Realizing Everett Parker's Dream

Speaking at the Everett C. Parker Ethics in Telecommunications Lecture, Federal Communications Commission member Michael Copps said he believes that many of the media reform and justice causes for which Everett Parker worked are closer to achievement now than they have ever been. "A window of change and reform has opened for our country," Commissioner Copps said. "[A]fter years of dangerous drift and worse, America is poised at last to move ahead." He identified universal, affordable broadband as "the central infrastructure challenge of this first half of the Twenty-first century" and said that the FCC's charge to write a National Broadband Plan is "truly once-in-a-lifetime opportunity." But Commissioner Copps did not ignore traditional media policy. "The Internet opens wonderful new opportunities, to be sure-but what we have gained there hasn't yet begun to match what we have already lost because of bad choices that have been made regarding traditional media," he said. "Bad choices by the private sector through, for example, heedless consolidation that saddled companies with unmanageable debt and sacrificed localism and diversity to uniformity and program homogenization. Bad choices by government through, for example, mindless deregulation-particularly on the part of the Commission of which I am a member-gutting most of the public interest protections that under-girded our media landscape for decades. These private and public choices exacted a heavy toll on consumers, on all our citizens and, in the end-as we've come to see-on the companies themselves."