Kevin Martin’s Betrayal of this Nation’s Most Basic Principles
December 21st, 2007 by Gordon Cook
I grew up believing in an America that i can no longer recognize. War Department films that informed the public during World War II of the struggle to save Europe from the darkness of facism and nazism were given to my father at the end of the war by the War Department. Beginning in 1949, when i was 6 years old, my father taught me how to view these 16 mm black and white sound films on the Bell & Howell “filmo-sounds” he sold to Florida public schools. The films were my television from age 6 to 14 when the first TV arrived in the house. They gave me my interest in history and a pride that the documents on which this nation was founded truly meant something. One of the films ended with the Gettysburg Address. ” . .dedicated to the great task remaining before us . . . . ” that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
In the fifties the villains seemed to be the Russians. They claimed they had a constitution, but somehow we all knew that “what they claimed” meant nothing. The law was whatever Stalin said it was and to change something, all it took was a middle of the night call to Poskrebyshev, his personal secretary. Our laws are now made in a similar fashion in the middle of the night.
The way that Kevin Martin makes policy at the FCC is instructive. A year ago, running into a time deadline, to allow an appropriately sycophantic ATT to swallow Bell South Martin sent Copps and Adelstein out of town believing that ATT had agreed to an enforceable version of net neutrality. Then the last thing the duplicitous Martin did was to hand in HIS opinion proudly proclaiming that he would never enforce what he lead Copps to believe he’d agreed to. I commented here on all this in great detail. More available here.
Copps Has had Enough
On December 19th, 2007 the FCC majority made a ruling approving further media consolidation. This link will grab the PDF of Copps dissent where in places that I don’t quote below he notes how last minute changes in the ruling that the commissioners were asked to rule on where made in revisions emailed to them in the middle of the night.
Cook’s Edge: I am glad we have a few public servants who still take Lincoln’s words seriously. Namely that this a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
Quoting Copps: Today’s decision would make George Orwell proud. We claim to be giving the news industry a shot in the arm-but the real effect is to reduce total newsgathering. We shed crocodile tears for the financial plight of newspapers-yet the truth is that newspaper profits are about double the S&P 500 average. We pat ourselves on the back for holding six field hearings across the United States-yet today’s decision turns a deaf ear to the thousands of Americans who waited in long lines for an open mike to testify before us. We say we have closed loopholes-yet we have introduced new ones. We say we are guided by public comment-yet the majority’s decision is overwhelmingly opposed by the public as demonstrated in our record and in public opinion surveys. We claim the mantle of scientific research-even as the experts say we’ve asked the wrong questions, used the wrong data, and reached the wrong conclusions. Unquote
Snip
Quote: Our motivations are less Olympian and our methodology far simpler-we generously ask big media to sit on Santa’s knee, tell us what it wants for Christmas, and then push through whatever of these wishes are politically and practically feasible. No test to see if anyone’s been naughty or nice. Just another big, shiny present for the favored few who already hold an FCC license-and a lump of coal for the rest of us. Happy holidays!
If you need convincing of just how non-expertly this expert agency has been acting lately, you couldn’t have a better example than the formulation of the cross-ownership rule that the majority is adopting today. I know it’s a little detailed to see how the sausage is made, but it’s worth a listen.
On November 2, 2007-with just a week’s notice-the FCC announced that it would hold its final media ownership hearing in Seattle. Despite the minimal warning, 1,100 citizens turned out to give intelligent and impassioned testimony on how they believed the agency should write its media ownership rules. Little did they know that the fix was already in, and that the now infamous New York Times op-ed was in the works announcing a highly-detailed cross-ownership proposal. Unquote
Cook’s Edge: Read the full text and judge for yourself the contempt in which this Republican administration and its puppet FCC majority holds this government of the people, by the people, for the people. The White House and Kevin Martin have betrayed the most basic principles that Lincoln extolled at Gettysburg and made Lincoln’s words a sham.