The Reagan Era: Gifts That Keep Giving (I)

In The Man Who Sold the World: Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America, William Kleinknecht covers, in a chapter entitled "The Looting of America," the Reagan blitz to deregulate everything.

Following the gory details of how oversight was removed or subverted for financial institutions, workplace safety, airlines and pretty much all consumer goods and services, Kleinknecht adds special mention of Mark Fowler, Reagan's head of the Federal Communications Commission.

Of course the appointment was consistent with the administration's MO: just install a sworn opponent of an agency to subvert its function from the top. [See, for example, James Watt.]

Fowler's take on broadcasting and the public interest: "Television is just another appliance. It's a toaster with pictures."

More from Kleinknecht—

Mark Fowler, Reagan's first chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, was the spiritual father of broadcast deregulation. He came into office with a profound disdain for the notion that television and radio airwaves were owned by the public, a concept that had been the cornerstone of communications law since 1934. He felt the airwaves should be the province of corporations, whose competition in the free market would be enough to serve the public interest. "It's time to move away from thinking of broadcasters as trustees and time to treat them the way that everyone else in this society does, that is, as a business," he said. "Television is just another appliance. It's a toaster with pictures." Fowler said he took it as an "article of faith that any successful businessman is meeting a public need." He was fond of cloaking himself in the mantle of Ronald Reagan, once boasting that he was "not the captive of any industry or industry in general. I am a captive of a philosophy of government we call Reaganism."

These were not just idle words. In Fowler's six-year tenure as chairman, the FCC reviewed or abolished 89 percent of the regulations governing broadcasting. By 1987, the commission had done away with the fairness doctrine, which required broadcast outlets to cover both sides of public issues; the provision that required broadcasters to allow public figures equal time to respond to attacks; the requirement that politicians be given airtime around elections; and the rule that stations keep a file of all their complaints from the public. Fowler also dropped the FCC's enforcement of misconduct on the part of broadcasting license holders.

Fowler's "most important contribution to the homogenization of news and entertainment," notes Kleinknecht, was in loosening limits to company ownership of multiple media outlets.

When Fowler took over, a single entity was restricted to owning no more than seven each for TV, AM and FM radio stations. That number was increased to twelve, and the rule that a station be held for three years before sale was abolished. Those changes alone were—

enough to set off a round of mergers in the broadcasting industry, including Capital Cities' acquisition of the American Broadcasting Corporation, the first sale of a major television network. Radio and television stations were soon being traded like any other commodity, making a mockery of their status as trustees of the nation's airwaves.

Subsequent money poured into lobbying of (and "donations" to) Congress members would set the stage for passing the Telecommunications Act of 1996—

The result was that a bill profoundly skewed toward powerful interests was passd with hardly any public debate...

Sponsors of the law estimated that deregulation of the cable and telephone industries would save consumers $550 billion over a decade-$333 billion in lower long-distance rates, $32 billion in lower local phone rates, and $78 billion in lower cable bills. Instead, cable rates went up by about 50 percent and local phone rates by more than 20 percent, according to a 2005 study by Common Cause.

Even more devastating for our culture and national discourse was the further evisceration of limits on multiple ownership of broadcast stations. Companies had been limited to owning forty radio stations; the law removed any limits, enabling a company like Clear Channel Communications to own twelve hundred stations around the country. The Common Cause study found that $700 million worth of buying and selling of radio stations occurred the first week after the act became law.

Need the author add? "Higher telephone and cable TV rates, vastly increased concentration of the media, the death of local radio, the homogenization and dumbing down of programming, less broadcast coverage of news—all these emerged from the movement begun by Ronald Reagan, the man they called the Great Communicator."

Just as taking corporate oversight from government would prove "government doesn't work"—and would make sure the government haters stay in charge.