01.25.07
The GOP FCC
It works only to protect Big Business:
At the Federal Communications Commission, reports were altered, and studies were blocked from release that showed local ownership was beneficial for local news coverage. The panel is still withholding hundreds of pages on media ownership research from release to the public. So says the Associated Press:
When the government decided to take a hard look at how well broadcasters were serving their communities, two economists at the Federal Communications Commission got a research idea: They would look at whether locally owned TV stations produced more local news than stations owned by companies based outside the area.They found that local ownership resulted in more local news coverage. They also realized they had turned up what one of the researchers, economist Keith Brown, called “inconvenient facts.” The findings were at odds with what their agency, under heavy lobbying from the broadcast industry, had endorsed.
The months-long study was spiked by the agency with “no plausible explanation,” Brown says. He suspects it was because the conclusions were at odds with the shared position of the FCC and the broadcast industry: that media ownership rules were too restrictive and should be loosened.
walt said,
31 January 2007 at 7:49 am
I’m not going to defend the FCC here, but I disagree that changes in media ownership are good only for big business. Unless some of these stations and newspapers are bought by larger chains, they will fold. So it’s actually to the benefit of anyone who wants to maintain a diverse media to support franchise ownership. It’s counterintuitive maybe, but those are the facts.
Full disclosure, I work with the National Assn of Broadcasters in my offline life, and they generally don’t represent the mom-and-pop broadcasters, so take that under consideration.