Benjamin Page

Using the Telecommunications Act of 1996 as a case study, two IPR researchers demonstrate how TV broadcasters subtly wield political power by breaching the line between their news and business operations.

In a recent IPR working paper, “The Political Power of TV Broadcasters: Covert Bias and Anticipated Reactions,” political science graduate fellow James Snider and IPR faculty associate Benjamin I. Page identify “the threat or reality of covert biases” that broadcasters employ to punish their political enemies. They also hypothesize that “anticipated reactions” of broadcasters serve to keep politicians from opposing them on key issues.

	James Snider

This is the authors’ second research paper based on the 1996 Telecommunications Act in which they examine how broadcasters may operate as political actors. The act gave TV broadcasters free use of additional spectrum valued at $11 billion-$70 billion and was labeled a “giveaway” by its critics.

Because such power is difficult to prove, Snider and Page focused on a political episode that illustrates underlying power relationships: former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole’s strong opposition to the telecommunications bill and abrupt reversal of his position in late January 1996. As a presidential contender, Dole initially called the spectrum clause in the bill a “giveaway” and “corporate welfare.” He said he would hold up passage of the bill until the offending clause was removed.

In their paper, Page and Snider construct a timetable of events during January 1996 leading up to Dole’s reversal. They interviewed more than 40 congressional, Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and National Tele-communications and Information Administration (NTIA) aides responsible for communications policy, and gathered additional data from articles, transcripts from TV news programs, internal documents, and congressional testimony.

Their central argument focuses on a letter Dole received in the midst of his presidential campaign on January 23, 1996, from Nick Evans, a board member of the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) and president of Spartan Communications, a TV group with 11 stations (four in Dole’s home state of Kansas). In “The Threat,” as the authors identify the letter, Evans tells Dole he is a Republican supporter but will remain so only under certain conditions. Evans wrote, “If over the next few days your position on spectrum has not changed and been made public, you will have lost my support. I will be forced to use our resources to tell viewers in all our markets of your plan to destroy free over-the-air TV. I will be forced to tell the over 700 employees of our company of your plan and encourage their support of another presidential candidate.”

The authors suggest there is good evidence tying Evans’s letter to the general broadcasting community and implications that he acted with support of the NAB, the largest broadcaster trade organization, which is well-known for its effective and costly lobbies. Within a week of receiving the letter, Dole reversed his position and did almost everything Evans asked.

Snider and Page conclude that ...“at least under circumstances of extremely high financial stakes—TV broadcasters can and do exert substantial political power...not only through campaign contributions, standard lobbying techniques, and overt bias in their treatment of the policy issue of concern to them, but also—and perhaps most importantly —through the threat or reality of covert biases that punish their political enemies.”

They suggest that covert media bias is a powerful tool of political action because politicians’ livelihood depends on the media. Covert bias usually goes unnoticed by the public because broadcasters either withhold information on a poli-tician or emphasize negative information. “The media has become increasingly important for successful careers today,” they point out. Therefore politicians are highly sensitive to how broadcasters will react and tend to go along with broad-casters’ policy desires in order to avoid retribution.

For future researchers, the study of lobbying is as important to the field of political communications as the study of media content, Snider and Page say. They also believe scholars should spend proportionally more time studying both media owners’ pocketbook bias and local TV and less time on their partisan bias, although the two may be related. Local stations reach politicians’ target groups—those in their districts—and often have more than one local legislator from whom to choose.

This working paper was presented at the 1997 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association in Washington, D.C. It may be ordered from IPR’s publications department for $5.00.