[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 149 (2003), Part 8]
[House]
[Page 11123]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




        MORE MEDIA DEREGULATION WILL BE A DISASTER FOR DEMOCRACY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Vermont (Mr. Sanders) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. SANDERS. Mr. Speaker, I recently held a town meeting at St. 
Michael's College in Vermont to discuss an issue that for obvious 
reasons does not get much media coverage, and we had over 600 people, 
Vermonters, coming out to this meeting to discuss the issue of 
corporate control over the media and the impact that further media 
deregulation will have on the quality of our democracy.
  At that meeting we had a gentleman named Michael Copps, one of the 
commissioners on the Federal Communications Commission, who laid out 
what is happening at the FCC and told us what most Americans do not 
know, that on June 2 the FCC is likely to hold a vote which will 
further deregulate media in the United States and create a situation in 
which a handful, a tiny handful of huge media conglomerates will 
largely control what the American people see, hear and read. What we 
have today is already a very dangerous situation. What is likely to 
happen after June 2 will be even worse.
  What do we have today? If we turn on the television and watch NBC, 
how many people know who owns NBC? It is owned by General Electric, one 
of the largest corporations in the world, a corporation with enormous 
conflicts of interests in a dozen different areas. Turn on CBS. Who 
owns CBS? It is owned by Viacom, another huge company. Turn on ABC, 
owned by Disney. Turn on Fox, owned by the right wing Australian 
billionaire Rupert Murdock. Turn on CNN, owned by AOL-Time Warner, 
another huge corporation.
  What happens when we end up with a few large companies determining 
the flow of information in America? Two things happen. Number one, if 
we listen to radio, we know that on talk radio, the only differences 
that we hear are between right wing radio talk show hosts and extreme 
right wing talk show hosts. There is virtually nobody on national talk 
radio who is expressing the needs of working Americans, of the middle 
class, of low income people.
  If we watch television, huge sections, huge areas of great concern to 
the American people are virtually never discussed. How many Americans 
know that we as a Nation have the most unfair distribution of wealth 
and income of any major country on earth? The richest 1 percent own 
more wealth than the bottom 95 percent, and the Bush tax proposal will 
only make that situation worse.
  Have my colleagues heard discussion on that issue? Is it appropriate 
to give tax breaks to billionaires when we have the highest rate of 
childhood poverty in the industrialized world? When we turn on the 
television we can see a lot of advertising come from the large drug 
companies. How many Americans know that we are the only major country 
on earth that does not have a national health care program that 
guarantees health care to all people as a right of citizenship? Yet we 
end up spending twice as much per capita on health care as any other 
country.

                              {time}  1600

  Mr. Speaker, turn on television, you hear a lot of discussion about a 
lot of things; but you may not know in the United States, our people, 
especially seniors, are forced to pay by far, not even close, the 
highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. Turn on TV, read 
the editorial papers of your newspapers. You will hear how great our 
trade policy is doing. How many people know that NAFTA, most-favored 
nation status with China, was pushed upon Congress by the big-money 
interests who also own the media but have resulted in huge job losses 
for working people in this country.
  If deregulation of media goes forward, this is what will happen. For 
the first time, we will have television stations and newspapers in a 
given town or city owned by the same person. You are going to turn on 
TV and get the same point of view as you do from the local newspaper 
owner. Also as a result of further media deregulation, we will see 
large television companies able to own more and more TV stations all 
over the country. The trend is very clear. Fewer and fewer large 
corporations own more and more of the media. This is dangerous for 
democracy. It must be opposed.

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