second was devoted to all 19 Kent County Commission races. Then again, broadcasters are just giving us what we want, right?

Jeff Smith is with the Grand Rapids Institute for Information Democracy and has been watching so much local TV he now wears a Lee Van Amyde button on his hat..