Speaking for Ourselves

Nearly forty years ago, a few determined civil rights activists at the United Church of Christ and the NAACP in Jackson, Mississippi, decided to take on the treatment of blacks by the television news. They drew a straight line from the racism they faced on the streets to the racism they faced in their living rooms when they turned on the TV. So they monitored newscasts at two local stations in Jackson. After determining that the stations were utterly failing to serve their African-American audiences, the activists filed petitions with the Federal Communications Commission. And when they didn't like what the FCC had to say, they took the commission to court, where they won. Big time.

The courts ultimately ruled that the broadcast license of station WLBT-TV ought to be taken away altogether. They said that while African-Americans were 45 percent of the audience, their concerns were totally ignored by the local television stations. It was a stunning decision, one that not only established the principle that news content must reflect in some fashion the actual diversity of local audiences but, just as important, that the public--not just corporate entities--had standing and could go directly to the FCC.

Today the landscape is radically different. With the Congressional deregulatory frenzy that started in the early 1990s, many media restrictions were loosened, and after passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the floodgates were completelythrown open. The rapid acceleration of consolidation in media and telecommunications industries that quickly followed--and is still under way--has occurred with the eager complicity of the FCC. Media reform advocates were placed on the defensive, but they did their best to mount a holding action and not be flattened by the commercial steamroller.

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