Media (Not) Covering Media   

Charles Layton's December/January article, "News Blackout," which documented coverage (or lack thereof) of this summer's important FCC rulings, was an important story to report. It's the type of insightful industry reporting that I value in AJR, in part because who else is going to take on such media issues?

Well, I took on such issues last spring as part of a television investigative reporting class I taught at the College of Charleston. My students and I produced a nearly hour-long report about media ownership in Charleston and how the changes here reflect nationwide trends. The program didn't take a stand but was a fair and balanced look at the pros and cons of media ownership consolidation.

During the summer, after our program was completed, I sought outlets to air the report. Comcast Cable locally has a public access channel, so I brought the tape to the program director, who was quite agreeable to showing it. At first. Once he and the general manager viewed the program, I received a terse e-mail from the program director saying, "It is not in the best interest of management" to air the program.

Neither Comcast nor the cable industry was mentioned in our program, which focused on the changes in radio due to deregulation and the possibility of similar changes to television.

South Carolina Educational Television has been more receptive to being an outlet for the program, promising to air it early in 2004.

Patrick Harwood
Instructor
Department of Communication
College of Charleston
Charleston, South Carolina

Chicago Media Action thanks Charles Layton and AJR for the article "News Blackout."

As an aside, the article didn't mention that Robert Feder wrote about the Chicago forum in the Chicago Sun-Times. Also, Karen Young--the main subject of Layton's article--has since left Chicago Media Action.

We are concerned that Layton's article does suggest that public broadcasting covered the media ownership debate in early 2003 sufficiently well. If you think that, we have a wonderful war to sell you! Public broadcasting is increasingly beholden to commercialism and corporate corruption. CMA is making public broadcasting a focus of our work.

Mitchell Szczepanczyk
President
Chicago Media Action
Chicago, Illinois

Charles Layton's "News Blackout" was an excellent piece, but it would have been nice if he had at least mentioned Rep. Bernie Sanders' crusade against the FCC ruling. Rep. Sanders (I-Vt.) started sounding the alarm at least as early as March 2002 and has continued to do so. www.bernie.org/documents/20020417120650-07715.cfm

Bradford Cornell
Wolcott, Vermont