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Public Interest Obligations

As former Speaker of House Tip O’Neill once said, “All politics is local.” If the media is to serve the public’s interest in terms of our democracy, we need to receive sufficient amounts of information on local issues and politics from our local media. Indeed, the Federal Communications Commission has rules for broadcasters about localism and describes “Broadcast Localism” thus:

Broadcast radio and television are distinctly local media. They are licensed to local communities, and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has long required broadcasters to serve the needs and interests of the communities to which they are licensed. Congress has also required that the FCC assign broadcast stations to communities around the country to assure widespread service, and the Commission has given priority to affording local service as part of this requirement. Broadcast “localism” encompasses these requirements.

One of the most important “needs and interests of communities” is informing viewers about what is going on in their local politics so that voters have the information they need to participate responsibly in their local elections and to communicate with their elected officials. However, the amount of time that local broadcasters spend on local politics, even campaigns close to an election day, is far from adequate. The Sacramento Media Group, a project of California Common Cause, found that television viewers in Sacramento during the 2006 elections were seven times more likely to see a paid political advertisement during the local news than news coverage of political issues. When they proposed a modest five minutes a night of prime-time local news coverage of political issues, the broadcasters chafed. Two local stations refused to even meet with the group to talk about how to improve local public-affairs programming.

Broadcasters receive free licenses to use the publicly owned airwaves, and in return they agree to operate in the public interest. These principles are enshrined in the Radio Act of 1927 and the Communications Act of 1934 in the mandate that "broadcasting serve the public interest, convenience and necessity.” As broadcasters will soon have significantly greater capacity to provide content thanks to the February 2009 Digital TV transition, this provides a rare opportunity to make the case for greater public-interest obligations. The DTV transition allows broadcasters to air as much as five times more content on the same amount of bandwidth that they currently use. Since they will receive this extra capacity at no additional cost, it is reasonable to require specific programming in the public interest in return.

Other than vague statements about public affairs and localism, the only clear guidelines broadcasters have at this time is to air a certain amount of children’s programming as mandated in the Children’s Television Act of 1990. Guidelines for public-affairs programming should be as clear as those for children’s programming.

• There should be a minimum of three hours per week of qualifying local civic or electoral-affairs programming on a licensee’s most-watched channel.
• A clear definition of what qualifies needs to be established so that the local weather and sports reports are not claimed as public-affairs programming.
• In addition to other requirements, a minimum number of locally produced public-service announcements (PSAs) should be aired by broadcasters and must be aired at times when viewers are likely to be watching.
  
  

Broadcasters can be held accountable to these new standards in a number of ways.

• First, licenses should once again be renewable every three years instead of every eight years so that if broadcasters are not living up to their license obligations, the public does not have to wait years to hold them accountable.
• The FCC should create a revised license-renewal process that increases the amount of public participation and places the burden of proof on the broadcasters to demonstrate that they have fulfilled their obligations to the public.
• Finally, the FCC should publish clear guidelines for the creation and powers of citizen advisory boards to assist broadcasters in understanding the needs of the community. This would help ensure that the community is served effectively, and help broadcasters fulfill their obligations.

Free Air Time for Candidates

As part of a broadcaster’s public-interest obligations, but not to be counted as part of their local civic or electoral-affairs programming, we support requiring broadcasters to offer a limited amount of free airtime to candidates for federal office. In our democracy, speech is free but communication is expensive — and never more so than during the campaign season. This paradox lies at the heart of our problems with money and politics. As the cost of political communication keeps rising, the competitive playing field of campaigns keeps tilting toward candidates who are wealthy or well financed. Not only does the better-funded candidate almost always win in our system, but, increasingly, these victories come at the end of campaigns that are so lopsided that they rob voters of genuine choice. In our gilded age of politics, if you’re a challenger who can’t write a big check to your local television station to pay for a nightly bombardment of ads, you’ll still enjoy freedom of speech. You just won’t have the ability to be heard, much less elected.

 
The most promising way to ensure lively debate in our elections as well as reduce the need for huge sums of campaign contributions is to create a system of free air time on broadcast television, as is done in virtually all of the world’s other democracies. This would increase the flow and reduce the cost of political communication on the most important medium for politics and democracy — the broadcast airwaves. To best achieve these goals, a free air time system should impose two separate mandates on the broadcast industry. It should require television and radio stations to devote a reasonable amount of air time during the campaign season to issue-based candidate forums such as debates, interviews, town hall meetings, etc. And it should require stations to provide qualifying candidates and parties with vouchers to run a reasonable number of free ads in the period before an election.

 
Free air time is not intended to drive money out of politics altogether. But by providing a floor of communication opportunities to candidates, regardless of their financial circumstances, it would open up the political process to those currently priced out of the market. And by creating forums that allow for a free exchange of ideas among competing candidates, it would reduce the relative importance of moneyed special interests.