FCC Tests Reception for Lifting Owner Limits
Roadshow Gets Lots of Corporate Static
By Marc Fisher
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 28, 2003; Page C01
RICHMOND, Feb. 27 -- Somewhere out here, way beyond the Beltway, where
the real America lives, are the People, the mythic folk for whom
Washington toils. And despite the snow and the ice, the four men and one
woman of the Federal Communications Commission traveled today to find
those People and to glean from them just how ticked off or tickled they
might be about the bland pap or the fine entertainment that they watch on
TV and listen to on the radio.
The commissioners slipped and slid their way to Virginia's capital to
give the public its one chance to stand before them and instruct the feds
on whether it really matters if one company owns most of the radio
stations in town, or if a handful of companies control nearly every show
on TV. By May, the commission expects to decide whether to lift all
remaining restrictions on media ownership.
Do the People care who owns their TV and radio stations, who feeds them
their media gruel? By midday, 195 of the People had made their way to the
convention center here. One hundred nineteen of them were white men in
suits; many of those men were grumbling about the trip down from
Washington. Twenty-two people were scheduled to address the commission;
13 of them had traveled here from the District.
But Anthony Mazza and his friends had made it in from Philadelphia, where
they have grown so tired of bland broadcast fare that they attached
cardboard TV set frames to their heads and sat in the hearing room
wearing blue lab coats -- their protest against 500 channels of nothing
to watch.
"Listeners are turning off the radio in huge numbers and the media
companies don't care," Mazza says, "because the only thing that
matters to them is getting their share of whatever audience there
is." Mazza, 30 and unemployed, has a show on Radio Volta, a small
community station in Philadelphia that lets him play everything from
hard-core hip-hop to old country songs to swing-era jazz. It's all his
choice, radio the way it used to be, one person programming for whoever
might listen.
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