FCC Issues, Dems Attack, Ownership Studies
By John Eggerton -- Broadcasting & Cable, 7/31/2007 2:59:00 PM
The FCC has released the 10 media ownership studies it contracted out as part of its review of its ownership rules per a congressional mandate for periodic review and a court-ordered remand of a 2003 rewrite of those rules.
It has given interested parties 60 days to comment on them, but several media ownership critics didn't need more than a few hours.
Martin had promised the studies as part of the FCC's fact-finding into the state of the media marketplace and any changes since the deregulatory rule rewrite of 2003, but the released reports did nothing to assuage the Democratic FCC Commissioners who voted against that rule rewrite.
"Just when we hoped an open media ownership process was developing here at the FCC, along comes this bucket of ice water," said Commissioners Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein in a joint statement. "These are ten supposedly serious studies put together by teams of economists and analysts over an eight month period. One study alone contains over 13 million data points. Yet the Commission expects the public to analyze all ten studies, and reams of underlying data, and file comments 60 days from today!
"This is unfair, unnecessary, and ultimately unwise – inviting public, Congressional, and judicial outrage reminiscent of what happened when the FCC tried to loosen media ownership rules four years ago."
Free Press, which has joined those commissioners in strong opposition to media deregulation, blasted the studies as biased in favor of consolidation, including lifting the ban on newspaper-broadcast crossownership. Arguably, though, that should have been the easiest case to make, since even the federal appeals court that remanded the 2003 rules didn't seem to have a problem with lifting that ban.
Free Press also took the opportunity to point out that the FCC investigation into two media ownership studies not released under FCC Chairman Michael Powell had been pending since September. "Coming on the heels of a major flap over the suppression of research that contradicted the agency's policy recommendations in the media ownership proceeding," said Consumer Federation of America's Mark Cooper, "it is clear that the new blatantly biased research plan was intended to avoid that kind of embarrassment and produce the results the FCC was looking for," Cooper said.
