Public domain, public airwaves

I spent much of the morning watching/listening to the Senate Commerce Committee oversight hearings on Monday's media deregulation decision by the Federal Communications Commission, and I managed to take a few notes.

Kudos, as they say, to Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona), who chairs the committee, and obviously made a review of the controversial FCC decision a priority. Kudos as well to Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Montana), who was in the broadcasting business himself years ago and understands how easily small and independent media outlets can be muscled out of a market. Burns offered a most disheartening statistic: 85 percent of independent production companies (presumably television, but that might possibly include radio as well) have gone out of business since the Telecommunications Act of 1996. FCC Chairman Michael Powell (son of Secretary of State Colin Powell) responded by pointing out that there were at least 26 independent production companies still in business, as they were providing more than 50 percent of the broadcast networks' prime-time programming.

Of the Democrats on the committee, the junior Senator from New Jersey, veteran Frank Lautenberg, was downright fatherly as he talked to Powell and the other 4 commissioners, saying something along the lines of, "You know how this looks, don't you? You took all those freebies, you seem to have ignored the will of the public, this does not make you look good, so you might as well come clean and let's try to undo the damage." (I hope the reader as well as the Senator will pardon my paraphrasing there; my intent was to convey the message accurately if not verbatim.) And even more senior veteran Sen. Dan Inouye (D-Hawaii) served not only his constituents, but the nation in focusing on the local angle: what will this mean to the people of Hawaii? Will one company take over all the state's media? Will that company even have any connection to the state aside from its media ownership? He ended by conceding that under the new rules, it appeared that Hawaii's media choices could be reduced to two companies: a duopoly. He did not concede that that would be a good thing for his state.

As the committee considered the future of the public airwaves, elsewhere Stanford Law Professor (and blogger) Lawrence Lessig continued his campaign to preserve the public domain. I was the 5,833rd person to sign his petition this morning; by this afternoon more than 7,500 had signed.