FCC Plan Disappoints A 'Poster Boy' For Cross-Ownership

By: Mark Fitzgerald As soon as I read the details of Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Kevin J. Martin's proposal this week to permit dailies to own a broadcast station -- only in America's biggest cities -- I thought of "Skip" Bliss up the road a couple of hours from me in Janesville, Wisconsin. I knew he couldn't be happy.

"It's a little discouraging," Bliss said when we talked Wednesday afternoon. He grabbed yesterday's New York Times and started reading from Martin's op-ed column about the importance of "saving" the newspaper industry. "If we don't act to improve the health of the newspaper industry, we will see newspapers wither and die," Martin wrote. "Without newspapers, we would be less informed about our communities and have fewer outlets for the expression of independent thinking and a diversity of viewpoints."

On the other end of the phone, Sidney H. "Skip" Bliss sighed: "To say that, and then to backtrack and say, well, there's only 20 newspapers that would see this relief when he seems to be talking about the whole newspaper business, well, it's really hard to understand."

Martin's plan would permit cross-ownership only by dailies in the 20 largest Nielsen Designated Market Areas (DMAs). Janesville doesn't even have its own DMA. When it's piggybacked on Madison, they rank 85th in the nation.

There's no room for "Skip" Bliss, or other publishers of small- and mid-sized papers in Chairman Martin's proposed reform.

Bliss describes himself, accurately, as a poster boy for cross-ownership. For decades, Bliss' 21,000-circulation Janesville Gazette has operated not one, but two, of the town's radio stations. His father put the first Janesville radio station on the air -- at the urging, Bliss noted, of the federal government. The Gazette's same-market ownership of radio was grandfathered when the cross-ownership ban was imposed in 1975.

"Media democracy" activists argue that permitting this kind of common ownership diminishes the amount of local news and homogenizes the stations.

They should go to Janesville someday.

"We've got such a long-standing history of investing in the newsrooms of both the radio station and the newspaper," he said. In print that sounds like bragging, which I'm pretty sure the low-key Skip Bliss is incapable of. It's simply a matter of fact. "You look at our AM station. We have four full-time newspeople in this puny little radio station," he said.

Then too, reporters from the Gazette, named one of E&P's "Ten That Do It Right" in 2003, go on air regularly to talk about local issues. Cross-ownership has strengthened both the paper and the station -- and the community, Bliss argues.

Bliss owns three other dailies but no radio stations in those markets, and six stations in markets where it does not own a newspaper. Every time a radio station comes up for sale in those markets -- and an outlet in Janesville has turned hands five times since Bliss has been publisher -- he's reminded anew of a restriction unique to newspapers.

"We're the only guys who can't bid on those stations," he says. "The Internet guys and the cable guys -- they can all buy broadcast in my market, and I can't."

For newspapers whose job it is to hold to account elected and unelected public officials, the cross-ownership ban often appears to Bliss to be "the revenge of the politicians, the revenge of the bureaucrats."

It's probably no exaggeration to say that after the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) and Tribune Co., Skip Bliss is the third-most active newspaper industry figure when it comes to urging the FCC to overturn cross-ownership regulations. He's filed comments every time the commission revisits its ownership regs. At NAA's request, he was about to testify at a Senate subcommittee the other day when the chair decided to significantly whittle down the list of invited speakers.

He planned to sit down later and again write a filing urging the commission to strike the ban altogether.

After all, he argues not unreasonably, it isn't just metro papers that are hurting these days, and looking at some unpleasant long-terms scenarios. "You look at any newspaper in any size market, including mine, and it's evident our margins have deteriorated," he said.

Proponents of cross-ownership restrictions, Bliss said, seem to think newspaper looking for the chance to operate broadcast, too, are "out to destroy everything, in terms of good journalism. We've done just the opposite. I wish some of these people would get off their high horses, and get into the hinterlands of America, where I am -- and see what's really happening."