Take Back the Air Waves!
A May Day
Message to the FCC: "We are Many; They are Few"
By IAIN BOAL
Text of remarks delivered at
the Federal Communications Commission Hearing on Media Ownership Rules
at the City Hall, San Francisco, Saturday April 27th, 2003.
My
name is Iain Boal. I am a historian of science and technics, with a
longtime interest both in radio and in the history of enclosure and
privatization. I have stood once before in such a room, some eight years
ago, in Washington DC, during the effort to derail the Telecommunications
Act of 1996, which quite predictably led to a vast plunder of the public
airwaves.
The jackals are back again - this
time to scavenge for what is left of the carcass. The hearings were a
travesty then; now they have the makings of a farce. There is only one
commissioner here today; Chairman Powell has not seen fit to show himself
to the people of Northern California. Nor have the rest of the commission.
None of the corporate interests poised to profit from the new ruling has
bothered to show up either; the fix is already in. They should know; they
paid for it.
The people, on the other hand,
have turned up, and in some numbers; the hall is full to overflowing. This
public comment period is, it might be said, just another ludicrous symptom
of the grotesque constriction of the public realm, a parody of the network
soundbite - the polyphony of voices reduced to videotaped snatches of vox
pop in a broom closet (for viewing "later" by the FCC), to
invitations to "fill out" 3 by 5 postcards, to one hundred and
twenty seconds of "feedback" permitted at this microphone - no
doubt a veritable eternity in the context of Viacom and Clear Channel
programming. Our moderator was about right when she called these
proceedings, quite without irony, ''your two cents worth".
But despite the elements of
farce, and in the wake of the predictable looting of public assets
sanctioned by the 1996 Act, there is finally a movement building of people
who well understand what is happening here, and what is at stake. The FCC
is not the cause of this disaster; in its current condition it is just
another symptom. For that reason I do not address the FCC or other
specialists in capitalist regulation. I just want to say one thing, as we
approach Mayday, to those both inside this chamber and those locked
outside in the hallway, to those listening on KPOO and KPFA, and to all
who intend harm to the system of state-sponsored private tyrannies that
calls itself "free enterprise", that even dares to call itself
"democracy".
The flourishing of life in this
city, in this country and, I dare say, around the planet, now depends on
the reappropriation of the commons, and that includes - because the means
of communication without limits is the very condition of possibility of
all else - the seizing back of the electromagnetic spectrum, the de-commodification
of the airwaves. Affected as we all were this morning by the eloquent
testimony of Professor Bagdikian, dean of critics of media monopolization,
what really is the difference between a mediascape owned by twenty or six
or two masters? Another degree of oligopoly is hardly the point.
Regulation at this stage is disreputable; it is like demanding regulation
of the slave-quarters, instead of abolition. The 1934 Act was bad enough;
the1996 Telecommunications Act is a scandal. The whole thing stinks; the
corpse is rotten. Let us take it out for burial, and start over.
Perhaps Commissioner Adelstein
will take this news back to Washington, to his fellow commissioners and to
his focus groups. There are thousands in San Francisco, and millions
around the world - many of us recently in the streets on related business
- who have rumbled the claptrap about "the market", who know
that its more accurate name is the "anti-market", and who
recognize the lethal connections between the so-called market,
concentrated media ownership, and untrammeled militarism. That is why
there are connections between the "anti-globalization" and the
"anti-war" movements, and, as I now see, historical links to an
earlier moment of reaction, the high tide of parliamentary deregulation
and enclosure, when in the bitter aftermath of a devastating imperialist
war, the poet Shelley, enraged by reports of a police riot against
defenseless protesters, composed the indelibly encouraging words: "We
are many; they are few".
Iain A. Boal, an Irish
social historian of science and technics, teaches at the University of
California, Berkeley. He can be reached at: iboal@socrates.Berkeley.EDU |
