Dear FCC: media accountability, not media consolidation

 COMMENTS DELIVERED ORALLY  TO FCC COMMISSION,

 8/31/2006  LOS ANGELES:

Thank you for coming to Los Angeles. My name is Charles Fredricks. I was preparing for a career in broadcast journalism until I interned in an NBC news department during the summer of the O.J. Simpson trial.

Broadcast media’s obligation to public service has devolved  to a perfunctory hour between two and five a.m. The further ownership is removed from the communities served, the less relevant are the needs of communities to ownership. Media then exists only to reflect the owners’ desires to our communities.

As staff positions easily replaceable cogs, employees quickly learn that in exchange for a paycheck and if they’re lucky a moment before the lights, the last thing they are expected to do is pass on  any  information that those who write their checks might consider challenging.

For example we been subjected to seemingly endless coverage of Joan Benet Ramsey’s killer, but there has been scant mention of the case moving through the courts challenging this administration’s right and to form a database of all the phone calls of every citizen in this country, in clear violation of the Constitution. How is it that even today, a substantial percentage of the public still believe the falsehoods this administration dictated to reporters, who repeated but never verified, in order to justify their aggression against Iraq?

No longer gatekeepers, news managers have become purveyors of Video News Releases, commercials that masquerade as news, and infotainment that uses fear, peer pressure, and arrogance to inform the public how they are expected to think.

How are we to make appropriate decisions for our future when the appropriate information is spun or withheld altogether by corporations who stand to gain from these actions.

Our civilization as currently configured is  un-sustainable.

We are entering an era where we are  not only losing the ability to make decisions to preserve our democracy and civil liberties, but we are losing the ability to make decisions appropriate for the preservation of life,  not just quality of life but  life itself,  on this planet.

This is what the short sightedness of programming for the bottom line is costing us, and what we stand to lose if we allow increased media consolidation, rather than increased media accountability.

Thank you.