REMARKS OF COMMISSIONER MICHAEL J. COPPS
FCC FORUM: “INFORMATION NEEDS OF ATLANTA”
ATLANTA, GEORGIA
DECEMBER 1, 2011
Thank you all for coming this evening.  It’s wonderful to be back in Atlanta—and 
to be talking with you again about the future of the media, a conversation you and I began 
with a forum on the media back in 2003.  Tonight is a wonderful opportunity to re-
engage and for me to get up-to-date on what’s been going on more recently.  It’s 
especially nice to be in the home district of Congressman John Lewis, one of our nation’s 
true heroes and a champion of “equal justice for all” over his entire life and consistently 
during his career in the House of Representatives. I want to thank him personally and his 
office for working to make this event possible.  And thanks for his heartfelt message to us 
on the video this evening.  I am also very pleased to be here with my colleague on the 
Federal Communications Commission, Mignon Clyburn, who has proven herself to be an 
ardent defender of the public interest and who has joined in the crusade to get America 
the media it needs to sustain our civic dialogue and enhance our democracy.  I am 
privileged to be with her here tonight and honored to call her friend. And, of course, deep 
thanks go to Georgia Tech for hosting this event and providing us with the facilities to 
convene this important discussion and for all the help they have provided. 
This forum is in one way bittersweet for me because I am set to leave the FCC at 
the end of the month and this will be my last stop outside the Beltway before I take leave 
of Mignon and my other colleagues.  Over my ten years at the Commission, I have made 
it my priority to get out of Washington and engage citizens in conversations on what is 
needed from our media to inform not just this community, but every community across 
the land.  I have participated in dozens and dozens of hearings, town hall gatherings, and 
public forums of all kinds from coast to coast, from huge cities to rural Indian country, 
from south to north and all directions in between. Here is what I have learned: That 
people want more from the media than they are getting. That you and your neighbor and 
the person down the street have serious concerns about the media you are receiving on a 
daily basis. That the huge cut-backs we have seen in newsrooms and the number of 
journalists plying their trade is not serving democracy well.  That something valuable and 
precious has gone missing.  And that a lot of people—millions of people—want to repair 
what’s broken.
A number of years ago, the then-Chairman of the FCC wanted to loosen our 
media ownership rules that limited the number of stations one company could own.  It 
was an absolutely horrible idea, highly detrimental to diversity of voices and viewpoints, 
damaging to the preservation of localism and to the advancement of competition that our 
media so desperately needs. But I was told that nobody outside the confines of 
Washington, DC, really cared—it was all too technical, too arcane for people to get 
involved in. Just let the FCC handle it.  Well, my fellow Commissioner at the time, 
Jonathan Adelstein and I begged to differ, and we took to the road and we attended 
hearing after hearing long into the night listening to the people, hearing their concerns, 
and suddenly we saw around us a movement building for a better media. And three 
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million people contacted the Commission and the Congress saying Chairman Powell’s 
rules were exactly the wrong thing to do. So the Senate voted to disapprove what was 
rammed through the Commission in spite of the popular outcry; the House was debating 
it; and then the Third Circuit Court told us the rules were flawed in substance and flawed 
in process.  Who says citizen action can’t count—even in these times when so few people 
wield so much outrageous power?  You just try to tell John Lewis that grassroots 
movements don’t work!  
To make a long story short, here’s what went wrong with media. The story has a 
private sector part and a public sector part.  For thirty years and more, private sector 
media consolidation has seen broadcast outlets bought up by the hundreds, as a few 
mega-media companies gobbled up small, local, independent outlets and created huge 
empires where they could standardize programming, cut back on what Wall Street 
considered non-essential parts of their business—like spending on hard news and 
reflecting the diversity of their communities of service—all the while trying to show the 
captains of finance that they were subservient to the bottom line and the quarterly report.  
Stakeholders—that’s the people the stations are supposed to serve—to the back of the 
bus, stockholders to the front, became the new modus operandi.  It was, and is, a far cry 
from the original broadcaster commitment to serve the public interest in return for free 
use of the people’s airwaves.  The result has been hundreds of newsrooms shuttered, 
thousands of reporters walking the street in search of a job rather than walking the beat in 
search of a story, and true investigative journalism on the endangered species list.  Real 
news too often replaced by glitzy entertainment, hard facts by shouted opinions, and local 
and regional music by stultifying, creativity-killing playlists and national music 
homogeneity.  Even those station owners who tried to resist—and there were many who 
did, and still do, strive to do their job—even they came under incredible pressure to cave.  
It made it much harder for them to do their job and to be the good stewards of the public 
airwaves that many still want to be. Still today the speculative fires burn on—and our 
democracy suffers.  
To make this the perfect storm, the private sector debacle was blessed, even 
encouraged, by the public sector.  This is the saddest part of the story.  The place where I 
work—the Federal Communications Commission—was at the center of it all, blessing the 
consolidation tsunami, seldom finding a merger they didn’t like, and then making things 
even worse by eliminating almost all of the public interest guidelines and enforcement 
that we once had on the books—rules and procedures that had been fought for and won 
by generations of media reformers.  And when the Internet and the promise of new media 
came along, the two previous FCCs helped the big companies travel down the same 
misguided road that radio, TV and cable had gone down—consolidation blessed by 
government, no real public interest oversight, and access to perhaps the most dynamic 
and opportunity-creating technology ever devised put into the hands of a few huge 
telecommunications giants.  
New media offers tremendous opportunities but it is not on auto-pilot to rescue us 
from the wreckage of traditional media.  There could be a wonderful new town square of 
democracy there, paved with broadband bricks.  But, truth be told, 90-95% of the news 
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we read on the Internet still originates from the traditional newspaper and television 
newsrooms.  It’s just that there’s so much less of it than there used to be.  While there are 
any number of interesting experiments and innovations taking place on the Internet, so far 
there is no model to support the kind of resources that online journalism would require if 
it is ever going to replace all the journalism that has been lost over the past three decades.  
So it is that we find ourselves at the present moment with radio and TV news and 
information shells of their former selves, shilling programs that encourage a dumbed-
down civic dialogue based too often on fluff.  Democracy is not well-served by fluff. 
A well-informed electorate is the premise and prerequisite of functioning self-
government.  Right now, your country and mine faces deadly serious challenges.  Our 
economy founders; our global competitiveness has lost its edge; nearly a fifth of the 
workforce is un- or under-employed; our education lags and our teachers suffer as much 
as the kids; and 50 million Americans have no health insurance.  If we don’t have a 
media that can dig for facts, cover the beats, separate fact from opinion, and hold the 
powerful accountable, then tell me please how in the world are we going to meet and 
master these challenges?  How are we ever going to overcome?  To me, getting our 
journalism and our media right is Step Number One in getting our democracy right.
There’s a real irony here.  When the actions of government weaken the Fourth 
Estate, as has happened over these past three decades, there is less of a check on 
government itself. The estimable David Simon, creator of the The Wire and former 
journalist at the Baltimore Sun hit the nail on the head when he said, “The next 10 or 15 
years in this country are going to be a halcyon era for state and local political 
corruption.” It will take a lot more vibrant and vigilant journalism than we have now to 
keep that from happening.
But it’s not just the accountability stories or the “things-gone-wrong” stories that 
need to be told.  There’s good news out there, too—although we don’t get to see very 
much of it on TV.  As Congressman Lewis pointed out, you live in a diverse community, 
with lots of people doing lots of interesting, and lots of often very good, things.   How 
often do these stories manage to get through the “if it bleeds, it leads” mentality that 
seems to dictate so much of our present-day “news”?   I’m a strong believer that if we 
want more diversity in our stories, if we want to understand what’s really going on in our 
communities, then we need more diversity in who owns our media outlets.  But here’s the 
reality of ownership diversity: in a nation that is now almost one-third minority, people of 
color hold only about 3.6% of full-power commercial TV stations?  So maybe we 
shouldn’t really be surprised that what we see on our media doesn’t even come close to 
what’s actually happening in our communities.  Talk about an area where the 
Commission needs to take some positive actions to break down barriers!
There are so many abuses out there.  Here’s another example: some broadcasters 
are doing end-runs around our media ownership limits by way of so-called “shared 
services agreements”—a fancy term for covert consolidation that lets one company 
control another without actually formally owning it.  It’s something we should not 
tolerate.  But, just last week, our Media Bureau actually dismissed a complaint against 
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such a shared service agreement, even while admitting that the arrangement was at odds 
with the purpose and intent of our rules on duopolies.  Go figure.  I guess we’ll get 
around to it later, but it just seemed to me that this might be a case where we should have 
acted on behalf of the public interest instead of kicking the can down the road.
There is one final issue I would like to address.  It’s about all those political ads 
we are subjected to on TV and the lack of clarity and transparency that surrounds them. 
Get ready—we’ve got 11 months ahead of us with political ad saturation bombing like 
we’ve never seen before.  We are not well-served when those who are attempting to 
manipulate our political dialogue and determine election outcomes through these ads can 
disguise themselves and hide behind misleading names. If a group calling itself “Citizens 
for Purple Mountain Majesties” is in reality the mouthpiece of a company that is refusing 
to clean up a toxic dump or is spewing pollution into one of the Great Lakes, don’t 
citizens have a right to know that?  Yes, I said “a right.”  Open government can only exist 
where people and groups trying to influence elections stand up and tell us who they are 
and who is footing the bill for these ads.  That’s not happening nearly often enough.  The 
fissures in our democracy can only widen if anonymous money retains its unchecked 
influence in our elections.  The FCC has the authority to do something about this right 
now.  It’s time to use that authority.  It’s time to require fuller sponsorship identification 
of the special interests that are bank-rolling so many of the ads we all watch all the time.   
I’ll leave you with this.  Forty years in Washington have convinced me that while 
some change can come from the top down, real change comes from the grassroots up.  It 
comes because the people demand it and mobilize to make it happen.  Abraham Lincoln 
was a great President—but there would have been no Emancipation proclamation without 
the abolitionists and other reformers who demanded action.  Franklin Roosevelt is my 
personal hero—but there would have been no social security and other New Deal 
programs without labor organization and a host of other reform advocates pressing him to 
move ahead.  John F. Kennedy came to support civil rights—but there would have been 
no such conversion without Martin Luther King and John Lewis and a host of other 
heroes and crusaders who led and marched in the cause of freedom.   It’s no different in 
our time.  Here in media democracy is a cause that goes to the roots of self-government, 
an issue that just about every other issue depends upon if we really are going to 
overcome.  
So I hope when you leave here tonight, you’ll answer the call.  You’ll talk to your 
families and friends about this.  You’ll speak out, write, sing, maybe even march.  Tell 
the FCC what you think, but don’t stop there.  Tell all those who make public policy what 
you think.  As for me, I may be leaving the Commission soon, but I can guarantee you 
this:  I intend to keep speaking out and working hard on this challenge.  It’s too important 
to stop now.  It’s too important for you not to be involved.  We can do this.  We can make 
it happen.  And then, as citizens united, we will realize the dream of media of, by and for 
the American people.  Media democracy—I love the sound of it, don’t you?
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