The South African media has reported the resignation of SABC chief executive Peter Matlare largely as a clash with the ruling party. But as Business Day (January 24) reminded its readers, it may have as much to do with the conflict over how Matlare viewed the corporation’s mission. It seems Matlare emphasised the commercial imperatives of the SABC over its public service interests. “Let the government give us funds and we will deliver on our public mandate,” he is quoted as saying.
Over here, with public television nearly irrelevant, the conflict between public interest and commercial profit on the airwaves plays out most visibly in the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Michael Powell, FCC chairperson, recently announced his resignation, effective this month. The circumstances are slightly different – the US media market dwarfs South Africa’s and the FCC is a regulator, not a broadcaster – but at its core is the fact that, like the SABC, the FCC is an institution meant to look after its country’s citizens—while deeply invested in revenue concerns.
George W. Bush appointed Powell FCC chairman in 2001, when a groundswell for more local control and diversity of the media had begun to unite both the political right and the left. The right complained about indecency on network (free-to-air) television, while the left bemoaned ideological uniformity and exclusion of left-of-center voices in news programming.
Powell began to react in 2002. He gained a reputation for slapping huge fines on network stations for indecency. The FCC leveled a record US$7.7-million in indecency fines in 2004 alone; the year before Powell became chairman, it was only US$48,000.
This endeared Powell to Republicans and the Christian right and heightened election-related talk of a renewed “culture war”. But ultimately Powell may have overreached, or at least lost the confidence of, an Administration that does not seem to believe he is the man to bring about more widespread change.
In mid 2003 the FCC announced new rules for media ownership. The proposed regulations would allow a single company to expand its holdings to own three television stations, eight radio stations, and a cable system, along with a daily newspaper, in the same city. Powell, especially, was at the head of the public campaign to make these changes permanent. He also pushed to ease limits on cable and telephone companies.
But in an unusual show of effective public pressure, at least 2 million Americans sent letters of protest to the FCC and Congress. In June last year a federal Appeals Court in Pennsylvania ordered the FCC to review its media ownership rules.
The big media corporations – mainly the Tribune Company, Fox (owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation), CBS (owned by Viacom Inc.) and NBC (owned by General Electric) – soon announced that they would appeal the Appeals Court decision. The Bush Administration then made it public that it would not join in. The chances of the appeal succeeding now seem less secure.
It is not clear what the Bush White House’s agenda is in the dispute, but the result has been pressure on the FCC to hold more public hearings and bring a halt to the growth of media oligarchs.
But that victory may be temporary, as Bush makes his new appointment soon. One of the favoured candidates is Becky Klein, a former chairwoman of the Texas Public Utility Commission, who failed in her bid for Congress in the November election. In that campaign, she accepted large financial contributions from telecommunications companies. Some commentators reckoned the media companies were hedging their bets.
Back in South Africa, minister of communications Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri recently voiced a rare opinion in the Sunday Times, emphatically stating that the SABC would lose its credibility with citizens if it was perceived as overtly partisan. Makes you wonder who the SABC’s “shareholders” are hedging their own bets on?
Sean Jacobs is The Media’s correspondent in New York.