seattle indymedia center

Media Politics: Tackling the NAB

author: Jonathan Lawson
Aug 21, 2002 13:27

Seattle's NAB conference next month provides the excuse for a celebration of more democractic media--and for the expression of a rising resistance to federal policies which allow rich media elites to ignore the public interest.

Next month, Seattle plays host to The National Association of Broadcasters’ annual radio conference. The NAB’s last west coast appearance in San Francisco 2000 atttracted hordes of articulate and well-organized protests from community radio advocates, labor unions and people bored with the sugar-coated sleeping pill that is commercial FM programming today. In Seattle, protests, rallies and counter-conference programming will literally surround the NAB once again.

Why pick on the NAB? The group’s primary importance is their stature as one of the most powerful corporate lobbies ever to walk the halls of Washington, D.C. There, the NAB’s primary mission is to ensure that the wealthiest handful of corporate media owners—not local governments or the public at large—play the dominant role in shaping federal laws and policies bearing on the broadcast media. The NAB serves this dark function in several ways:

· Shaping policy to benefit owners: NAB lobbyists pushed hard to convince the FCC and the Congress to open the floodgates of media industry consolidation, attacking limits on how many stations a single company can own in a single market, or altogether.

· Consolidating owners’ power, destroying diversity: The homogenizing of the airwaves and the dumbing-down of radio content are apparently music to the NAB’s ears. The organization is now working to extend the same effects to the nation’s newspapers, lobbying the FCC to repeal an important rule prohibiting companies from owning newspapers and broadcast outlets in the same town.

· Protecting the gravy train of campaign finance: Most Americans agree that out-of-control campaign spending is harmful to our democracy. The NAB’s media moguls, however, have invested millions in a long fight against campaign finance reformsmall change compared to the hundreds of millions they rake in during each year’s election season.

· Keeping the rabble out of the neighborhood: When the Clinton-era FCC moved to allow the licensing of low-power FM (LPFM) community stations across the country, the NAB pounced, with a major lobbying campaign portraying LPFM as a terrible threat to the public. With the help of NPR (yes, NPR) and some cooked pseudo-science, the NAB managed to convince Congress to overrule the FCC and drastically curtail LPFM plans.

· Digital radio transmission is coming—but in what form? The NAB has placed its lobbying weight behind a scheme called IBOC (“In Band, On Channel”), which promises to significantly enhance the signal quality of incumbent broadcasters. Technologically, digital broadcasting coud use existing spectrum much more efficiently, allowing many more stations to share the band. The NAB is not interested in sharing, however, and IBOC will instead shut out new station applications. In fact, IBOC’s wide-band signals promise to wipe out nearby low-power stations and formerly available frequencies. All that, plus you’ll have to buy a new kind of radio—at least if digital radio offers anything worth listening to.

The Seattle NAB conference will be attended by hundreds of engineers, station managers, advertising reps and on-air personalities, as well as corporate owners. Many of these radio folks are survivors of deregulation-induced megamergers and staff purges, and more than a few of them have good reason to hate their bosses. Organizers of the counter-NAB conference Reclaim the Media anticipate that many NAB attendees will wander across Freeway Park to share their own war stories about working inside greedy conglomerates such as Clear Channel, Entercom and Infinity Broadcasting.

The NAB Radio Show runs Sept 12-14 at the Convention Center; Reclaim the Media events run Sept 10-15. For more information visit www.reclaimthemedia.org.

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