In the late 1960s, when Turner Communications was a business of billboards and radio stations and I was spending much of my energy ocean racing, a UHF-TV station came up for sale in Atlanta. It was losing $50,000 a month and its programs were viewed by fewer than five percent of the market.

I acquired it.

When I moved to buy a second station in Charlotte – worse than the first – my accountant quit in protest, and the company’s board vetoed the deal. I mortgaged my house and bought it myself. It gave me the capital to launch CNN.

Both purchases played a role in revolutionizing television. Both required a streak of independence and a taste for risk. And neither could happen today. In the current climate of consolidation, independent broadcasters simply don’t survive for long. That’s why we haven’t seen a new generation of people like me or even Rupert Murdoch – independent television upstarts who challenge the big boys and force the whole industry to compete and change.

It’s not that there aren’t entrepreneurs eager to make their names and fortunes in broadcasting. Washington has changed the rules of the game. When I was getting into the television business, lawmakers and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) took seriously the commission’s mandate to promote diversity, localism, and competition. They wanted independent producers to thrive. They wanted more people to be able to own TV stations. They believed in competition.

Today, media companies are more concentrated than at any time over the past 40 years, thanks to a continual loosening of ownership rules. The media giants now own not only broadcast networks and local stations; they also own the cable companies that pipe in the signals of their competitors and the studios that produce most of the programming.

In the media, as in any industry, big corporations play a vital role, but so do small, emerging ones. When you lose small businesses, you lose big ideas. People who own their own businesses are independent thinkers. They know they can’t compete by imitating the big guys – they have to innovate, so they’re less obsessed with earnings than with ideas.

But without the proper rules, healthy markets turn into sluggish oligopolies, and that is what’s happening in media today. Large corporations are more profit-focused and risk-averse. They often kill local programming because it’s expensive, and they push national programming because it’s cheap – even if their decisions run counter to local interests and community values. Let me be clear: as a business proposition, consolidation makes sense. But for a society, it’s like over-fishing the oceans. When the independent businesses are gone, where will the new ideas come from? We have to do more than keep media giants from growing larger; they’re already too big. We need a new set of rules that will break these huge companies to pieces.

The FCC says that we have more media choices than ever before. But only a few corporations decide what we can choose. That is not choice. That’s like a dictator deciding what candidates are allowed to stand for parliamentary elections, and then claiming that the people choose their leaders. Different voices do not mean different viewpoints, and these huge corporations all have the same viewpoint – they want to shape government policy in a way that helps them maximize profits, drive out competition, and keep getting bigger.

In early 2002, when a freight train derailed near Minot, North Dakota, releasing a cloud of anhydrous ammonia over the town, police tried to call local radio stations, six of which are owned by radio mammoth Clear Channel Communications. According to news reports, it took them over an hour to reach anyone – no one was answering the Clear Channel phone. By the next day, 300 people had been hospitalized, many partially blinded by the ammonia. Pets and livestock died. And Clear Channel continued beaming its signal from headquarters in San Antonio, Texas – some 1,600 miles away.

When media companies dominate their markets, it undercuts our democracy. Justice Hugo Black, in a landmark media-ownership case in 1945, wrote: “The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public.”

Consolidation has given big media companies new power over what is said not just on the air, but off it as well. Cumulus Media banned the Dixie Chicks on its 42 country music stations for 30 days after lead singer Natalie Maines criticized President Bush for the war in Iraq. And Disney recently provoked an uproar when it prevented its subsidiary Miramax from distributing Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11.

Naturally, corporations say they would never suppress speech. But it’s not their intentions that matter; it’s their capabilities. Consolidation gives them more power to tilt the news and cut important ideas out of the public debate. And it’s precisely that power that the rules should prevent.

This is a fight about freedom – the freedom of independent entrepreneurs to start and run a media business, and the freedom of citizens to get news, information, and entertainment from a wide variety of sources, at least some of which are truly independent and not run by people facing the pressure of quarterly earnings reports. No one should underestimate the danger. Big media companies want to eliminate all ownership limits. With the removal of these limits, immense media power will pass into the hands of a very few corporations and individuals. What will programming be like when it’s produced for no other purpose than profit? What will news be like when there are no independent news organizations to go after stories the big corporations avoid? Who really wants to find out? Safeguarding the welfare of the public cannot be the first concern of a large publicly-traded media company. Its job is to seek profits.

At this late stage, media companies have grown so large and powerful, and their dominance has become so detrimental to the survival of small, emerging companies, that there remains only one alternative: bust up the big conglomerates. We’ve done this before: to the railroad trusts in the first part of the twentieth century, to Ma Bell more recently. Indeed, big media itself was cut down to size in the 1970s, and a period of staggering innovation and growth followed. Breaking up the reconstituted media conglomerates may seem like an impossible task when their grip on the policy-making process in Washington seems so sure. But the public’s broad and bipartisan rebellion against the FCC ’s pro-consolidation decisions suggests something different. Politically, big media may again be on the wrong side of history – and up against a country unwilling to lose its independents.

Ted Turner founded 24-hour news network CNN in 1980. The audience reach was more than one billion when he resigned in 2003. This essay is adapted from an article in The Washington Monthly, July/August 2004 issue.