Gender and race in media ownership: Ugly truths at a critical moment

It’s been a couple of hot weeks for new studies on media ownership, a number of them shedding light on the extreme marginalization of women and people of color in broadcast industries. Two of these were studies that I conducted, one of them jointly. (Click here for a PDF of the media ownership report.)

One of these studies analyzed 2005 FCC ownership data – admittedly a flawed data base due to numerous omissions and data entry errors, but the most comprehensive available and what the government holds to be “official.” I found:

• Female and minority ownership is way down in the single digits – under 5% each.
• Almost all women-owned “stations” are in fact radio stations, not television (the medium with the largest audience).
• In addition, three-fourths (75%) of women-owned stations are actually owned by both men and women.
• At more than 50 (13%) of those stations, women hold less than 60% of the vote, and in many cases women’s controlling interest is as low as 50.25% — barely a “woman-owned station.” In fact, many “women-owned” companies appear to be family corporations in which the female owners are greatly outnumbered by the male owners.

These troubling patterns are begging for future research.

In terms of ethnic composition, women of color experience the greatest structural barriers to media ownership, and to the corresponding access to public discourse that flows from it: more than four fifths (83%) of the owners in women-owned stations, according to FCC reports, are white, not of Hispanic descent. Cathy Hughes, an African-American woman who owns the 70+ stations in the Radio One conglomerate (the nation’s seventh largest broadcast company), is one clear exception. (I note with some irony that Ms. Hughes’ stations were not included in the 2005 FCC’s reports for women or minority stations, one reason the FCC’s data are a bit low.)

The second study, one that I conducted and co-authored with Kehbuma Langmia and Jamila A. Cupid, was based on interviews we conducted with about 200 African-American, African, Latino and other ethnic minority residents in the Washington, DC, area last summer. Our goals were to learn about their consumption of local news, views of news content and whether the news affected their level of community participation. About half said they get their news from television, a fourth read a newspaper, and a fifth listen to radio news. The radio listeners overwhelmingly prefer minority-owned stations, which they believe “know what’s going on” and “tell me the truth.”

Participants leaned toward believing the news did not help them to understand crime, rising costs of living and other problems they face each day. They criticized the overemphasis on negative news and what they believed to be racist coverage of crime. Race bias, they said, comes up especially in crime reporting, which tends to blame Black people without examining causes or solutions. They also believe that reporters know little about their lives or communities and fail to cover events that mean the most to them. Participants want to hear news from “the perspectives of those who experience the problems.” The issue of the news’s impact on civic involvement was the least conclusive in its findings, with half the participants saying the news did not affect their level of community involvement, and the rest saying either yes, it did, or that they were uncertain. Further research will need to probe this question.

These two studies and others were timed to coincide with the ending of the Federal Communications’ public comment period on media ownership, which opened in July and closed October 23. The FCC received more than 160,000 comments and reports – from public interest attorneys, academic researchers and citizens, which they are obligated to review and consider.

What spawned so many studies was the Prometheus case, the federal ruling in September 2003 that stopped implementation of media deregulation that the FCC had adopted a few months earlier. That same ruling told the Commission it would have to revisit a number of issues, including broadcast ownership by women and minorities.

For various reasons, the Commission has waited three years to respond, giving the media reform movement time to gather steam. One of the positive things during in this period has been having advocate organization leaders, public interest attorneys, media scholars, and funding groups sit down together and develop working relationships and strategies. A number of us received small grants from the Social Science Research Council and the Benton Foundation to conduct independent research on issues we knew the FCC would be considering.

It’s a critical moment in policy history for those of us so drastically shut out of the ownership picture. Feminists and people of color have long criticized the omission of our ideas from serious media content and the misrepresentation of our experiences in television and film. These problems have their origins in control of messages and images, and control is mostly a matter of who owns these media. Ownership is a specific outgrowth of public policy, which privileges wealthy white men, few of whom have our interests at heart.

I urge us to follow the debate and to get involved at some level in citizen action aimed at ownership reform.

There has been quite a bit of interest in the media ownership studies, especially by online reporters. To read some of the coverage, see:

• http://newstandardnews.net/content/index.cfm/items/3815
• http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/10/24/MNGU6LUK351.DTL
• http://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/tv/bal-to.media24oct24,0,6583713.story?track=rss
• http://www.nj.com/business/ledger/index.ssf?/base/business-4/1161667662124010.xml&coll=1
• http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117952484.html?categoryid=18&cs=1
• http://www.lasarletter.net/drupal/node/172
• http://www.tvnewsday.com/articles/2006/10/23/daily.8/
• http://www.deadlinehollywooddaily.com/670/
• http://newstandardnews.net/content/index.cfm/items/3815
• http://www.mediageek.net/?p=1477
• http://www.insidebayarea.com/news/ci_4540809
• http://jazzhq.blogspot.com/2006/10/fcc-challenged-on-media-consolidation.html

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 28th, 2006 at 1:20 pm and is filed under African Americans in Entertainment, Asian American community, Feminism, Latina/o Community, Media Justice Now, Media Policy Reform, Native American Community, Race, Technology & Communication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.