Communications Daily Media Update on UCLA Speech

Former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt was expected to urge the FCC to eliminate the newspaper broadcast cross-ownership rule in a speech he was scheduled to give at UCLA Wednesday night, according to a Hundt spokeswoman, who provided a copy of the speech to us. In it, Hundt says the FCC's enforcement of cross-ownership rules has become "an exercise in intellectual contortions that persuade on-lookers that the Commission is acting in an arbitrary fashion." Hundt says the numerous other ways that consumers get access to media have made the rules outdated, and also said they don't serve the goal of promoting minority media ownership. "Anyone who believes that a ban on print and broadcast combinations promotes minority ownership need only look to the bidding wars that arise among non-minority companies when a media property becomes available," he said. Hundt says the rule has become "perverse" in denying struggling newspapers access to broadcaster capital. "If a profitable broadcaster wants to buy a newspaper in its city - to expand the amount of attention it can obtain from an audience or just to have more impact on the way people think - the FCC should welcome this extra support for the trouble-plagued newspaper industry." In the speech, Hundt denounces the Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch, but says he can't imagine "any government in a truly free country" doing anything to stop them from buying "the Los Angeles Times, or any newspaper, or any media outlet of any kind." Hundt says "the cure for awful speech is an awful lot of money," and he advocates eliminating cross-ownership rules as a way of increasing participation in the sale of newspapers like the Times. "I can imagine that some person as progressive in politics as I am, but of course vastly richer, might want to assemble a broadcast-TV combination that increased audiences for both, expanded news coverage on television, and built a better Web presence than either a newspaper or a TV station can do on its own," says Hundt. "One of the glories of the United States - one of the many things that make our system better than the system in China or Russia - is that we truly do believe in free speech," he says in the speech. "When applied to media, that means we should honor the freedom to own the means of speech.