The FCC and Infectious Disease Containment: How Are These Things Related?
Why should people care about terrestrial radio and television when we have the internet?
Hello welcome back to TracingVRL, originally TracingCOVID, the software-journalism project tracing the infodemic going ViRaL. Don’t miss the next free issue:
In my most recent newsletter I wrote that possible deregulation of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) TV ownership caps was more urgent and important than every other news item happening today. But I imagine many people asking: why do FCC rules matter at a time like this?
In 2017, fires were burning and killing people in Northern California. Getting news about this through the laptop or the phone was distressing to the point of being debilitating, so my household bought a digital antenna for a TV we put in the kitchen.
And whoa, we found the TV to be a far better way to get news updates in such a situation, for a few reasons. We could have it on in the background as we ate breakfast. It brought *local news* and a local perspective. Where the national reporters were earning accolades for prestige pyromania, like beautiful photographs of pyrocumulonimbus clouds and delivering heartfelt stories of lives lost, the local news stations ran stories in the local public interest. Like what roads were blocked by fire evacuations, and which areas had contained the fire. This helped us plan our routes to get to work that day.
The local public interest. Imagine that. We have a lot of news sources right now but most have zero public interest obligation by law.
The 1934 Communications Act created the FCC and gave it a mandate (see www.fcc.gov/media/radio/public-and-broadcasting#FCC ) :
In exchange for obtaining a valuable license to operate a broadcast station using the public airwaves, each radio and television licensee is required by law to operate its station in the “public interest, convenience and necessity.” Generally, this means it must air programming that is responsive to the needs and problems of its local community of license. To do this, each non-exempt station licensee must identify the needs and problems and then specifically treat these local matters in the news, public affairs, political and other programming that it airs. As discussed in more detail further in this Manual, each commercial station – and most noncommercial stations – must provide the public with information about how it has met its obligation in a quarterly report.
This may seem unfair, since the internet now exists, and newsletter writers like me are not held to these standards.
But should we abolish old standards, or implement new standards? Right now we have a lot of locationless news. As a newsletter writer, most of the best sources I find are the websites of TV and radio stations—affiliates of ABC News, affiliates of NBC News, affiliates of CBS News, and local affiliates even of FOX News provide good reportage. And there’s a reason for that.
Local affiliates give actionable specifics. They make things real.
Here is how one historian explains what happens in other countries that lead them into that dulling trance of authoritarianism. Tim Snyder here was commenting on the Russian misinfo cyberattack during the 2016 presidential elections::
The Russian attack on the US took place primarily through the media. And it gives us a chance to ask what has actually happened to our media in the last decade.
In fact even the fact that I’m using the word media, and you’re all nodding your head media media we’re thinking we use the word media … that itself reveals the basic problem.
Because what has happened we’ve shifted from being a country where there were lots of regional and local newspapers which provided you know an imperfect but nevertheless a shaded a variegated a specific view of daily life of people. We’ve shifted from that to something else. We’ve shifted to this place where there is one media. And we’re for it or against it. Or whatever.
I mean something very specific here. A decade ago, the US still had a great deal more local press than it did now. In the late 2000s the local press began to suffer. After the financial crisis of 2008, roughly 40 newspaper men and women were laid off every day. On average. In 2009. By 2010, the industry had basically cratered. Now why does this matter so much? Why does it matter that there is not a local newspaper here or a regional newspaper there?
It means that people shift from thinking of “journalism” as something done by people who they know. Because they see them at the city council meeting or they see them at the PTA or whatever. People shift from that idea that journalism as about life. To another idea. Which is that there’s not really journalism. There’s just the media. There’s just television. There are the networks.
And what do the networks cover? This is important.
Networks cover international news. They cover what happens on the coasts. They cover DC. They cover NY. They cover LA. If you’re in Oklahoma, and you’re watching one of the networks your face appears pretty much only when there is a natural disaster. Now that’s a slight exaggeration but it gets at an important truth.
When you clear away the local news, what you’re doing is you’re opening the way for the fake news. Because if journalism starts to become the media it starts to become something distant and abstract something not about you, you’re only one step away from beginning to believe the things that really aren’t true. Right? If news becomes distant, then the next step is the news becomes fake.
Now why does this have to do with Russia? Because amazingly the same thing happened in Russia just a few years before. There is also not local news in Russia. There is also not regional news in Russia. The way Russian news works is everything is huddled around a few television stations. And the television stations give Russians all across that massive country an idea of who the enemies and the friends are. An idea of what the conspiracies are supposed to be.
We’re not there yet. But its striking how getting rid of the local news makes us just a little bit more like Russia than perhaps we think we are. Which brings us to the problem of television in itself.
I’ll have more to say about this in future newsletters. But without local news, national news becomes a blur. Everything becomes “one man’s fault” as I heard a local virologist say last week.
I hope this helps bring to light that local news is what we need to bring to life. We have limitless news right now, but little of it is tied to a physical region, and little of it is legally obligated to serve the public interest. TV and radio is an exception. Remember that.