When the News is Not the News

The internet has failed to nourish our news and information diet the way we hoped it would twenty years ago. The norm is major platforms poaching the news they distribute directly from newspaper and television newsrooms while failing to make any meaningful investments in journalism despite generating billions of dollars in advertising revenue that traditional media once depended upon. Solutions have been suggested; one option is vigorous anti-trust to break up monopolies. There is some promise of anti-trust action here on the high-tech side, but I believe anti-trust should be an across-media effort. High tech is not our only media problem. Another option is effective public interest oversight of broadcast and extending it to cable and the high-tech giants. This should be a priority. These options—anti-trust and public interest oversight—are important initiatives that should be rigorously pursued. They won’t be easily won. A third option is to get serious about public media. What public media we have now is the jewel of our broadcast system, but it operates on a relative pittance. We don’t need to supplant the commercial media we have, but we do need to provide a less self-interested media system than the one that is presently holding America back. I’m for proceeding on all three fronts: anti-trust, public interest oversight, and public media. Any one of them would be real progress. Two would be better. All three might just deliver the media infrastructure needed to support our always-fragile democracy.

[Michael Copps served as a commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission from May 2001 to December 2011 and was the FCC's Acting Chairman from January to June 2009.]