MORE SOURCES? NOT REALLY
by Deborah Potter

If you're like me, you get your news from a lot of different places, or at least, you THINK you do. After all, with television, radio, cable, the daily newspaper, the Internet, we have so many choices these days. But how many of those choices are really different? And of those that are, for how much longer?

I started thinking about choices recently when Disney's Michael Eisner showed up here in Washington. He was making the rounds on Capitol Hill, while downtown his union employees at ABC were doing the rounds in front of the office, locked out in a contract dispute. So what does Mr. Disney want from Congress? More. He wants more.

Eisner and other broadcast bigwigs were all exercised about an effort by the FCC to clip their wings, ever so slightly. In case you hadn't noticed, the broadcast business has been on a buying binge. When Congress lifted the limits on ownership two years ago, big owners started getting even bigger, buying up the competition -- but not big enough to suit them, it seems. They were incensed about a plan to limit the number of radio stations a company could own in the city where it also owned a television station. The way things stand now, a company can own eight radio stations in a market. The FCC wanted to cut that to four.

"Disaster!" cried the owners. Why, they'd have to sell some of those profitable radio stations they just bought. In Chicago, for example, CBS would have to sell four. Chancellor Communications would have to let go of three. "No way," said the owners. So they came to Washington to fight the move, and to make it plain they expect even more freedom.

Not only do they want to keep those radio stations, they want to be able to own more than one television station in the same market. And they want to reach even more viewers. The rules now say one owner's stations can serve 35 percent of the national audience. The owners want to raise that limit to 45 percent.

So what's the big deal? Why should the FCC put limits on ownership? Isn't consolidation a good thing, just the free market at work? If you own stock in some of those companies, it certainly is a good deal. You've made a lot of money in the past couple of years. But what if you're just a viewer or just a listener?

Consider the case of CBS Radio, once a proud, independent source of news, now part of the Westwood juggernaut that also owns Mutual and NBC radio news and distributes CNN Radio. Two years ago, when that deal was going through, all the bosses said it would have no effect on the choices available to listeners. Yeah, right, as my 12-year-old would say. Listened lately? The takeover is now complete, and you can flip from station to station to station at the top of the hour and hear the same voices giving you the same news on supposedly different networks.

What's happened in local markets isn't that different. From Tampa to Dallas, multiple radio stations with the same owner share just one newsroom, often staffed by just one or two people. So do listeners have much of a choice for news? Not really.

And now more newspaper owners also want to own radio stations in the same city. The head of the publishers' trade group says that would provide audiences with "a strong new source of information about community affairs." Well, again, not really. It would be the same source after all, the newspaper but in a different medium. And it's not as though there's more than one newspaper in most cities these days.

But not to worry. The FCC is going to rein them all in, right? Don't bet on it. Last week, under pressure from the industry, the commission backed off, postponing the vote it had scheduled for later this month.

Sure, there are plenty of choices out there. But when it comes to broadcast news, are they all that different? Not really.

(This commentary was originally broadcast by NPR's On the Media, December 12, 1998)