Over the past decade, the Internet has given new life to one of
the oldest forms of media: the urban legend. Sometimes an urban
legend is complete fiction. More often a story is based on events
that may be partially true but which become greatly exaggerated.
The legend’s spread can do lasting damage — especially when it
falsely informs an already contentious policy debate.
Case in point: an event in the Midwestern town of Minot, North
Dakota, has provided the impetus of the past few years to restore
the so-called Fairness Doctrine and other media controls that
would reverse the gains of conservative talk radio. The story
involves a train derailment and chemical spill and a supposed
delayed response by the town’s radio stations. It has been used
as an effective propaganda tool by critics of media deregulation.
The tale goes: Between 1 and 2 a.m. on the morning of January 18,
2002, a train derailed just outside Minot. The train spilled
toxic ammonia fertilizer over Minot, from which one person died
and several were injured.
Police tried calling the town’s radio stations to get them to
send the word out, but they faced a daunting dilemma. All six
commercial radio stations in Minot were operating on autopilot
with prerecorded programming. Phone calls to the station went
unanswered, and radio warnings were delayed.
The culprit pointed to was the owner of all six stations, Clear
Channel Communications: the huge, national, homogenizing, Big
Radio corporation everyone loves to hate.
The story is employed as an example of the evils of media
consolidation in debates about localism today. It has been
featured prominently on the PBS program NOW with Bill Moyers and
various Leftie blogs calling for “media reform.”
By fueling the perception that national radio companies weren’t
adequately serving local communities, the Minot incident probably
played a role in influencing the Bush administration Federal
Communications Commission to push through a pending regulation on
“localism,” which many are calling a stealth Fairness Doctrine.
The localism
rule, now in its “proposal” stage, has been criticized by
both commercial and religious
broadcasters as hearkening back to the days before Ronald
Reagan rescinded the Fairness Doctrine in the mid '80s. During
the previous decades when the doctrine was in effect, radio and
television stations would be bombarded with response time
requests from pressure groups if they aired a conservative or
other controversial point of view.
The new rule would require that broadcast licensees “convene and
consult with permanent advisory boards” that include
“representatives of all segments of the community.” The rule then
mandates that station license renewals be “based on their
localism programming performance,” which would be determined by
members of the advisory board.
The boards could have the same “chilling effect” on controversial
speech that the Fairness Doctrine once had.
WHERE DID THIS rule come from and why did Bush’s FCC Chairman
Kevin Martin sign on?
According to the
Broadcast Law Blog, “The proposed new requirements seem to
stem from the notorious ‘Minot incident.’” In his
speech introducing the proposed rules, Martin declared, “It
has become apparent, however, that some broadcasters may not be
doing all they can or should to serve their local communities.”
In an apparent reference to Minot, Martin said, “These actions
are designed…to ensure that vitally important local information
and viewpoints are provided to the community.”
But hold on. Before Martin and other commissioners rush to
reregulate, and put in policies that would likely stifle
alternative viewpoints, they need to take another look at the
real facts of the Minot incident that fueled the controversy.
This moralistic folk tale is far from the whole story. Serious
analyses of the incident have shown that local first responders
were as much, if not more, to blame as the radio stations for
failing to get the word out. And among the lessons that really
can be drawn from Minot are that even existing top-down “public
interest” requirements for local stations are often
counterproductive.
As Slate media critic Jack Shafer has written in an analysis
of the event, when a disaster strikes, first responders are not
even supposed to call radio and television stations to
tell them to alert the public. Rather, the federal Emergency
Alert System (formerly the Emergency Broadcast System) allows
authorities to directly break into station broadcasts to warn the
public of the emergency.
The real problem that early morning in Minot, according to Shafer
and others examining the incident, was that “when Minot
authorities attempted to use the EAS, they failed.”
In an article from Law Enforcement News, a Minot police
lieutenant acknowledges
that part of the delay was “our fault.” The local police did not
understand the new system, receive full training on it, or
install it properly. Law Enforcement News makes clear
that rather than a failure of broadcast deregulation, “what
happened in Minot is a stellar example of how little thought has
been given to the communication and information systems that are
the heart of all public safety and critical incident response.”
The Clear Channel stations were also not unique in carrying
automated late-night programming and in having few if any station
employees on deck during that time of day (though Clear Channel
insists there was at least one person in the Minot offices that
night and that phone lines were simply jammed or malfunctioning).
Nor was this unusual. Even in the big market of San Diego, only
two music stations broadcasted live programming after midnight in
2002, according to
Wired. And before this automated programming was
available, stations would simply shut down around midnight.
Remember the “Star-Spangled Banner” sign-off?!
Thus, authorities wouldn’t even have had the option to break into
station broadcasts at 2 a.m.
AND, REALLY, HOW much of a difference would it have made? Even if
everything went like clockwork that night in Minot, it was still
two in the morning. How many people would have been listening to
the radio at that hour?
The most effective system of warning people would seem to be the
tried-and-true method of blaring sirens and knocking on doors.
Now, they might improve on the old methods with new media
innovations, including texting everybody’s cell phones with a
warning about a dangerous chemical spill.
Colleges, for instance, from
Pennsylvania State University to the University of Arizona have set
up registries for the administration to send students text
messages if there is an emergency. Small towns like Minot could
set up a voluntary registry for their citizens who wish to
receive emergency notifications.
After all, if so many sign up for the Obama-Biden vice
presidential
publicity stunt, it’s not too much to think that there are
some who might want be notified about events in which their lives
could be at stake.
In the meantime, the new media marketplace is giving more choices
to residents of Minot, as it is to all American media consumers.
As Shafer points, radio consolidation has brought a greater
diversity of programming in Minot and other towns. The number of
radio formats went up from three to six after Clear Channel took
over the six Minot stations.
Frequently, when independently-owned stations compete for a given
audience, they tend to duplicate formats — such as new popular
music. But when companies like Clear Channel own several
stations, they attempt to appeal to as broad a customer base as
possible, and so offer different sorts of programming on each
channel.
If new localism rules are imposed, Minot and other cities and
towns would experience a true threat in the silencing of
controversial viewpoints. The ensuing First Amendment emergency
will be no urban legend.
