Media ownership study ordered destroyed

Posted by Mary Mancini on December 10, 2006 under Uncategorized |

Tomorrow is the big day. Tomorrow the FCC comes to Nashville for a public hearing on media consolidation. To whet your appetite, let’s take a trip in the WayBack™ machine to last September when we found out that the staff of the FCC was ordered to destroy all copies of a 2003 study suggesting that a “greater concentration of media ownership would hurt local TV news coverage.”

The report, which former chairman Michael Powell denied ever seeing, would have remained buried if a copy was not clandestinely given to Senator Barbara Boxer during FCC Chairman Kevin Martin’s confirmation hearing.

The analysis of the report showed “local ownership of television stations adds almost five and one-half minutes of total news to broadcasts and more than three minutes of “on-location” news,” a conclusion at odds with arguments the FCC made in 2003 in favor or increasing the number of television stations a company could own in a single market.

On our next stop in the Wayback™ machine is November 2006 when the FCC disclosed the launching of ten new studies on media ownership during the Thanksgiving holiday. Funny though, the two Democratic commissioners didn’t really know anything about them.

“Today’s announcement of the Commission’s new media ownership studies, unfortunately, raises more questions in the public’s mind than it answers,” Democrat Michael Copps declared. “How were the contractors selected for the outside projects? How much money is being spent on each project—and on the projects collectively? What kind of peer review process is envisioned?”

Shortly after Copps’ remarks, his fellow Democrat Jonathan Adelstein released a similar statement.

“Today’s unilateral release of this Public Notice on the eve of the Thanksgiving holiday ultimately undermines the public’s confidence by raising more questions than it answers,” Adelstein said in comments distributed to reporters. “The descriptions of the studies are scant, lacking any sense of the Commission’s expectations for scope, proposed methodology and data sources. In certain instances, the truncated period of time to complete the studies is an ingredient for a study that doesn’t engender public faith and confidence.”