Sen. Cantwell's Statement on Senate Resolution Disapproving FCC Media Ownership Rule Changes

WASHINGTON, D.C.- Earlier this year, the Federal Communications Commission ("FCC") issued rules making changes to long-standing limits on the types and amounts of media outlets that can be owned and controlled by a single company.
These rule changes drastically increase the ability of a few companies to control access to information in this country. The rule changes undermine the public interest and do nothing to ensure diversity of viewpoints, "localism," coverage of events in local communities by people who are a part of that community, or to ensure that healthy competition exists amongst media outlets.

The American people know these changes are not in the public interest and that is why I have heard directly from more than 1,650 of my constituents urging Congress to overturn the FCC's actions.

Specifically, the rule changes adopted by the FCC earlier this year would allow a single company to control television stations with access to almost half of the American broadcast audience. How that can be billed as increasing competition or diversity of viewpoint is a mystery. Given that these rules were written with only one public hearing and without opportunity for public comment, it is not surprising that they fail to reflect the public interest.

It is important to recognize that overturning these rules is not just about preventing additional domination of the airwaves.
It is about ensuring the survival of local newspapers that genuinely know and are a part of the community.

The rule changes would allow the sole or dominant newspaper in a city to merge with the top broadcaster in 200 of the 210 media markets in the country! That would mean 98 percent of the American public could effectively lose an independent voice in their community. Already, since 1975, two thirds of independent newspaper owners have ceased to exist, leaving only 290 independent newspapers in a country of 292 million people.

If these rules are allowed to take effect, it will mean fewer reporters on the ground chasing stories in our local communities, and less local investigative journalism. It would make it possible for individual markets to be dominated by a single newspaper/TV conglomerate which could control well over half the news audience and two-thirds of the reporters in a given local market.

Inevitably, the merging of broadcasters and newspapers reduces the number of voices in individual markets and threatens to place too much control over local news and information in the hands of too few companies. Repackaging and repeating stories produced in other venues is not the same as real reporting of local news.

One of the most common refrains that we hear to justify this tremendous change is that new outlets for news and information are now available. While I firmly believe that we are only at the cusp of an information age that will drastically change how we receive information, it makes no difference if the new access points are controlled by fewer people.

The reaction to these rules has been quick and sure. I have heard from over 1650 of my constituents directly, an additional 10,000 through the Move On petition. The House and the Senate Appropriations Committee have taken action to reverse the increase in the cap on broadcast audience in the appropriations process, and the Third Circuit Court of Appeals has temporarily halted implementation of these rules. But the clearest way to send a message to the FCC that these rules cannot stand is to pass this resolution disapproving the rule changes. We expect the FCC to be a watchdog not a lapdog.

I urge my colleagues to vote for this resolution as a first step in reinvigorating competition and preserving local control in mass media.