Page 287 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

| M nor ty Med a Ownersh p

Specifically, the court told the FCC that African Americans in Jackson, Missis-
sippi, had the right to challenge the renewal of a license to a radio station owner
accused of racial discrimination. WLBT lost its license.
That ruling created a process that greatly increased a minority’s chances of
owning a station. That process was a comparative renewal hearing. In such hear-
ings, the FCC compared the merits of an incumbent station licensee with a new
applicant and granted a license to the one who could best serve the public inter-
est. (Under the Telecommunications Act of 1996, comparative renewal hearings
were eliminated, allowing the FCC to grant a broadcaster’s renewal application
if the FCC believed statutory requirements were met.)
In 1973, a federal court ruling, TV 9, Inc. v. FCC, 495 F.2d 929, 937 (D.C.
Cir. 1973), directed the FCC to give favorable consideration to an applicant who
proposed to include ethnic minorities among its owners and managers. That
ruling prompted the FCC’s landmark Statement of Policy on Minority Owner-
ship of Broadcast Facilities, 68 F.C.C. 2d 979 (1978), in which it adopted a policy
of promoting minority broadcast ownership. The FCC said minority broadcast
ownership tended to create more diverse programming.
In the 1980s, the FCC and the courts affirmed the desirability of media own-
ership diversity. But in the 1990s, the forces behind the anti–affirmative action
movement dampened that commitment. The 1978 program allowed a capital
gains tax break to anyone selling an outlet to a minority buyer. As a result, 200
minority-owned stations were launched within less than 20 years. But the in-
centive was killed in April 1995 because of allegations of fraud. Mark Lloyd,
director of the Civil Rights Forum on Communications Policy, said, “The Re-
publican Congress teamed up with President Clinton to kill the most effective
method for increasing minority ownership, the tax certificate. With minority-
owned broadcast licenses stuck at around 3 percent, loss of the tax certificate
makes any progress beyond that invisible ceiling impossible.”
In Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Pena, 515 U.S. 200 (1995), the U.S. Supreme
Court ruled that so-called minority preference policies could only be justified
by a compelling government interest, narrowly tailored to achieve the goal, and
the least restrictive means for achieving it, or “strict scrutiny.” This ruling made
affirmative action minority ownership programs highly suspect and overturned
Metro Broadcasting, Inc. v. FCC, 497 U.S. 547 (1990) use of the intermediate
scrutiny test. After the Adarand Constructors ruling, the FCC abandoned a pro-
posal for credits to help minorities and women bidding in the auction of FM
licenses in 1995.
In 2003, the FCC repealed the Failed Station Solicitation Rule (FSSR) 1999
Television Rule Review, 14 F.C.C.R. 12,903, PP 13–14, 74, created to foster
minority television ownership by requiring public notice of a sale of a TV sta-
tion. The following year, the court in Prometheus Radio Project v. FCC said the
repeal was unjustified because the FCC had not considered the impact the re-
peal might have on declining minority station ownership. The court also noted
that the FCC had not yet considered the Minority Media and Telecommunica-
tions Council’s proposal for prohibiting race and gender discrimination in the
buying and selling of broadcast outlets.