"Tinkering"

When the FCC promulgated the Prime Time Access (PTAR) and Financial Interest and Syndication (Fin/syn) rulings, well over thirty years ago, the Commission raised the battle cry of diversity, ergo too few (ABC, CBS, and NBC) controlled too much, if not all, of what Americans watched on television.

For good or bad reasons, the 1996 Communications Act Re-write rendered Fin/syn moot. The networks said they would not be abusive if Fin/syn were eliminated, but of course they were and a legion of business and creative people have been agitating since for the return of Fin/syn, either in whole or in part.

In a piece carried in your May 5th, 2003 edition, Mickey Gardner and Ken Ziffren (Counsel for Coalition for Program Diversity) suggested that 25% of the four major network schedules be set aside for programming by true independent producers. They went on to say, "If adopted by the FCC on June 2, the 25% Independent Producer Rule would simply mean that approximately 20 hours would have a different creative source than the four networks' television programming chiefs, who today control 100% of everything aired on network prime time television." There is a significant "mislead" here. Since the beginning of network television in our country nothing has aired in primetime, other than what the networks decided to air. Gardner and Ziffren continued, "When only four people program every minute of the networks' 80-plus-hour weekly prime time schedule, 'blandness,' 'sameness,' risk-free programming is the inevitable result." That is a qualitative judgment and the fact that 20 hours per week are set aside to be produced by disassociated independents, nothing will change as the people who develop, buy, and schedule remain the same.

Implementing a "25% rule" would only be "tinkering" with a system that has been broken since the re-implementation of the Communications Act Re-Write.

Extracting some very good points from Robert Corn-Revere's piece published in your April 28th issue: The regulators should abandon the pursuit of "good" broadcast content. They should similarly decide once and for all if it is the Commission's role to reduce "indecent" and "violent" programming (Whatever that is). Also, they should give up assessing the "quality of newscasts". If America chooses to watch reality programming and the networks choose to give it to them, good for the networks.

To quote directly from Corn-Revere's piece, "The lesson here is that the FCC should scrupulously avoid injecting programming quality into its review of the ownership rules".

The economics of the industry have changed dramatically and will continue to change as other delivery systems develop. The Fin/syn ship has sailed and in my opinion, the networks will someday be very sorry that they did indeed get what they asked for. The implementation of Fin/syn created a vast array of independent production companies using their own creative and financial resources to bring programming and concepts for programming to the networks. These same people would have had the financial resources to do the same thing with the newer delivery systems. The studios and the networks have been married and living together for quite a few years and the networks will continue to program whatever they feel is in their own self-interest and everyone will continue to complain about the deteriorating quality of American network television. Those people should be sentenced to watching 1950's television for at least a month.

If the dissidents need an issue that could help America, let them fight the elimination of station ownership caps and the elimination of cross-ownership rules, and while they're at it, encourage the government to reduce the station ownership limits rather than increase them.

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