Media 2070 FINAL - Flipbook - Page 54
commissioner. The group’s co-founder, William Wright,
accused a Senate subcommittee of being racist for failing
to consider the appointment of a Black FCC commissioner.
BEST’s advocacy pushed Congress and President Richard
Nixon to appoint Benjamin Hooks in 1972.22 Hooks left
the agency in 1977 to become the executive director of the
NAACP.23
But in 1973, Commissioner Hooks helped arrange the
first meeting between the FCC and about 40 leaders of
color, the majority of whom were Black. They discussed
such issues as “extreme racism and sexism” in TV
programming, news reporting, the agency’s enforcement
of its Equal Employment Opportunity rules and the
“cavalier handling of petitions and complaints submitted”
by organizations of color. 24
Wright is quoted in the book Reluctant Regulators as saying
he hoped the commission would understand as a result
of the meeting “‘something of the depth of frustration,
the despair with the performance of the broadcast media,
which afflicts the peoples of color.’”25
There is still much to learn about the role the CRS
played behind the scenes to help integrate our nation’s
newsrooms. And there is so much to learn about the work
of civil-rights activists who were determined to hold their
local broadcasters accountable for failing to serve their
communities.
This work has received little attention in U.S. media
history. But as Levine noted, the CRS’ efforts to
mediate tensions with the news media ended in 1973,
when the “program suffered a sudden demise with the
termination of the agency’s preventive work by the Nixon
administration.”.26
The Justice Department wasn’t the only agency to respond
to the findings of the Kerner Commission. In 1969,
the FCC adopted the EEO rules that made it illegal for
broadcast stations to discriminate in employment against
any person “on the basis of race, color, religion, or national
origin” and “to ensure equal opportunity in every aspect of
station employment.”27
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Efforts to democratize our media system also resulted
in the FCC adopting a policy to increase broadcast
ownership by people of color. In 1978, the agency created
the minority tax-certificate program, which allowed
broadcasters to receive a tax break if they sold their
stations to people of color.28 However, a federal court
twice struck down the FCC’s EEO rules in response to
successful legal challenges brought by the broadcast
industry in 1998 and 2001.29 And in 1995, the Republicancontrolled Congress passed legislation that ended the
minority tax-certificate program, which had increased
broadcast ownership by people of color from less than 1
percent to 3 percent.30
In the following years, both Congress and the FCC made
it even more difficult for people of color to own broadcast
stations. Congress passed the 1996 Telecommunications
Act, which deregulated the broadcast industry and
resulted in massive media consolidation. The legislation
increased the number of TV stations a company could own
as long as the combined stations did not exceed 35 percent
of the national audience.31
In 2003, the FCC attempted to weaken its rules and raise
the cap to 45 percent; in a compromise, Congress raised
the cap to 39 percent.32 The agency has also allowed giant
TV conglomerates like Sinclair Broadcast Group — which
owns and operates nearly 200 stations — to exceed its
ownership limits through sham agreements, giving the
company control over stations it doesn’t technically own.33
This rampant deregulation also affected the radio industry:
The 1996 Telecommunications Act also removed the
radio-ownership cap, which had prevented a company
from owning more than 40 stations nationwide. Clear
Channel (now iHeartMedia) went from owning 40 stations
to more than 1,200.34 The consolidation of the broadcast
industry reduced the number of broadcast owners of
color, who could not economically compete with the big
conglomerates.35
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