**REMARKS OF FCC COMMISSIONER MICHAEL J. COPPS**

**COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM**

**NEW YORK CITY**

**FEBRUARY 8, 2007**

Thank you President Bollinger for visiting our conference, Dean Lemann
for bringing us all together, and my friend Walter Cronkite who brings
such wisdom and adds such stature to our gathering. One of my stellar
experiences after joining the FCC was coming to know Walter, to be able
now to count him as a friend, and to have the opportunity to work every
day at the Commission for the kind of public interest ideals that his
career personifies over so many event-filled years. There are many
reasons why Walter Cronkite became the most trusted person in America.
Not the least of these was his trust in the American people and his
life-long commitment to making sure that the media where he worked
reflected the interests, the diversity and the dreams of all his fellow
citizens. There is no one in our national life that I admire more than
this good man.

I admire this school, too. Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism is a
city on a hill for those of us who believe that serious reform is
necessary if we are to preserve a vibrant, diverse, local, intelligent
and independent media environment. I know that President Bollinger and
Dean Lemann are both fighting hard and thinking broadly---like Walter
Cronkite is---to ensure that journalism, as a profession, remains
capable of serving the essential cultural and political role that our
system of government demands of it.

Down in Washington D.C., I find myself involved in a fight that I
believe is similar in many ways. The question is what can and should
government do to ensure that the broadcast media system continues to
serve the ***public*** interest rather than just the financial interests
of media corporations and their shareholders. I want to talk a little
about that and then sit back and hear the thoughts of the distinguished
folks gathered here on how the broadcast issues before the FCC intersect
with the state of journalism generally. There may be many important
meetings taking place in New York today. My take is that this gathering
of working journalists, former journalists, publishers, academic
experts, and media reform activists trumps them all.

No serious observer can doubt that journalism is currently experiencing
rapid and even destabilizing change. The Hutchins Report---written 50
years ago, but still eerily relevant today---demonstrates that change
has been a hallmark of the profession for a long time. But the pace of
change has accelerated to warp speed in the last decade with the coming
of new technologies and capabilities and, especially, the Internet that
is bringing such profound changes to every information-based industry.
The question then is: Will this change be for the better or for the
worse? The answer is: It's up to us.

Regarding broadcast journalism, the answer won't be good for the
profession or the country if we continue down the same road we've
traveled for the past quarter century. Beginning in the 1980s, with a
few hints even before then, those of us who believe that public policy
has a role to play in securing public interest performance by our
broadcast media were told to get out of the way. A fundamental shift in
our approach to media regulation was needed, we were told. And they sent
us a new Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission who famously
stated that a television is nothing but "a toaster with pictures." And
that's how he treated it. Turns out that he was the toaster and what his
approach made toast of was the public interest. Of course he didn't do
this alone. He had plenty of accomplices, some in very high places. Over
the next two decades nearly every explicit public interest criteria we
had to measure a broadcast station's public interest performance was
eviscerated. No longer did station owners need to consult with the
citizens of their communities about what kinds of programs they wanted.
No longer were they required to cover controversial public issues and to
foster the healthy clash of antagonistic viewpoints so essential to
decision-making in a democracy. No longer were they required to come in
every three years and demonstrate their public service contributions at
license renewal time; all they do now is send in a post-card once every
eight years and we don't generally even open up their public file to see
what they're up to. And, to gild the lily, we removed the constraints
that separated program distribution from program production, and opened
up the way for cartel control of the broadcast media from one end to the
other.

Simultaneously came the great tsunami of media consolidation. Ownership
caps were loosened and media behemoths gobbled up local outlets. One
company grew to more than 1200 stations. We know the results now. Closed
or amputated newsrooms. Entertainment passed off as news. Homogenized
entertainment, national music play lists, no coverage for local talent,
local music, local creativity. Too much of media using us, not enough of
using media for the common good. Our country is paying a dreadful cost
for this quarter century fling with government abdication and media
irresponsibility.

But of course even that wasn't enough for big media and their friends in
high places. They wanted more---and they almost got it. In 2003, then
FCC Chairman Michael Powell rammed new rules through the FCC---over my
strenuous objections and those of my colleague Jonathan Adelstein---to
allow a single company to own up to three television stations, eight
radio stations, the monopoly local newspaper, the monopoly cable
provider, even the Internet service provider, in a single market. I
asked how that would serve local and community interests, independent
journalism, minorities and local creative artists.

Thankfully, three million citizens contacted the FCC to express their
outrage at this near-disaster for our country. I didn't know 3 million
people even knew there was an FCC! But it was a true grassroots,
bipartisan movement that made a difference. Congress went on record with
its opposition, and then a federal court found the rules both
substantively and procedurally flawed and sent them back to us to
rework. That's where we are now. And I can tell you this: in spite of
their spin messaging, big media is still pushing to loosen the caps even
more, to allow more duopolies and triopolies and to do away with the
present constraints on newspaper-broadcast cross ownership. I've read
their pleadings and I can tell you they are still marching to the tune
of their Pied Piper of Consolidation.

Looking back at where the FCC has been and where it is today, I think we
can reach three conclusions:

First, the consolidation we have seen so far and the decision to treat
broadcasting as just another business has ***not*** produced a media
system that does a better job serving most Americans. Quite the
opposite, in fact. Rather than reviving the news business, it has led to
***less*** localism, ***less*** diversity of opinion and ownership,
***less*** serious political coverage, ***fewer*** jobs for journalists,
and the list goes on.

Second, I think we have learned that the purest form of commercialism
and high quality news make uneasy bedfellows. As my own hero, Franklin
Delano Roosevelt, put it in a letter to Joseph Pulitzer, "I have always
been firmly persuaded that our newspapers cannot be edited in the
interests of the general public from the counting room." So, too, for
broadcast journalism. This is not to say that good journalism is
incompatible with making a profit---I believe that both interests can
and must be balanced. But when TV and radio stations are no longer
required by law to serve their local communities, and are owned by huge
national corporations dedicated to cutting costs through economies of
scale, it should be no surprise that, in essence, viewers and listeners
have become the products that broadcasters sell to advertisers.

It's not just what FDR thought. Listen to Herbert Hoover, who was
present at the creation of our broadcast media: "It is inconceivable
that we should allow so great a possibility for service, for news, for
entertainment, for education and for vital commercial purposes to be
drowned in advertising clutter." Maybe I shouldn't be surprised that the
grassroots call we hear today for media reform has such a bipartisan
ring to it!

Third, we have seen that the death of the news business is often greatly
exaggerated. Even though I understand the serious challenges and
uncertainty that media companies face, the truth remains that many---if
not most---local newspapers and broadcasters continue to be extremely
profitable compared to other industries. Do these papers need new models
to survive in Internet Age? Of course they do. Will they find them? I'm
convinced they will. Meanwhile they remain, along with television, the
primary source of news and information for the huge majority of
Americans. And the Internet won't be competing with them in such areas
as investigative journalism or broad global coverage in my
lifetime---and I plan, like Walter, to live a long time.

So what can government do to reverse these trends and produce a media
environment that actually strengthens American democracy rather than
weakens it? Here are a couple of thoughts I'd like you to consider.

The time for action is now. "The times they are a-changin'" and the
months just ahead may afford us the best chance in a generation to bring
public interest standards back to broadcasting---and the spirit of the
public interest to other media, too. For openers, of course, the FCC
must be blocked from passing any destructive new media ownership rules
like those approved in 2003. But we can do more than that now and I, for
one, am tired of just playing defense. It's time for those of us who
share a commitment to the rebirth of public interest stewardship to go
on the offensive. We need not settle for defending journalism against
bad ***new*** rules---now we can, we must, revisit those bad ***old***
rules and laws and decisions that eviscerated long-standing public
interest obligations. I don't want to paint too rosy a picture, but I
believe we have a special chance right now to make a difference. Last
week, my fellow Commissioners and I were called before the Senate
Commerce Committee for a general oversight hearing. And, you know what,
despite all the astonishing changes and policy issues facing the telecom
industry today, about 80% of the questions from both sides of the aisle
were about how to return the public interest to broadcasting. Was I
encouraged? You bet I was!

Every American is a stakeholder in how our broadcast media develop. 
Fiduciary responsibility to corporate stockholders is one thing; public
interest obligations to stakeholders is quite another.  So far
stockholders have totally trumped stakeholders.  This is not a sound
investment in America\'s future and we must find a way to fix it.  I
want---and we need---a thriving broadcast industry where stewards of the
airwaves continue to make a good living.  But our notion of good
stewardship must expand---or return---to putting some real muscle into
the obligations that broadcasters undertake in return for their free use
of the public\'s airwaves. It's a big quid pro quo, to be sure. But
those airwaves are a big gift, too---to the tune of, conservatively,
\$500 billion. The American people expect a return on ***their***
investment, too.

I didn't bring with me, unfortunately, any silver bullet to restore
public interest airwaves. But I do want to start that conversation, and
I can't think of a better place to do this than here at Columbia. Is the
answer a stronger license renewal process, which would require stations
to prove every few years that they have actually served their local
community? Is it a community discovery requirement, which would force
stations to actually solicit input from the local community about how
programming might change to better serve that community? Might it be tax
incentives to encourage long-term investment in broadcast journalism or
other types of media?  Encouraging a more active role for foundation
investment?  More public resources? 

I\'m not smart enough to figure that out all by myself.  So I think we
need a blue-ribbon panel of citizens and journalists---stakeholders as
well as stockholders---charged with addressing these issues.  I am
inspired here by the process that President Bollinger engaged in to
guide his thinking about how journalism is taught here at Columbia.
Going about the process in such a thoughtful way almost guaranteed a
credible outcome. I don't know who should convene this panel or the
precise parameters of its charge. But it should be a panel on a
schedule, because the last thing we need is a commission or a task force
that politicks the issue for years while the media environment
deteriorates even more. We need a working group with a meaningful
deadline (like 6 months), charged with recommending real-world solutions
to a real-world problem which pulses close to the heartbeat of our
culture and our democracy.

Building a media environment that truly reflects and truly nourishes our
diversity and democracy may be our nation's greatest calling now
because, without that, all the other huge issues we confront won't
receive the kind of true journalistic scrutiny they need if they are to
find satisfactory resolution. The best way to do this is together---the
public as well as the private sector, stakeholders as well as
stockholders. But, for heaven's sake, let's get away from all the
endless, mind-numbing prattle about how this is somehow a question of
regulation versus deregulation, or of being for or against business.
This is about the ***people's business***, about citizens acting
together. Isn't that how we built this country of ours? It wasn't just
that we declared our independence in one glorious document; it was that
we made a declaration of inter-dependence, one upon the other, to win
and sustain our freedom and to build our country. This isn't about
ideology, it's about ideals. Our challenge is to find ways to combine
the genius of our great enterprise system with the things people expect
their government to do. This is how we built America, and this is how we
are called to redeem the Promise of America in every generation.

Thank you.