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Sen. Dorgan on public broadcasting and media concentration
Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-S.D.) made these remarks as part of a speech in the U.S. Senate June 13, 2005. From the Congressional Record. He starts by addressing the presiding officer of the Senate. Several days later, Dorgan joined two fellow Democratic senators in a letter to CPB urging delay in CPB's hiring of a new president. Related article.
Mr. President, a couple of things have happened in the last several days that I want to visit. First, I wish to talk for a moment about public broadcasting and, secondly, to talk about a Supreme Court decision that was announced this morning here in Washington, D.C., and the relationship between the two.
First, I will talk about public broadcasting . I confess I am a big supporter, a big fan of public broadcasting . I think they are an organization that provides an independent view of a range of issues to the American people. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting , public television, and public radio, I think, provide a significant service to this country.
In a time when there is this enormous concentration in the media, more and more television stations are being bought up by fewer and fewer companies--one company owns over 1,200 radio stations in this country — the Federal Communications Commission writes new rules that get overturned by the courts, frankly, that say you can even buy up more of these properties. In fact, the rules the Federal Communications Commission developed some while ago said it is going to be all right in one of America's major cities for one company to own three television stations, eight radio stations, the dominant newspaper, and the cable company. That is unbelievable. Are they dead from the neck up? What possibly could they be thinking?
Fortunately for us, the Federal courts struck down the new rules and, fortunately for us, this morning the Supreme Court decided that the court had justification in striking down these new ownership rules.
Again, I do not think it makes any sense to have a handful of people in this country determining what the American people see, hear, and read, and that is exactly what is happening.
That brings me back to public broadcasting . It is interesting that at a time of this concentration in the media — one company owning a lot of radio stations, 1,200 of them, one company and several companies owning a lot of television stations — at a time when there is not much room for discord and voices, which, incidentally, I think strengthens a democracy.
There is this old saying when everyone is thinking the same thing, nobody is thinking very much. This democracy of ours, this system of self-government, this country that is full of self-expression is strengthened, in my judgment, by an exchange of views of people who have different views. But that, regrettably, is seen somehow as being disloyal these days.
Oh, I know, someone in the Dixie Chicks said something that was unpopular about the President, and then we had tractors driving over the CDs from the Dixie Chicks and big rallies to burn their music. Just before the last election, one television consortium decided they were going to run a clearly partisan film designed to attack only one Presidential candidate and not allow time for the opposing view. This was a television consortium that nearly every single night was doing editorials against one of the Presidential candidates.
In Minot, ND, late one evening, a train ran the tracks and some cars of anhydrous ammonia spilled a plume over that community of nearly 50,000 people, and that deadly cloud of anhydrous ammonia enveloped that community at about 2 o'clock in the morning. There is some disagreement about the events of that night, but reports are that the telephone calls went to the local radio station, and were not answered. All the radio stations in Minot are owned by one company.
What is happening in these broadcast facilities these days is they are running a broadcast out of a board someplace 1,000 miles away, someone who is homogenizing the music to run it through the local station. There is no local broadcasting in many cases. What you have is a company 1,000 miles or 1,500 miles away deciding they are going to run some homogenized music through the sound board. You do not even need people around to do that.
The Minot, ND, story is one that has been well repeated. I know there is some dispute about a number of the details, but the fact is, there should not be any dispute about what is happening with this concentration. We now have people who sit in a basement, perhaps 20, 30 miles from here one of the examples I heard was over in Baltimore, a guy sitting in a basement studio saying: It is sunny in Salt Lake City. What a beautiful morning to wake up in Salt Lake City. He was not in Salt Lake City. He was in a basement in Baltimore.
He was reading off the Internet, pretending he was broadcasting to the local folks over the local station in Salt Lake City. They have a term for that. They also have a term for the kind of homogenized television news that is put out by people who are not in your region to make it look like it is locally produced news.
We have this massive concentration in the media, which I think is awful, the FCC promoted rules that says we will let them concentrate even further. As I said, in a major city, under the FCC rule, one would be able to own eight radio stations, three television stations, the cable company, and buy the dominant newspaper all at the same time. I think it was one of the single most complete cave-ins to the biggest corporate interests in this country I have ever seen: The public interest be damned.
The FCC had three-quarters of a million people write to it to say: Do not do this. It did not matter to them. They just did it. Now they have been enjoined by a court. The Supreme Court says they cannot continue and so now they have to start over. Perhaps when they start over they will understand they also have a responsibility to work for the public interest, which brings me to public television.
A couple of things are kicking around about public television. Last week, I believe on Thursday or Friday, the appropriations subcommittee in the House decided to cut funding for public broadcasting . The cut in funding probably meets the interests of some who would like to abolish it. I do not know. I know we had one of our colleagues some years ago decide to get in a big fight with Big Bird and, frankly, Big Bird won. Public broadcasting is widely supported in this country.
In recent years, we have heard a drumbeat by people who say public broadcasting , public television, public radio, is biased. It has a liberal bias, they say. No evidence of that, to my knowledge. Still, the mantra seems to try to brand it as something that is anathema to fairness or balance.
The other day I called Mr. Tomlinson, who is the Chairman of the Board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting . He has been in the news a great deal. In fact, as Chairman, he is one who has made the point that he believes that some of the programming is not balanced, is in fact biased towards the liberal view.
I talked to Mr. Tomlinson by telephone the other day. I do not know him. I do not have anything bad to say about him. But I called him because of what I had read in the public domain that he has said as chairman of the board.
I knew he had hired, with public funds, a consultant to come in and take a look at programming, particularly Bill Moyers', called Now, I believe it was titled, to see if it was fair. I will not use ``fair and balanced'' because that belongs to another brand.
So I wrote to Mr. Tomlinson and asked: Why do you not send me the work papers, send me the summary. I would like to see this report that you empaneled with public funding. He did. He sent me what he called the raw data. The raw data is here. This is raw, certainly, and I guess it is data, but there is no summary. So I called to ask: Would you please also send me summary.
If one looks through the raw data, it is unusual and strange. I will not enter this into the record. I will not put all of this information into the record. I am not going to read from all of it. I am still awaiting a summary. But I must say that the Chairman of the Board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting hired a consultant to do an evaluation of programming. Then we have all of these sheets that describe the guests and it says: anti-Bush, anti-Bush, pro-Bush, anti-Bush. It appears to me to be not so much an evaluation of is this slanted, is it liberal, does it have an agenda; it is the evaluation of is this program critical of the President?
Is that why a consultant was employed, to see whether public broadcasting is critical of our President? God forbid that we would be critical of the President of the United States.
I find it interesting that in this evaluation — this one is incidentally conservative/liberal, C or L. This was not anti-Bush but C or L. My colleague, Senator [Chuck] Hagel from Nebraska, appeared on one of the programs, and he apparently disagreed with a portion of President Bush's strategy with respect to Iraq. So my colleague, Senator Hagel, is referred to as liberal. He is a liberal contributor to National Public Radio. My guess is that is going to surprise a lot of Nebraskans.
If he were on the floor he would probably say he is a pretty good conservative Republican, someone for whom I have deep admiration, but he kind of claimed the liberal status according to the consultant.
This is pretty unseemly, frankly, spending public money on a consultant who then sits down and looks at all of these programs to see if something is being said that might be critical about a President or Congress.
Well, I guess that is enough to say about this particular report. I will await the summary, but as someone who supports public broadcasting and thinks it contributes a great deal to this country — and by the way, who do my colleagues think has been willing to do programs about the concentration of media ownership in this country, about the fact that one company has gobbled up over 1,200 radio stations and fewer people are involved in what we hear, what we see and what we read in this country because they are gobbling up all the television stations as well? Who do my colleagues think has the guts to do programs on the question of what does the concentration in the media mean in America?
Is it ABC, or CBS, or NBC? Get real. Do my colleagues think they are going to do that? They are involved in the concentration. Public broadcasting did it. Public broadcasting is willing to take this on.
How about a program that describes waste in the Defense Department? I am on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. I feel very strongly about our country having a strong defense. I feel passionate about supporting men and women who wear this country's uniform. We need to honor them and support them in every way possible. I also happen to think that the Pentagon is one of the largest bureaucracies in the world, and there is massive waste there.
So public television did one program in which they talked about waste over at the Pentagon. Do you know how that is described? Antidefense. God forbid that you should describe waste at the Pentagon because then you will be classified, according to this consultant, as antidefense.
Let me describe something that was going on deep in the bowels of the Pentagon about a year and a half ago. They spent about $8 million, and they were going to create what was called a futures market for terrorism. It was basically supposed to be an online betting parlor.
For example, you would be able to bet on such things as: How many American soldiers would be killed in the next year? Would the King of Jordan be assassinated within the next 12 months?
Yes, that is exactly what the Pentagon was preparing to put up and operate in a real way on the Internet. They were within 3 days of doing it, and they wanted $8 million to continue it for the next fiscal year.
Senator Wyden and I discovered what they were trying to do. We blew it wide open. We had a press conference, described what they were doing, had on the Internet to show that they were only days away from implementing this crazy strategy, and the next day, the Department of Defense shut it down.
At the press conference, I said this idea of setting up an online betting parlor to take bets on terrorism was unbelievably stupid. Can you imagine, setting up a futures market by which Americans can buy futures contracts and effectively bet on how many soldiers will be killed in the coming year? That is exactly what was going to happen in the bowels of the Pentagon.
Just as an aside, one of my staff people, about 4 months later, used a Google search and typed in the words ``unbelievably stupid,'' and my name came up. That is the danger of Google, I suppose.
But the fact is, what was happening in the bowels of the Pentagon was, in fact, unbelievably stupid and a tragic waste of the taxpayers' money and very unseemly, so we shut it down. Would that be called antidefense? I guess so. I guess, according to this consultant, that is antidefense. It may even be anti-Bush, I don't know.
On top of all this, the attack on public broadcasting by cutting the funding in the U.S. House, by hiring a consultant — unknown to the Board, by the way — with public funding to try to determine what is anti-Bush and pro-Bush or liberal or conservative--on top of all that, last week, the Washington Post reports that the search for the new president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has narrowed. I don't know whether it is true. I am just telling you what was in the papers last week. It has narrowed to two candidates, and the leading candidate is a former co-chair of the Republican National Committee. A former co-chair of the Republican National Committee they are going to make head, the president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting ? I don't think so. At least those who worry about bias, those who worry about objectivity, ought not be thinking about presenting to this Congress something as unprecedented as that.
I want public broadcasting in this country to be what it has always been: a proud symbol of independence, willing to search for the truth wherever it exists and willing to take on tough subjects. I mentioned that it falls to the Public Broadcasting System to air the programs about concentration in the media. Do you know why? Because Fox News is not going to do it, CBS is not going to do it, NBC and ABC won't do it. So the American people will be spoon-fed this intellectual pabulum that says: All this is really good. If one company owns all the radio stations in your town, good for you.
It is not good for you. Who is going to broadcast the local baseball games? Who is going to broadcast the local parade? Who is going to report on local issues, when someone in a basement in a city not far from here is broadcasting over a radio station in Salt Lake City and pretending to be living there when, in fact, they have never set foot in the town?
Enough about that — only to say that some of us in this Chamber and some of us in Congress care very deeply about the Corporation for Public Broadcasting , about public television and public radio. I happen to listen to NPR, National Public Radio, on the way in the mornings, in to work in the Capitol. I think it is some of the best news you can find.
Let me say I listen in the evening, when I can, to Jim Lehrer. I challenge you to find a better newscast than that which exists on public television. There are those who believe they want to abolish funding for it. If there are those who believe they want to have a former co-chair of the Republican National Committee now assume the presidency at a time when they themselves have raised all these questions and hired consultants about objectivity, I want them to know they are in for a fight because some of us care deeply about the future of public broadcasting in this country.
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Posted June 19, 2005
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