There’s a prevailing view on broadcast regulation in the developed world: the only justification for it is when the market can’t provide enough competition. Over in the US and the EU, governments have long held that any intervention beyond cutting the media monopolies down to size is plain ‘unthinkable’. And since it’s obvious to them that the best environment for growth is a deregulated environment, these governments imagine and expect that the rest of the world will follow suit.
Did they figure we’d miss the little detail that they’re not even regulating competition anymore?
With respect, it’s no big surprise that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has recently given the top-tier global media giants official permission to eat one another. Following the passing of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 a watershed statute removing barriers to consolidation in the telecommunications, media and information industries the US regulator has allowed acquisitive media conglomerates to do their thing and has instead concentrated on censoring offensive speech and harassing rap stars. This has culminated in Eminem singing: “The FCC won’t let me be/ Or let me be me so let me see/ They tried to shut me down on MTV/ But it feels so empty without me.”
It seems the FCC is reimbursing the American public for killing any hope of media diversity by protecting them from profanity.
Against this background, our regulator is doing rather well. This month’s cover story highlights ICASA chairperson Mandla Langa’s even-handed commitment to both plurality and industry growth. As implied in the article, South African media owners will probably call for an upward adjustment to foreign ownership limitations in their submissions to the Discussion Paper but they’ll be doing so in full knowledge that ICASA well understands the dangers of too liberal an adjustment. ICASA also has a strong position on empowerment and the local consolidation issue. Belinda Anderson reminds us in her feature story on NAIL, Kagiso and AME that these imperatives have been at odds in the past.
Again, it’s got to be a good thing that Mandla Langa sees the challenge of regulation as one of “consolidation versus constellation.” If he ever gets swayed by the example of the FCC and drops the latter from the equation, we could have Mandoza rifling through the dictionary for words that rhyme with ICASA.