A Response by Third Coast Press to the Federal Communications Commission
by Scott Sanders and Mitchell Szczepanczyk

Third Coast Press was recently notified of the FCC's rejection of our petition to
deny the license renewals of eighteen Chicago-area TV broadcasters filed
on November 1, 2005. While we are dismayed by the ruling, we are not
surprised.

As a progressive newspaper serving Chicago and now as a news website
online at thirdcoastpress.com , Third Coast Press prides itself on
providing critical journalism on social and political issues important to
all Chicagoans.  Our petition to the FCC challenged the licenses of every
TV station in the Chicago market because of their systematic failure to
serve the public interest by failing to cover just such issues.

Among other points raised in our complaint, we noted the stations'
inadequate "coverage of the debate over the war in Iraq, their chronic
underreporting of local election campaigns and their lack of attention to
the city's African American, Latino and working class residents."

The arguments described in Third Coast Press' petition may not have
convinced the FCC, but there's more to this challenge than just sound
logic or compelling, heavily-documented evidence.  Arguments are accepted
or rejected for other reasons, sometimes having little to do with logic or
evidence.  

Indeed, there is reason to view the license renewal process
itself as suspect. For example, in our February 2005 issue, Third Coast Press quoted
the words of FCC Commissioner Michael Copps, who criticized the broadcast
license renewal process as "postcard renewals"—meaning that huge media
companies get tremendously valuable licenses to use the public's airwaves
at no cost and all they have to do in return is mail in a postcard once
every eight years.

The FCC is simply not being truthful when it asserts that our petition
"contains statements of opinion as opposed to the specific allegations of
facts necessary". Was the FCC spokesperson referring to the study we included by the Benton Foundation and the Media Access Project or to the study by teachers from the Medill School of Journalism? Or perhaps to the statements of opinion included the data from the U.S. government's own telecom agency, the NTIA? Was it the "opinions" in The Lancet's Iraq mortality studies? Or rather the PIPA/Knowledge Networks study entitled
"Misperceptions, the Media, and the Iraq War"? Or rather the forty or so
studies commissioned by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting with titles
like "On Party, Gender, Race and Class, TV News Looks to the Most Powerful
Groups" and "White Noise: Voices of Color Scarce on Urban Public Radio"?

Perhaps it was the statement by a sitting area judge attached to our
petition, or the disturbing assertion made by activist Juan Torres, who as
the father of a service person killed in the so-called "war on terror"
holds the Chicago TV broadcasters in substantial part responsible for his
son's death. We wish the FCC would clear this confusion up for us: where
are the unjustified opinions?

We can't help but wonder if the FCC even read the following excerpt from
our petition's conclusion:

"Our progress, security, and survival require that the lessons in domestic
civil rights the [blatantly racist] WLBT-TV example teaches also be
applied to stations that exclude rigorous debate about U.S. foreign
policies affecting human rights. [We demand that] the owners of the local
TV stations in Chicago listed here be denied the ability to use the
public's airwaves to express their tacit support for elective mass
destruction, civil and human rights abuses, torture, and mass murder. For
other relief, we request the media conglomerates noted here be split into
smaller pieces and their ownership be reassigned with the help of tax
credits and with an eye toward substantially increasing minority
ownership."

It is by an overwhelming preponderance of facts that one reaches an
inescapable conclusion—the broadcast TV outlets in the Chicago area are
a clear threat to democracy because of all the voices that they systematically exclude. That fact remains.

Nevertheless, more and more people are making an end-run around this
embargo and getting more involved in making their own media—independent media of
which the Third Coast Press is but one example—and, thereby, challenging the
mainstream forces which ultimately shape our media. Those challenges
are poised to expand further, and can hopefully result in a better media
and a better world for us all.