Remarks Commissioner Michael J. Copps Everett Parker Ethics in Communications Lecture Washington, Dc September 24, 2002
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REMARKS COMMISSIONER MICHAEL J. COPPS EVERETT PARKER ETHICS IN COMMUNICATIONS LECTURE WASHINGTON, DC SEPTEMBER 24, 2002 I am truly and deeply honored to deliver the Everett C. Parker Ethics in Communications Lecture this year. I feel twice humbled. First because Dr. Parker did his communications ethics out on the front lines, battling for civil rights back in the difficult and dangerous days of the 1950s and 1960s, when many of us were only beginning to awaken to the horrid injustice of racial intolerance and to the moral justice of America’s civil rights movement. A lecturer can get by with talking the talk, but Dr. Parker was walking the walk -- and what a daunting walk it must have been -- so many decades ago. The second humbling challenge is that we meet at something of another ethical crossroads this year, and we feel the need for reflection and correction in numerous spheres of our nation’s life -- including some that involve very directly our communications industries and how their evolution will affect each of our lives. Dr. Parker was in the vanguard leading us out of those earlier and doubtless more dramatic challenges, but I submit, first, that the current challenges are serious onto themselves and, secondly, that the same ethics and vision that he brought to those earlier front lines are equally imperative today. Most of us assembled here today are familiar with what is arguably Dr. Parker’s most famous crusade -- the WLBT case. We know how, in March of 1964, he and the United Church of Christ went to Jackson, Mississippi to look at the media there and how they found that although African-Americans comprised 45 percent of the TV audience, their concerns were completely ignored by the local stations. We know how the local station blocked the network feed whenever the national network ran a documentary about the civil rights movement or an interview with Dr. Martin Luther King. So, joining with the local NAACP, the group went to the Federal Communications Commission and challenged the license of the Jackson stations. And the FCC turned them down, concluding instead that viewers did not have the right to challenge the license of the local station. What a cold, bleak day that was for the FCC. Not to be denied, Dr. Parker went to the D.C. Circuit Court – and the Court, thank God, overturned the Commission. Even then, the Commission was slow to understand and it voted a second time in favor of the recalcitrant station. Finally, with then-future Chief Justice Warren Burger in the lead, the Court simply took the license away itself, Judge Burger noting that the Commission was “beyond repair.” A lot was won that day. First the Court had found that by not fully airing issues of public importance, the station failed all of the citizens of Jackson, and that in renewing the license, the FCC failed in its duty to protect the interests of the community. But that wasn’t all, because this case also established the right of plain American citizens to petition the Commission instead of limiting such petitions to commercial interests only. The court visited and rejected the FCC’s traditional premise that a petitioner achieved standing only if direct economic injury in a commercial sense was involved and found instead that there was “no reason to exclude those with such an obvious and acute concern as the listening audience.” In short, viewers and listeners had rights too, including the right to challenge broadcast licensees. With that right established, the public 2 dialogue was forever enhanced. The Commission could get on, albeit belatedly, with what it had been charged to be in the first place -- a forum to ensure that all Americans are served by communications. And a host of public interest and advocacy groups sprang up to fight for the rights of women, minorities, consumers, the disabled and the whole magnificent tapestry that comprises the diversity of America. In looking back over the years, I found another case for which Dr. Parker was responsible that also has particular resonance for me. In this case, in 1973, he and his colleagues challenged a number of non-commercial licenses held by the Alabama Educational Television Commission. These stations had systematically refused to carry PBS programs that included African American actors and news stories involving African American citizens. During the license period in question, some stations had even refused to carry Sesame Street, insidious and subversive program that it was! In addition, there was only one African American employee to be found on the premises, and he was a janitor. So Dr. Parker and friends filed a petition with the FCC to deny renewal of the licenses. The petition was granted a hearing before an Administrative Law Judge. At the hearing, the ALJ granted renewal of all of the licenses. Dr. Parker’s group appealed to the full Commission. Finally emerging from its “beyond repair” mode, the full Commission held an unprecedented, truly historic oral argument on the matter, and then voted to deny the AETC licenses. 3 What resonated with me about this particular story is that Dr. Parker was not afraid to do what is right, even if it meant challenging public broadcasting, when he believed its stations were not acting in the public interest. In my short time at the Commission, I have already learned that hard as it may be to challenge commercial broadcasters, it can be even harder to challenge public broadcasters because their commitment is so obviously to the public interest. But Dr. Parker did not excuse public broadcasters from the ethical standards he expected of others or from their special obligation to safeguard the integrity of the public trust they had been given. That kind of ethical consistency is not only chicken soup for the soul; it’s nourishment for the future of public broadcasting, too. That future shines brighter than ever with digital broadcasting and new educational program opportunities coming our way, but with new opportunities come new temptations, and we must always be on guard lest public broadcast lose its special identity and integrity and wide base of support. EEO Running through and stitching together the fabric of Everett Parker’s illustrious career is the strong, unbroken thread of equal opportunity. Indeed, the Commission’s Equal Employment Opportunity rules are one more contribution for which we are eternally in his debt. After the United Church of Christ’s second win in the Court of Appeals on the WLBT decision, the Church petitioned the FCC to issue equal employment opportunity 4 rules requiring all stations to develop affirmative action programs and to hire, train, and promote minorities and women, under ultimate penalty of license revocation. It was this petition that gave rise to the rules we are still struggling with today. As many of you know – and some of you know all too well – the Commission’s EEO rules were promulgated, struck down by the Court of Appeals, rewritten, readopted and struck down again. Last winter, we commenced a proceeding to put in place new, and I hope effective and sustainable, EEO rules. While we work to put these rules in place, we still have a long way to go and a lot of working and pushing and shoving to make it happen. We’re a long way from equal opportunity for minority groups, a long way from equal opportunity for women, a long way from understanding that America’s strength is its diversity. Diversity is not a problem for an industry or a country to overcome – it is an opportunity to be taken advantage of. America will succeed in the Twenty first century not in spite of our diversity, but because of our diversity. It’s our special strength, our leg up on the rest of the world. But there is still too much caution in the industry and even at the Commission, to be frank -- skittishness about getting too close to the boundaries that the court established in striking down the last set of EEO rules. We can do better. We can push the envelope farther and still be within the safe harbor of legal and judicial boundaries. The Constitution has brought us a long way in civil rights and equal opportunity in the past half century, and I just don’t believe it’s out of gas yet. There’s a bottom line here, and that bottom line must be to put in place strong and effective equal employment 5 opportunity rules. Such rules are, to me, an essential part of broadcasters’ obligation -- every broadcaster’s obligation --to serve the public interest. We need strong rules to pry open and keep open the doors of opportunity that advanced communications are unlocking. Communications technologies are remaking our world, and there is no doubt in my mind that just about everything we do is going to be transformed by communications technologies in this new century. How we work, how we care for ourselves, how we play, even how we govern ourselves, perhaps even how we worship, are going to be different in the Twenty first century. While many of the so- called analysts and experts are still mired in depression about anything even remotely related to communications, I think it’s an eminently safe bet that telecom and communications generally will soon be back at the forefront of those forces propelling our economy forward and transforming people’s lives. Those who have access to advanced communications like broadband in this new century will win. Those who don’t will lose. For my part, I don’t think it exaggerates a bit to characterize access to modern communications in this modern age as a civil right.