**REMARKS OF**

**MICHAEL J. COPPS, COMMISSIONER**

**FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS COMMISSION**

**FUTURE OF MUSIC COALITION POLICY SUMMIT**

**WASHINGTON, DC**

**MAY 3, 2004**

What a great way to start the week! Thank you for having me over. Thank
you for the kind introduction. And thank you for being here and for your
involvement with issues that are so very critical to the future of our
country. As I look around this room, I see people who labored mightily
in the battle against more media consolidation---otherwise known as the
battle for media democracy. The Future of Music Coalition under the
leadership of Jenny Toomey and Michael Bracy has been all over this
issue from Day One, you're still on the case, and when the dust settles,
I do believe you'll be enjoying the sweet smell of success. So I jumped
at the chance to come over here this morning to thank you for the hard
work and creative thought that so many of you have put into the media
consolidation fight.

Of course, no one should have been surprised about musicians and other
creative artists joining the fight for good, progressive media policy.
History records that creative artists have often been leaders for
progressive change and democracy in times of great social and political
testing, and their music not only influenced a moment in the past but
still reaches out to us down the corridors of the passing years. In this
present struggle over the future of the media, groups such as the Future
of Music Coalition, the Recording Artists Coalition, AFTRA, the American
Federation of Musicians, and the Recording Academy weighed in frequently
and effectively with their concerns about spiraling media concentration.
Over 4000 recording artists sent us a letter opposing media
concentration. In addition to platinum selling artists, many local
musicians have stood up, spoken out, filed comments and otherwise gone
on the record to highlight the dangers of media concentration.

And then there was the "Tell Us the Truth Tour!" What an experience that
was! I got to be up on stage in Madison, Wisconsin---where a lot of you
also were on that wonderful night last November 7---as the tour played
its first concert. What a debt of gratitude we owe to those incredibly
busy artists who gave up their time and resources to raise public
awareness of an issue that Big Media was doing its best to hide from the
American people. These musicians weren't doing it for money or because
it would advance their careers. No---they volunteered because they
wanted to awaken the country to an issue that affected not only them and
their fellow artists, but affects each of us as citizens. Everywhere the
tour went, these committed artists not only gave us the great gift of
their music but they held press conferences, they discussed media
concentration, and they performed a tremendous public service. So, I
want to thank once again Billy Bragg, Steve Earle, Lester Chambers, Tom
Morello, Mike Mills, Boots Riley, Jill Sobule, Janeane Garofalo, Peter
Jenner and everyone else involved in that truly magical tour.

It took a lot of people to bring this issue to the forefront of the
nation's consciousness. It took people raising their voices in song, in
protest, in books and pamphlets, in whatever media and whatever forum
they could manage to penetrate, to get this issue front-and-center and
to force the issue of media concentration outside the pages of *The
Federal Register* and into the mainstream of America. Working together,
you succeeded in moving this issue outside the Beltway and out onto the
highways and byways leading into every city, town and village in
America. You made a difference. ***What*** a difference ***you*** made!

Because of the efforts made by you and so many like-minded groups and
individuals, millions of Americans now understand that media
concentration is not a threat \-- it is a reality. Because of your
efforts, it is no longer insider information that Big Media
conglomerates own not only television and radio stations, but newspapers
and cable channels and cable networks and production studios and music
promotion and advertising firms and even those hallowed portals of the
Internet that were supposed to be forever free. Because of your efforts,
there is the growing realization that having a few powerful masters
controlling the production of what we see and hear and read, as well as
controlling its distribution, is inimical---truly inimical---to the
interests of us all. It's just plain bad for America.

What's *good* for America is the kind of citizen action you became part
of. Across the political and cultural spectrum, people banded together
in a common cause. In these times when so many issues divide us, you
participated in mobilizing an unprecedented army -- a coalition of left
and right, liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, who
understood the dangers of too much concentration and who went to work to
do something about it. Concerned parents and creative artists, religious
leaders, civil rights activists, labor organizations, young people, old
people, broadcasters and many, many others united on this issue. You
made it a national issue.

So you have already made a difference. Part of that difference is to be
seen over at the FCC. The Commission now must explain its acts to a far
more informed and involved citizenry than it did just a year ago. The
obscurity of this issue that Big Media and some at the Commission relied
on in the past is gone forever. Another part of the difference you made
can be seen up on Capitol Hill, where long-time champions of good media
policy found themselves joined by many more colleagues than they ever
expected. The U.S. Senate has voted to overturn the FCC decision in its
entirety and over 200 Members of the House of Representatives have asked
the House Leadership for permission to vote on the same resolution of
disapproval. They were denied that vote---a denial of democracy that
should worry us all. And part of the difference you made can be seen in
the courts because a united coalition took one look at those god-awful
rules that the Commission majority passed on June 2 and marched them
right into court, a court which immediately stayed the new rules, heard
arguments and is now writing a decision on what to do about it.

No question, then, that you made a difference and congratulations are in
order. But now, my friends, we must move beyond congratulation to
challenge. This is demonstrably ***not*** the time to slow down. Big
Media, on its side, isn't slowing down; neither should you. This is the
best opportunity this country will have, perhaps for years, to do
something about media concentration and to make sure the public's
airwaves serve the public's interest. So don't permit yourself the
luxury of sitting back. Don't accept anyone's counsel of caution or
assurances that this problem can be settled sometime later on. It needs
to be fixed now. And if it's not fixed now, the consolidation genie will
be out of the bottle with an energy the likes of which we have never
seen and that genie is hungry to complete every kind of merger,
acquisition and swap imaginable. It could happen easier than you think.
It will happen---without your vigilance and without your continued
involvement.

You folks in music bring a special perspective to the Big Media debate.
Because, in addition to all those other things that Big Media
increasingly owns, it increasingly owns the creativity that goes into
our mass media. Think about that. They own the distribution, they own
the production and, more and more they are getting hammerlock control on
creativity itself. Anything with the name "independent" on it seems to
be on the endangered species list. That's why I'd like to see some sort
of set-aside, like 25-35% of prime-time hours, for independent creators
and producers. There's a lot more creativity and genius out there across
America that our media should be reflecting than the lowest common
denominator entertainment from Madison Avenue that currently infuses so
much of the programming we see and hear. More independent programs would
also be a boon to localism, diversity and competition---those three
essential building blocks for a healthy and dynamic media environment,
currently all under the gun. Localism, competition and diversity, by the
way, aren't luxuries, nice things to have if we can afford them. They
are necessities for a thriving American society and we can't afford
***not*** to have them. They are essential for the quality of
entertainment our citizens enjoy. And they are essential for the
vitality of America's civic dialogue. We need them across our entire
media landscape. Your FCC ought to be nourishing these all-American
traits, not subverting them.

What I see at this particular Commission is a tectonic shift in
policy-making across the whole wide range of media and
telecommunications issues that are under our jurisdiction. It is a shift
in decidedly the wrong direction. We are endangering competition by
putting too much power into the hands of too few people. We are pushing
aside local creativity, talent and production and replacing them with
culturally stultifying news, information and entertainment
homogenization. In the process, my friends, the FCC is short-changing
its responsibility to protect the public interest.

The public interest---some claim it's unworkable, even unknowable.
Forget about it---it's the angel that never appears. Yet there it is,
appearing some 110 times in our enabling telecommunications statute, put
there to be our lodestar. And all these qualities I have been talking
about are exactly what the public interest is.

I know that many of you are feeling the effects of consolidation as you
seek to get your creative product out to a wide audience. You know
better than I what happens when distribution channels are put beyond
your reach. Radio deregulation gives us powerful lessons. The loosening
of ownership caps and limits eight years ago created real problems in
radio, most experts agree. Now, arguably, consolidation also created
some economies and efficiencies that allowed broadcast media companies
to operate more profitably and may even have kept some stations from
going dark and depriving communities of service. And that's fine. That's
why many Congressmen and Senators voted like they did. But the
consolidation that ensued went far beyond what anyone expected, leading
to outrageous concentrations of social, cultural and political
influence. Conglomerates now own dozens, even hundreds -- in one case
more than a thousand -- radio stations all across the country. Many
markets are oligopolies at best. Competition in many towns has become
non-existent as a few companies \-- in some cases a single company \--
bought up virtually every station in the market. More and more
programming seems to originate hundreds of miles removed from listeners
and their communities. And we know there are one-third fewer radio
station owners than there were before these protections were eliminated.
And minority ownership is on the way to becoming an historical
curiosity.

Respected media watchers argue that this radio concentration has led to
less coverage of local news and less public interest programming. When
it comes to entertainment, you good folks in the Future of Music
Coalition found in your multi-year study an homogenization of music
crowding out local and regional talent. Others point out that radio
serves now more to advertise the products of vertically integrated
conglomerates than to entertain Americans with the best and most
original programming.

Rather than learn the lessons of radio concentration, the FCC plunged
ahead and voted to visit this policy of "Clear Channelization" on the
rest of our media. And if those rules are allowed to go into effect, a
single company will be able to own up to three TV stations, eight radio
stations, the already monopolistic newspaper, the cable system and
potentially the portals of the Internet in the larger markets. The big
networks will be permitted to buy up even more local TV stations than
they already have to cover potentially up to 90 percent of the market.
Newspaper-broadcast cross ownership would be acceptable in 179 of our
210 media markets, and TV duopolies would receive the green light in up
to 162 markets. It's breath-taking.

At issue in the Commission's dismal decision of last June is how
America's TV, radio, newspapers and even the Internet are going to look
for years to come. Who is going to control the media? How many \-- or
rather, how few \-- companies? And for what purposes? How will we assure
quality TV and music instead of being so often fed a diet of pre-canned,
nationalized fare aimed primarily at selling products? Will we still be
able to get real local news and clashing points of view so we can make
up our own minds on the issues of the day? The issues here boil down to
whether a few large conglomerates will be ceded ***content control***
over our music, entertainment and information; ***gatekeeper control***
over the civil dialogue of our country; and ***veto power*** over the
majority of what we and our families watch, hear and read. These are
incredibly huge stakes.

What you have to also remember is that this is only the latest, most
radical step in a twenty-year history of undermining the public
interest. The first great wave hit in the 1980s, when the guiding
rationale at the Commission was that television is nothing more than a
toaster with pictures. Well, that Commission burned the toast. And this
present Commission is upping the toaster's amps. Step by step, rule by
rule, bit by bit, we have allowed the dismantling of public interest
protections and flashed the green light to the forces of consolidation,
until now a handful of giant conglomerates are on the inside track.
Fundamental protections of the public interest have been allowed to
wither and die. Vertical safeguards, such as the financial syndication
rules, are long since gone. Horizontal protections were whittled
significantly down long before June 2. License renewal is a joke.
Requirements like ascertaining the needs of the local audience, the
Fairness Doctrine, teeing up controversial issues, providing
demonstrated diversity in programming---all these and more have long
since been abandoned. Rigorous public interest scrutiny is more a quaint
relic of the past than an effective safeguard to protect against
excessive concentration.

Over the years, the Commission has come to rely more and more on
marketplace forces as a proxy for serving the public interest. Don't get
me wrong---I don't have anything against folks making a buck from their
media investments. We decided long ago in this country that the media
would be part and parcel of our great system of capitalist enterprise
and that's fine. But our licensees, in return for the privilege of using
airwaves that belong to somebody else---somebody called The
People---undertook and pledged to serve the public interest. It's a very
different and very special industry. And when its foundation stones
begin to crack and things like diversity and localism and competition
are imperiled, then it's past time that we wake up and do something
about it. I think the heart and soul are going out of much of our media.
And by neglecting to do justice to proposals such as requiring more
independently produced programs, or disciplining the mad bazaar of media
consolidation deals, or encouraging more diversity, we are skirting
perilously close to taking the public interest out of the public
airwaves.

During the hearings on media concentration that my colleague,
Commissioner Adelstein, and I held across the country, we saw and heard
first-hand the stories of so many hundreds of citizens about the
detrimental impact that consolidation has already had on their local
media and their fears about where still more concentration will lead. We
heard from people laid off from the newsroom when local news got the ax
from the new owner. We heard from creative artists who couldn't get air
time for their music because they weren't on the centralized,
homogenized play-lists. We heard from independent programmers who
couldn't find outlets for their programming because the networks and the
studios had that hammerlock on so much of what is produced.

Everywhere we went we heard anguish over the prospect of more local and
independent stations facing imminent takeover by one of the media
giants. People are worried because it is precisely these independents
that are serving diverse audiences in local communities, and it is at
these kinds of stations where I still find a large measure of
broadcaster dedication to serving the public interest. The fear is that
they will be the first casualties of a buy-out, taking local diversity
with them. Those few that remain will find themselves less and less
captains of their own fate and more and more captives of Wall Street and
Madison Avenue manipulators. That's just not the way things are supposed
to be.

There were so many important questions that should have been addressed
in the ownership proceeding that were not. Let me mention a couple.

What might be the effects of further concentration on America's
minorities in terms of providing Hispanic Americans and African
Americans and Asian-Pacific Americans and Native Americans and other
groups the kinds of programs and access and viewpoint diversity and
career opportunities and even advertising information about products and
services that they need? America's strength is, after all, its
diversity. Diversity is not a problem to be overcome. It is our greatest
strength. ***Our media need to reflect this diversity and to nourish
it.*** Yet, the number of minority owners has dropped by a shocking, and
nationally embarrassing, 14 percent. And there has been an even greater
drop in minority station managers and newsroom employees. Why not ask
these questions ***before*** we change the rules instead of creating the
potential for even more harm?

What is the impact on small, local broadcasters? Consolidation could
sweep them all before it. Media analysts expect that the only option for
most local broadcasters will be to sell if the new rules go into effect.
And that those that want to remain will face an extremely tough road.
During our hearings, we heard from small broadcasters that had already
been squeezed out of the market. That's not good for them and it's not
good for you and me, either.

Then there is the question of local artists getting airtime on local
stations. In our hearings, we heard time and again that if you do not
have a major label contract with promotional money behind it, you can
forget about airtime. We heard that various types of paid consideration
and business relationships influence programming decisions more than do
the merits of recordings. We heard from recording artists like Tift
Merritt in North Carolina who have major label contracts but can't get
airtime in their home states.

My colleague Commissioner Adelstein has already spoken up on this issue.
It is now time for the Commission to take seriously these allegations
that institutional and structural barriers are preventing so much music
from getting onto the public airwaves. Does local music no longer have a
place on local commercial radio? Is that in the best interests of our
citizens?

In the near future, the Commission will launch an inquiry to examine
localism. It is important that this proceeding not become business as
usual. If you have experiences you can share, I hope you will do so. In
the meantime, the FCC ought to do more than just ask preliminary
questions designed to determine if we need to change our disclosure
rules. We should investigate allegations of pay for play that might form
the basis for enforcement action under current rules. And we should
obtain and analyze data and playlists from the industry to determine if
ever more media consolidation makes this problem worse. A recent study
of a sample of FM rock stations undertaken by Gabriel Rossman at
Princeton found that the larger a station group is, the less there is of
song and artist diversity. The FCC should use this study and build on it
to understand what is happening in radio and music rather than just
proceeding pell-mell in the happy notion that the market will solve all
problems. Sometimes markets create problems.

Two more quick thoughts. First, there is now an additional way for you
to be involved in these issues. As we make the transition to digital,
there is a crying need to update our rules on the public interest
obligations of those who are given the right to use spectrum,
particularly those who will multi-cast additional program streams. The
potential of digital television and radio is enormous and I believe the
rewards, for everyone, can be enormous, too. But while we have been very
attentive to expediting the mechanics of the digital transition---things
like DTV tuners and the like---and while we've made progress there, on
the central questions of what the digital transition means for the
public interest, we have a bad case of lock-jaw. The result is a great
big digital gap. We actually started having a discussion about digital
television and the public interest a few years ago and it was a pretty
good one. The Commission even initiated a couple of specific
proceedings---one on children's programming for DTV and the other a
requirement for disclosure of the station's public file on the Internet.
But three years later they have yet to be completed.

I want us to finalize action on these two specific rulemakings and then
go beyond that with a more comprehensive proceeding on the public
interest obligations of digital television broadcasters. I am pleased to
see that a coalition -- the Public Interest, Public Airwaves Coalition
-- has formed on this issue to press for such things as more local civic
and electoral affairs programming and more independent programming.

I hope you'll take me up on getting involved in this, and expanding the
public interest discussion to include radio. We have an opportunity in
radio to avoid the experience we have had so far with digital television
and accord the public interest the high priority it deserves. The
additional program streams that are becoming digital reality could be a
real boost for localism, competition, and diversity. I hope we will not
miss this opportunity to make sure that the American people realize the
full benefits of the digital transition.

Finally, one last area that merits attention in our effort to increase
localism, competition, and diversity is low power FM. These
community-based stations are licensed to local organizations and can
help in significant ways to meet the needs of under-represented
communities. Low power benefits recording artists by providing more
outlets for airplay, especially on a local or regional level. It
provides community coverage in often strikingly-successful ways. The
Chairman of the FCC announced last summer that the FCC was going to
license more low power FM stations. We need to fast-track this effort.

In closing, as we approach the one year mark since that big FCC vote on
media concentration, we have a lot of challenges ahead. But let me tell
you my mood. I am encouraged. I am enthused. And I believe that, if the
grassroots pressure continues, we can see progress---real progress---in
the months ahead. What encourages me most is that one consequence of the
June 2 vote that the Commission majority did not count on. Their rush to
loosen the rules and their reluctance even to share the draft rules with
the American people \-- or the Congress \-- before they voted awoke a
sleeping giant. The people. Citizens across this land of ours let their
voices be heard. They got downright mad that far-reaching changes were
being plotted and planned behind closed agency doors. They didn't like
the Commission messing around with their airwaves that way. And they
made up their minds to make a difference.

So we heard from 2.3 million people, and 99.9 percent of them came down
opposed to greater media concentration---not a bad ratio when you stop
to realize that on so many issues these days we see 50-50 divides. I
believe this groundswell of public opinion will yet save the day. But it
really comes down to you, on your staying involved, on staying the
course and even stepping up your efforts, and on all of us putting
maximum energy and maximum commitment into the crusade for media
democracy.

Yes, powerful economic forces that favor consolidation are out there and
they are converging with worrisome regulatory policies that pave the
way. But, after traveling the length and breadth of this country, I
believe these forces will yet be countered because so many Americans
want, deserve, and are demanding action on how their airwaves are going
to be used to serve the public interest.

If we role up our sleeves -- if we continue to work together now -- all
of us -- business people, artists, workers, regulators, consumers, even
independent broadcasters, citizens everywhere---we can settle this issue
of who is going to control our media and for what purposes, and we can
resolve it in favor of airwaves of, by and for the people of this great
country. Let's make it happen.

Thank you.