by Askia Muhammad
White House Correspondent

WASHINGTON (FinalCall.com)�Despite the availability of more and more radio and television channels for American listeners and viewers, there will be less variety and more sameness in future programming on those outlets because of fewer owners, members of Congress as well as media analysts predict.

The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in late February paved the way for a new wave of colossal mergers when it threw out long-standing rules forbidding one company from owning cable TV systems and a broadcast TV station in the same market.

In addition, new legislation has come on the heels of that court decision, as well as bad bureaucratic decisions by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)�now led by Michael Powell, son of the Secretary of State--according to Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.).

The result, Mr. Conyers told The Final Call, is an ncreasing willingness to give the large communications organizations even more power.

"We�ve got a couple of developments that I think are pretty alarming," Rep. Conyers said. "One is a decision that relaxed even further the very limp rules that deal with the increasing ability of large communications systems to buy up more (TV stations) in the local area.

"On another front, we have legislation that came out of the House of Representatives called the Tauzin-Dingell Bill, which would allow the biggest telephone monopolies to be able to abrogate their commitment to open up local lines to competitors, independents and long distance carriers by saying that they don�t have to do that anymore.

"There are more and more broadcast facilities being sucked up by the three or four major entertainment industries that are left. This is having a very negative affect on Black-owned radio, which is hardly in a position to resist the entreaties of these large corporations," he continued.

In 1934 Congress first imposed regulations to protect the public interest in how the broadcasting industry operated. The regulation overturned by the court last month, called the National Television Station Ownership Rule, had been in place since the 1940s, when television broadcasting began. Its purpose was to regulate the very limited airwaves and to "prevent any undue concentration of economic power" in television broadcasting. Monopoly control of the media was seen as contrary to democracy.

Blacks may be the biggest losers as a result of the major corporations gaining virtual monopoly control over the dissemination of ideas. "In radio, for three generations African Americans and other minorities were kept out almost exclusively," David Honig, executive director of the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council, told The Final Call.

It wasn�t until 1973 that the courts forced the FCC to take some action, he said.

At that time there were only 11 minority-owned stations. Five years later when the FCC adopted minority ownership policies, of the 9,000 total radio stations in this country there were only 60 stations owned by minority group members. Now there are 12,000 radio stations operating in this country, and only 350 of them (240 Black-owned) which amounts to about 3 percent of the total, are minority-owned.

Those stations are not even worth one percent of the total industry asset value however, because most of them are small operations. What�s more, now, after gaining a tiny foothold in the media marketplace Black broadcasters are selling their licenses at a rapid rate because they�re finding it increasingly difficult to compete with major conglomerates, which sometimes own several radio stations, all of which may be competing for local advertising revenue with the Black-owned.

About 25 percent of minority-owned radio companies that were in business in 1996 have sold their stations because of media consolidation.

The only Black broadcaster which has been able to hold its own and even grow in the new environment is Radio One, founded by Cathy Hughes as a single Washington station in the 1980s. Radio One, which is publicly traded, has grown to 65 stations nationwide, the seventh largest radio chain in the nation. But even that statistic is deceptive, according to Mr. Honig.

The number one radio company owns more than 1,200 station licenses, he said. The second and third largest companies own more than 200 stations each. "So, being number seven sounds great until you consider the scale," he said, indicating that the next higher tier of ownership is 10 times as large as Radio One.

What�s really at stake is freedom of speech itself, and the right of the public to be informed concerning what is really in its best interest, according to Rep. Major Owens (D-N.Y.).

"Ninety-nine percent of the media is controlled by a handful of people," Rep. Owens told an interviewer. "We have a situation where in our democracy, there are a few forces in a position toed nation on Earth that does not have a national health-care system, that we are the exception to the rule?

"Media itself is a political issue, in terms of who controls it, what�s on it, what�s not on it. The incredible talk show hosts--the right wing on the radio; the large corporate control over television; consolidation; all of these are major political issues. We need organizations formed to develop approaches to change it," Rep. Sanders said.