I had the pleasure of interviewing media reform activist Sue Wilson, producer of the documentary Broadcast Blues, which she'll screen in eight Wisconsin communities this September.
Wilson sees Broadcast Blues not just as a movie, but as the beginning of a movement. She's asking fed-up viewers and listeners to monitor the content of talk radio so that “We the People” can make formal complaints to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in November 2012, when the agency will hear from Wisconsin citizens about our views on local radio programming. Wisconsinites will be able to comment on local TV programming in November 2013.
To learn more about Wilson's work and her media reform tour, go to SueWilsonReports.com.
I was only able to fit a fraction of our conversation in this week's Shepherd, so here's the full interview:
Shepherd: You've had a long career in broadcasting. So why did you decide to make a documentary about its problems?
Wilson: Because I have had such a long career in news. I worked under the Fairness Doctrine way back in the day. I have witnessed how very good journalism, very good broadcasting, has deteriorated over 30 years. We got rid of the Fairness Doctrine, which wasn't entirely bad, but they kind of thought that they threw out the public interest obligation with the bath water. In fact, we do still have the public interest obligation, which is lovely.
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But I also witnessed—especially when the 1996 Telecommunications Act went through under the Clinton administration: I saw what happened to radio. I saw how we went almost overnight from a country that had very good local broadcasting, that had real debate and real discourse on our public airwaves, to a system that is corporate owned [and] that blocked out any views that weren't just one, right-wing side. I could see it happening in real time.
Shepherd: You worked when the Fairness Doctrine was in effect. How did that work? Did you have to give equal time to opposing points of view? Did it silence conservative voices, as the right-wing pundits claim it did?
Wilson: In real life you didn't have to give any equal time. You just had to try to do so. I was working in the public affairs division of the CBS-owned and -operated station in Los Angeles, KCBS-TV. In those days every station had a public affairs division—or they called them community affairs—and they would do programs to serve the community. In one case I produced a show called “At Issue,” which as it sounds, you would take an issue and create a debate around it. I would have to try to get both sides. If I could not get both sides I could go with the one side and say, “I tried, they wouldn't do it.” I'd have to fill out a form and state who I called and who I tried to get on the show.
Here's what's important about that form. A lot of people thought that the FCC would come back at you. In real life that form did go to the FCC but more importantly it went in the public file. There are still public files today for people to look at. There isn't a whole lot of meat in those public files anymore. But let's say I did a show and someone in the community came up and said, “Hey, you did a show that's purely a pro-choice show, you should have had an anti-abortion activist on the show.” It would completely be within their rights to go to the station and look in the file and see if I tried to do that. If I had a show and said, “These are the 18 people I tried to get on the show for the anti-abortion side,” then I'm safe. It really had to do with the effort to try to create a real conversation.
That said, legally broadcasters are still required to serve in the public interest in exchange for getting a license to broadcast. So what I'm doing is saying, those rules still stand. The trick is neither the FCC nor the federal government will tell us what the public interest obligations are so we're making them up on our own. It's up to us to tell the broadcasters and the FCC what we want.
Shepherd: I get tons of emails from conservatives saying liberals are going to reinstate the fairness doctrine to silence conservative voices on the airwaves. How true is this?
Wilson: Now, why are you getting so many emails? Could it be because Sean Hannity has spent four years on our public airwaves talking to 14 million people telling them this stuff? When there has been no credible attempt on the left to reinstate it? In fact, Obama said when he was running for election that we're not going to reinstate it. I think that is why they got rid of the Fairness Doctrine a couple of weeks ago once and for all—to silence this nonsense that was coming from the right, in order to stir up people.
Shepherd: I also get a ton of emails from conservatives saying that if people wanted liberal radio we'd have it. But listeners don't want it.
Wilson: Not true. Not true. In fact, I saw it right here in my hometown of Sacramento, which is the town that launched Rush Limbaugh. KFBK, which launched Rush, is a 50,000-watt station. That means that that signal reaches all the way from Lake Tahoe all the way to Sacramento to San Francisco, from the Oregon border to Modesto. It reaches about 10 million people. And Rush was pulling a 7 rating.
Now, little-bitty Air America station gets this tiny little 1,000-watt station… This is something you have to understand: all of the progressive stations, they got the crumbs that were left over from the banquet because the big stations that really are powerful were bought up by the right wing. So here's little-bitty Air America, a 1,000-watt radio station, they're pulling a 1.7 rating. That's 1.7 and they can only reach less than a million people. Let's extrapolate that out. If they were reaching 10 times as many people on that big station like Rush I would venture to say they'd be getting a 17 rating instead of a [Rush's] 7.
There's also economies of scale. Meaning, you can walk into most markets and you'll find that one company like Clear Channel owns seven different stations in the same town. Which means they have one sales crew going out and selling all these seven stations. They have fewer engineers. Their costs go down by virtue of economies of scale and having so many stations. So you have a little-bitty 1,000-watt station, not only are they smaller in terms of who they can reach, but they have as many costs as the guy running the seven stations, because they have to have engineers and a sales staff. It's very difficult to compete in a fair market when the odds are stacked so far against you.
There's also research on this, that in the 2008 election, we were seeing shows like Ed Schultz that were doing very well being taken off the air, and then getting replaced by shows getting half the ratings. So what's that about? Is it about ratings? It's not about ratings.
Shepherd: Why is it so important to ensure that the voices on the public airwaves provide some balance, as opposed to monitoring the content of, for example, newspapers?
Wilson: We have a very special, unique ownership of the broadcast airwaves. The reason for that is that there are only so many frequencies. If you look at your television dial, you can only have just a few TV stations in any one town. And that's for scientific reasons. There are only so many frequencies over which those signals can broadcast. Same with radio. Because of that scarcity, that is why the public has the ownership and theoretically the power to say, “This is what we want in our communities.”
Anybody can start a newspaper. If you have the money, you can find a building and hire some reporters and find a printing press and inside of 30 days you can have a newspaper. There's no legal means, there's no First Amendment issues in newspapers. You might have to have quite a few dollars to do it, but anybody can do it.
Not so with broadcasting. You can't just walk into the Milwaukee market right now and say, “I'm going to start a radio station to compete with Journal Communications.” You can't do it because the frequencies were snapped up in 1996 by these big corporations that knew just what they were doing. I don't think Clinton knew what he was signing. He has since said that that was one of the worst things that he did.
But in any case it's really important for people to understand that there is no market in radio. The right wing will tell us this is all market driven. No, no, no. This is not market driven.
Shepherd: In Broadcast Blues, you showed how difficult it is to lodge a complaint with the FCC about a station, or file a petition to deny a license renewal.
Wilson: The FCC is so completely worthless. The [commissioners] spent their entire careers with the corporations and licensing the corporations but really not thinking much about the public interest—with the exception of Michael Copps, who is the FCC rock star commissioner who also will be leaving at the end of this congressional term. But at the end of the day the FCC is also something that we are going to be dealing with.
This is something that's important for people to know all over the country. These license renewals come up once every eight years—only once every eight years. That renewal process has actually started and in fact right now North and South Carolina will have an opportunity just for the next couple of months to complain about the radio stations. Then they won't have another opportunity for the next eight years.
You've got these opportunities to formally complain, to launch petitions to deny licenses, but you have to make them by a certain date. For Wisconsin, for your radio side, Wisconsin and Illinois, that date is Nov. 1, 2012.
What I'm doing is setting up a website where people can complain to my website. [For more information, visit SueWilsonReports.com.] I will then send the information to the FCC, but also to the local affiliate that you're complaining about, to the owner, the corporate owner, and we'll be monitoring it for those really egregious times. A big one we're looking for is incitement to violence, quite frankly, because how do you define hate speech? There certainly is a lot of hate speech on the radio. But we feel like if we get a true incitement to violence, we'll file a lawsuit. But you've got this deadline, Nov. 1, 2012. You'll be able to complain about your local TV stations by Nov. 1, 2013.
Shepherd: So outside of that period there's no way to complain to the FCC?
Wilson: That's what we're trying to enable. I'm setting up a new group and a new website and we're calling it Media Action Center. Because, quite frankly, when the public complains to the FCC, it falls on deaf ears. It falls into a black hole.
Part of what I'm trying to do is to educate people that we own the public airwaves and we have been absentee landlords for too long and it is time for us as the collective “We the People” to start making noise. This does not mean just sending emails.
At the end of the day we've got to start local community by local community, No. 1, determining what you need in Milwaukee. I don't live in Milwaukee. I can give you some good ideas. But it requires the folks in Milwaukee to get together and say, “This is what we're lacking and our community would be so much better served if we had the following from local radio and local TV.” And then to make an appointment with the station manager and say, “This is what we want.” You find a lot of times that local management, that could be a guy you went to high school with. These are usually not bad people. They're usually people who love radio. There's a reason they're in radio. And some of the older ones remember a day when it was much, much better, but they work for these big corporations now that are giving the orders.
If you got a report from a local media group saying, “Here's what we've been monitoring. We did 60 days before the Scott Walker recall election, here's what we discovered,” that starts to have real teeth. That starts to have weight.
If this is really going to change, it's going to take team leaders on the ground in Wisconsin listening to what I'm saying, following this plan and working it, and giving the stuff to me to publicize as best as I can. But it really is going to take people on the ground who get it and will go to the stations to say, “We want this.”
Now if the stations ignore us completely—let's say there's this rogue station that really wants to do this right-wing crap—yes, we can do protests, we can boycott sponsors. We can file petitions to deny licenses. We can be the burr in the broadcasters' saddle. Or not. The public interest is just that. They are the public airwaves, not the Republican airwaves. It's really important for people to grasp that and for the stations to grasp that we grasp that. They really have been trying to hide that fact for a very long time.
I think what's lacking in this whole conversation is “We the People.” “We the People” didn't realize that we had any power in this. We've just been spoon-fed by the corporations that [say], “Here's the radio that you get, and if there was a market for liberal radio, we'd give it to you.” Actually, that's such a bogus argument. But what's more important is that people have got to start taking back the ownership of what we already own. They just don't want us to know that we own it. They want to think that they own it. But we own it. It's ours and we've got to start fighting for it.
My experience is that this message plays best in the most conservative areas. And the reason, I think, is that in San Francisco or New York they just kind of yawn. Why is that? They get all kinds of information as it is. The airwaves are not as peppered with right wing than in the conservative areas. And in every area across the country there are people who vote blue and pink. This is a purple country.
But we find that in the more conservative areas like Milwaukee there is a seething anger. People know that their voices are being shut out but they just don't know if there's anything they can do about it. But legally there is.
And guess what. The Supreme Court is on our side. That's the best part. They have to be tested, but the law of the land is Red Lion Broadcasting vs. The FCC, which is a 1969 case where the Supreme Court said there's a First Amendment aspect to broadcasting. But it is the interest of the viewer and the listener which is paramount, not the broadcaster.
That said it's the Supreme Court who decided that its us, the people, who own the airwaves, it's our First Amendment rights that we're talking about. Not the broadcaster, who says we can say whatever we want. Nope. Actually you [the broadcasters] have to serve the viewers and listeners in your community. That means all of the viewers and listeners.
Shepherd: You show in Broadcast Blues that the corporatization of the media doesn't just affect politics, but entertainment, too.
Wilson: It isn't just politics. I grew up in the Midwest. I grew up in Fargo and spent a lot of time in Minnesota. Do you guys get tornado warnings on all of your stations? That's a question I'm going to be asking because I get calls from people saying, “We don't get tornado warnings anymore.” Every single radio station in town should get a tornado warning. Every single station should be broken into and they should say “There's been a tornado sighted 16 miles northeast of Wausau,” or whatever it is.
But it's very difficult to do that because the radio airwaves have been corporatized. They're all broadcasting out of San Antonio and it's very difficult to get local information to the local people. But they should figure out a way. I don't care if you're listening to the news talk show or if you're listening to hip-hop driving down the road. Maybe you are getting them on all of your radio stations. We're putting together a survey to try to determine that.
[Corporatization] reaches so many things. Even the idea of local musicians. Young people are always coming to me and saying, “We have a band and we can't get anyone to play our music because the only player is Clear Channel.” So you've got six guys in suits deciding what the stations are playing all across the country. And if you don't play nice with Clear Channel you don't get your music aired.
Even Bruce Springsteen—we had a contract with Bruce to have one of his songs in Broadcast Blues. Only a couple months later he went, “Oh, oh. I'm going to tour with my new album and I can't afford to tee off Clear Channel, and this movie is going to tee off Clear Channel and I can't do it.” So he reneged on the contract.
Then my husband had written the theme song for the film. We knew some musicians in Nashville and said, “Could you record this for us?” and they called us and said, “If we did it we'd have to do it anonymously because we're just getting started and Clear Channel will ruin our careers if we record this song.”
So we have put together the anonymous Don't Tell Clear Channel Band and we'll reveal it at some point who's in that band but not at this point.
Wilson will screen Broadcast Blues at the Mequon Unitarian Church North on Wednesday, Sept. 21; at the First Unitarian Society in Milwaukee on Thursday, Sept. 22; at the Lake Country Unitarian Universalist Church in Hartland on Friday, Sept. 23; and at the Olympia Brown Unitarian Universalist Church Adult R.E. Committee in Racine on Saturday, Sept. 24. For details on times and locations, go to SueWilsonReports.com.
