Information Superhighway Robbery
Gold rush! Yee-haw! Look at them settlers, lashin’ their teams and bouncin’ their wagons in an all-out scramble to stake a claim in Electronville.
The federal telecommunications bill is the Gold Rush of 1996, an industry free-for-all, a wild, pell-mell greed stampede.
All the settlers have pretty fair grubstakes to start with; we’re talkin’ Time-Warner, Turner, TCI, Southwestern Bell, MCI, Microsoft, NBC everyone’s there except thee and me, bubba.
The gold in them thar hills is the public airwaves, theoretically and legally the property of the people of this country. But we’re not gettin’ a plugged nickel out of this here shivaree, folks. No one even told us it was goin’ on.
How much money is at stake? Well, for broadcasters, around $70 billion worth of public property is up for grabs - all they’ve got to do is grab it - and its potential worth runs into the hundreds of billions.
Forget the federal budget deficit; if we leased our property instead of givin’ it away, we could erase a chunk of the national debt, as columnist William Safire has pointed out.
But a shrewd move like that can’t even get on the dance card at the Giveaway Ball now being held in Washington, D.C. The select, limited company of settlers being allowed to participate in the Gold Rush of ‘96 just happens to have given $40 million during the last 10 years to members of the U.S. Congress. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, in the last six months of 1995, they gave $1.9 million in political action committee money alone, not to mention individual contributions.
And who is the telecommunications PAC champeen of them all, the man who has received more than anyone else in Congress from these modern-day settlers? Why, Texas Rep. Jack Fields, who just happens to be leading the charge in Congress to give away the property that all of us own to all those nice folks who have contributed so generously to his election campaigns.
Hope that makes you proud you voted Republican.
And why didn’t anyone tell you about this?
You might want to ponder on this quite seriously; almost every news medium that might have informed you about this astonishing giveaway already is owned by the settlers in this gold rush. Yep, the Big Three TV networks, CNN, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and pert near anyone else you want to name in what laughingly passes for American journalism these days have got dawgs in this hunt. Not to mention AT&T and the Baby Bells.
On top of that, the Democratic response to this ungodly giveaway is headed by the Great Dull One, Vice President Al Gore. (“Al Gore is so dull his Secret Service code name is ‘Al Gore.”’) The Great Dull One, who actually understands what he persists in calling “the information superhighway,” is in what passes with him as a snit about this bill. No wonder you never have heard of it.
To give credit where credit is due, a couple of other alert minds in Washington have noticed something rotten, that powerful whiff of Limburger cheese in our national Denmark. Sens. Ernest Hollings, D-S.C., and Bob Dole, R-Kan., plus Labor Secretary Robert Reich and a handful of others are trying to put the brakes on.
The beleaguered Center for Media Education, Jeffrey Chester conducting, keeps trying to point out that there are no safeguards for pricing or accessibility in this telecommunications bill. What that means is that 40 years of regulatory safeguards are being swept away, nothing is being done about regulating 21st-century communications, the sky’s the limit on what cable and phone companies can charge and no one even has suggested that it might be a good idea to dedicate just one piddly little channel out of more than 500 new channels to public issues and free time for political candidates. Not even one single channel.
The party that harps so endlessly on “family values” couldn’t care less about children’s education - there’s nothing in this legislation about violence in children’s TV programming, nothing about getting computers into the schools, nothing but a total bottom-line mentality.
No wonder - the whole bill was written by telecommunications lobbyists. As Chester said, the media, which we rely on both for entertainment and information, are about to be turned into a giant electronic shopping mall.
Not only that, but because future media will be interactive, everything you watch, everything you buy, will be noted and targeted for marketing purposes. The 21st-century media will not be something you watch passively; they will be incredibly intrusive.
The telecommunications industry’s defense is: But for-profit cable channels produce quality television - look at Discovery, look at Arts & Entertainment.
Excuse me, but have you ever noticed that much of the quality programming on those two channels is being bought from the British Broadcasting Corp., a publicly funded system?
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