paper that could afford to support a full-time television station solely on local talent. That fact has been demonstrated in the past in radio as well as television. So if you are going to get programs over television that the people are going to look at and, incidentally, which will make it possible for the station to meet its expenses and its service, those are going to come in on the chains. You have various chain services now furnishing television programs, and there again is the element of selection which the public today, in most areas of the country, has. They have a wide selection, not only of newspapers and magazines and other journals of opinion, but of radio and television stations. The problem comes on this segment of UHF stations where they do not have any broad chain affiliations, and no particular service and many receiving sets are not even equipped to receive the programs, and those people are really put up against it. But I cannot see any threat of monopoly where any one group could control the gathering or dissemination of information or opinion in any area in this country under our present setup. Mr. HALE. Thank you. Mr. DOLLIVER. I am disturbed by this situation that was pointed up by Mr. Priest's inquiry. You alluded to it in your own statement, that already there is a rule in the law requiring nondiscrimination as between applicants. I wonder if this amendment might not prove wholly illusory and useless in gaining the end which you seek. Mr. HANSON. If there was a better way to gain it, I would be glad to have you suggest it. I thought this issue was settled after the decision of our court of appeals in the Stahlman case, when the court frankly said that the Commission had no power to discriminate against newspapers in its proceedings down there and it further said that the court doubted that Congress had the power to authorize proceedings to give such discrimination, but in view of the fact that the Commission denied that it had the power, why the court would let it continue with its investigation. Mr. HARRIS. When was that case? Mr. HANSON. That case was back in the early forties, right after a a former Chairman of the Commission started his investigation of newspaper ownership of radio stations for the purpose of laying down a policy. The facts of the case were that Mr. Stahlman, who had been president of the association which I represent here today was called to testify, and in order to precipitate the issue as to the legality of the Commission's proceedings, he refused to comply with the subpena. The Commission then went to court and his defense was that the Commission was without authority to lay down a policy as it proposed to do following the results of its investigation under the rule that it had issued, or the order it had issued for the investigation, and the court held that it had no authority to lay down such a rule. The Commission has avoided that decision by a series of its decisions, and it has avoided it by using the so-called ruse of comparative proceedings in which it treats diversification of media as one area for use in decisions, but then it comes in, because of more or less favorable decisions of the court of appeals in recent years, and it has said in the McClatchy case that it comes to the contention which it considers to be determinative, and that is that one applicant had no experience in the field whosoever and the other one had had 30 years of experience in the broadcasting field with an outstanding record, and 75 years in the newspaper field and there could be no monopoly; and the only basis on which the Commission decided it was that one was a newspaperowned applicant and the other was not. Mr. DOLLIVER. Does it follow from your testimony that you are opposed to the Commission using diversification as one of the criteria on which they base their decisions? Mr. HANSON. I would not say so. You have had frequent cases down where several newspapers were involved such as the Texas case, to which I referred, where you had two newspaper interests involved there. You have had other cases where you have had newspaper interests. What I say is that a policy that says that a man who is best fitted to do the job cannot do it because he is engaged in a certain type of business, is wrong. Mr. DOLLIVER. Of course, we have had the Commission members here before us and if I recollect their testimony correctly, they have indignantly denied that they used any such criteria as you suggested just now. Mr. HANSON. I find that most law evaders do indignantly deny it. Mr. ROGERS. Mr. Hanson, is it your point, and do you say, that you do not think that the newspapers should be discriminated against? Mr. HANSON. Or favored. Mr. ROGERS. But is it your thinking that because a group owns and operates a newspaper that they are prima facie better able to operate a television or radio station than an applicant who is not engaged in that business? Mr. HANSON. No, sir, I would make them prove it in the hearing,. that they have the ability. Mr. ROGERS. You do not think the ownership of a news agency creates any presumption in their favor to begin with? Mr. HANSON. It creates no presumption in their favor and it should create no presumption against them. Mr. ROGERS. Thank you. Mr. DOLLIVER. You recognize, of course, that where there are several applicants for the same facility, somebody has to lose and somebody has to win. There can be, generally speaking, only one successful applicant. Mr. HANSON. That is correct. Mr. DOLLIVER. So that the Commission is necessarily put to the point of granting the application in one and denying the others. Mr. HANSON. That is right. Mr. DOLLIVER. Do you have in mind, as a lawyer who has taken a great interest in this subject, the criteria that they should use in arriving at such a decision? Is yours merely a negative position that they should not use this one criteria to which you object? Mr. HANSON. The law states that they should decide these cases on the basis of the public interest, convenience, and necessity. The courts in earlier decisions have stated that it is up to the Commission to find which applicant is best qualified to serve the public it seeks to serve. So that brings us down to criteria. What is the experience of the applicant in public service, whatever the nature of public service may be. So I proceed from that to what you call the negative idea, and I say that we think it is outrageous for the Commission to take the position that one who has never had any experience in the field whatsoever of gathering and disseminating information or providing entertainment, and that is one of the great features of the television field today, is better qualified to serve the public than one who has had an outstanding record of similar services over a period of years in other or related fields. It would be just about as proper, for instance, for me who has never had any banking experience in the world, to go up and get on a soap box in front of the Chase National Bank in New York and say that I would be better qualified by reason of my lack of experience to be president of that bank than John McCloy, who now heads it up, with his vast experience. That is the issue that the Commission has created by trying to carry out the policy which the court of appeals said it had no power to invoke in the Stahlman case, and carry it out through its decisions. Mr. DOLLIVER. Thank you very much. Mr. ROGERS. I just wanted to follow up my question of a moment ago, Mr. Hanson. If you carry out your last statement to its logical conclusion, would you not from this day on bar anyone from getting into the business of disseminating information or gathering news or into the banking business, unless you were in the news or banking business today? You would not be able to show any experience. Where are you going to get the experience to get into this business? Mr. HANSON. You have had radio broadcasting here for many years, and a majority of the radio stations today are operated outside of the newspaper field. You have had broad experience in the entertainment field by many who are not owners of newspapers or what have you. But as I say, when I answered your question it was based upon these comparative areas. The thing that we object to is the Commision's policy of stating that in one particular area anyone who has had experience in the field or is connected with it is virtually disqualified in favor of a newcomer. Mr. ROGERS. I gathered from your statement that the proof of prior experience in the gathering and disseminating of news should be the determining factor in determining the qualifications. Mr. HANSON. Oh, no, not at all. That would be one of them. If they proved that they did a pretty bad job, and I think that possibly could be done, although some of my clients would object to my saying so, there would be no reason for them to grant an application to such an applicant. We just do not think that because people are engaged in the newspaper business they should be considered as pariahs in the United States, or because one is engaged in some other business he should be disqualified under a policy of an administrative agency where there is no authority in the statute. Mr. ROGERS. Of course, you are familiar with the fact, Mr. Hanson, that many people charge certain newspapers with channeling their news into certain thought areas so that it will develop a certain thinking on the part of the populace. They, of course, deny it, and there is an argument and a controversy there. Do you not think, however, that that is something which should be taken into consideration as to the possibility that turning all of the news-gathering agencies and dissemination agencies over to one group might tend toward just letting the people hear and see what that particular group wants them to hear and see without the benefit of competition? Mr. HANSON. That is inconceivable in this country when you consider, first, that in the publishing field there are 25,000 different ones, and as I said earlier, there is no one man and no one group of men that controls any appreciable number of those in relation to the whole. It is just inconceivable. I think it is a myth. Again I want to point out you can pick up any newspaper, whether it is a large city newspaper or medium-sized newspaper or a small newspaper today, and it will be the one out of a hundred exception in which you will not find every shade of editorial opinion expressed by the special correspondents or the columnists or the contributors to the newspapers. Any one of them, that would be true. You can go down to Richmond, Va., which is right now mixed up in another controversy that has nothing to do with this, and you can find every shade of opinion in those papers there on the question of segregation or desegregation, written by the columnists. Mr. ROGERS. There are some people that say that that shade of opinion, all of these different shades of opinion are in the newspaper, but that where they appear in the newspaper sometimes might control the thought. Mr. HANSON. I want somebody to show me sometime a biased news article that is not signed by some writer. Anyone who signs this material is definitely entitled to express his views if he gets the right to use a byline. But I have been connected with the newspaper business for more than 50 years, and I have run the gamut from an office boy to a Washington correspondent, and now I am down to an attorney for them, and I have heard all of these charges about bias in news columns, and I have yet to see one of them that could be sustained. Mr. ROGERS. What I am talking about, Mr. Hanson, is this: Your statement does assume that there is such controversy, and there are groups of people who do believe that, and they will debate with you from now to doomsday that such is the case. The thing I am thinking about is the public service involved and what you are going to run into in making a decision in this sort of a situation. Mr. BEAMER. Will the gentleman yield at that point? I would like to say in behalf of both of us who have introduced this legislation that the intent of the bill is not to prohibit discrimination against newspapers or not to support newspaper contentions that they should be considered, but rather to make it a fact that their experience is a factor or one of the factors to decide in their favor. I think that is the basis and the intent of this particular legislation; is that right, Mr. Hanson? Mr. HANSON. I would think so. Mr. BEAMER. It is not a matter of whether it is unbiased or a factual newspaper. It is the fact that this is one of the contributing factors. May I add this, that I have before me a list of the different hearings and reports from the FCC on the reasons that they have granted or denied channels to certain applicants, and there is quite a long list of information there, and reasons that they have granted or denied. This is only one of the factors, and we are not arguing about all of these other conditions, such as financial responsibility, convenience and service to the community and all of those things. We are just trying to clarify this one particular discriminating condition which we feel has existed since 1941 or 1942. Mr. ROGERS. The point I am making is simply this: You have a debatable situation. Your statement about news stories that are slanted, of course, that depends upon which person is reading the news story. Some fellows you know would say one thing, others another. Mr. HANSON. Or which columnist you read. Mr. ROGERS. Some fellow might write that John Doe, who was recently accused of hog stealing but who was finally acquitted after several questionable trials is now loose-it is hard to make the person believe that he did not steal the hog. People will argue about that. Mr. HANSON. We think the Commission has stolen the hog in this controversy. Mr. FLYNT. I want to say that I am in substantial accord with what you have said in support of your position on these bills, and yet I do not know whether these bills would accomplish the purpose which was just expressed by our distinguished colleague, Mr. Beamer. If I can so determine, I think I would go along with them and support them wholeheartedly. Yet we have got to take this into consideration, and I want to see if you agree with this conclusion that I have reached. Wherever a board has discretion in deciding between two or more applicants, they are going to construe acts of Congress and previous regulations of their own promulgations in such a way as they want to, to let them exercise all of the discretion they want to exercise. It seems to me that the answer to what you want, and the authors of these two bills want is personnel on these various boards who will exercise discretion in a manner that will be free of unfair discrimination. Mr. HANSON. You are almost asking for the perfect man when you ask for that kind of a personnel. No; I think this: When the McFarland bill, which Mr. Priest was interested in, was before Congress, the Commission came up here and promised to behave itself on this subject of discrimination to avoid the enactment of that bill. It was able, through those promises, to stop the passage. Its record since then has been worse than it was before, and I think that the enactment of this legislation would have not only a very strong warning effect on the Commission that something else might happen if it does not behave on this issue of discriminating between citizens, and something else might well happen in the courts and if not there, then in Congress. Mr. FLYNT. On the other hand, it is impossible to determine with mathematical certainty which of two or more opposing applicants is best qualified for the franchise that is about to be awarded. It then, of course, becomes quite difficult also in the event of appeal to a judicial tribunal for that court to overturn the decision of the discretionary body if there is any substantial evidence whatsoever to support the finding they have made. Mr. HANSON. I would not advocate, in answer to your question, any effort by the committee or the Congress to interfere with the proper exercise of discretion by any administrative agency. We think that these measures are aimed at an arbitrary and capricious abuse of discretion that is not authorized by the statute and it is contrary to the statements of the Commission to the Congress of the United States when the matter has been up for consideration before. |