FCC's alleged quashing of 2004 draft study which boosted local-TV ownership criticized by Sen. Boxer and media activists

A-Ownership, governance & management
FCC's alleged quashing of 2004 draft study which boosted local-TV ownership criticized by Sen. Boxer and media activists
By MGP Staff
Sep 15, 2006, 13:44

(SOURCE DOCUMENT: A PDF of the “working draft” of the 2004 study has been posted on the StopBigMedia website. The FCC has also posted it.

UPDATE: As of Friday afternoon, Sept. 15, The AP was quoting an aide to former FCC Chairman Michael Powell as saying he never saw the draft report and never ordered it quashed.

Also, the media-watchdog group FAIR is urging its supporters to write the FCC about the report status.

EXCERPTING FROM an Associated Press account of the report published Sept. 15, 2006 on the Chicago Tribune website:

“Adam Candeub, now a law professor at Michigan State University, said senior managers at the agency ordered that "every last piece" of the report be destroyed. "The whole project was just stopped--end of discussion," he said. Candeub was a lawyer in the FCC's Media Bureau at the time the report was written and communicated frequently with its authors, he said. The report, written by two economists in the FCC's Media Bureau, analyzed a database of 4,078 individual news stories broadcast in 1998. The broadcasts were obtained from Danilo Yanich, a professor and researcher at the University of Delaware, and were originally gathered by the Pew Foundation's Project for Excellence in Journalism. The analysis showed local ownership of television stations adds almost 5 1/2 minutes of total news to broadcasts and more than three minutes of "on-location" news . . . The authors of the report, Keith Brown and Peter Alexander, declined to comment. Brown has left public service, while Alexander remains at the FCC. Yanich confirmed the two men were the authors.”

From a Los Angeles Times story about the report (09-15-06):

The 23-page study — based on a 1998 database of 4,078 news stories from 60 stations over a five-day period — found that locally owned TV stations broadcast nearly 5 1/2 minutes more of local news than stations not locally owned. Martin Kaplan, associate dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication, said the findings were similar to those he presented in 2003 but would have been significant coming from the FCC's staff. (author: jim.puzzanghera@latimes.com )

Peter Tridish, of the Philadelphia-based Prometheus Radio Project, has released a statement critical of the alleged FCC quashing of the draft study. He state in part:

“Many of us know far more about what's going on in far away countries than we know about local issues in housing, health care, environment and education -- news that affects us daily. We can have the most direct impact on what's happening in our local community, but because of the economic structure of the news business, these issues are the ones we end up understanding the least. A remote, corporate owned media can undermine our participation in a democracy. And it's our democracy trhat these conglomerates are exchanging for mass-produced news segments that they can syndicate on hundreds of channels, nationwide.”

OTHER RESOURCES:

The “StopBigMedia” website, which is mainted by FreePress.Net and represents a coalition of groups opposed to media consolidation, has developed an account of the report’s status at:

http://www.stopbigmedia.com/blog/

It includes a link to a version of the report, dated June 17, 2004 and labeled as a “working paper”:

http://www.freepress.net/docs/fcclocalnews.pdf

Broadcasting & Cable story quoting FCC Chairman Kevin Martin (09-14-06):

http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=65863

Another AP story from Sept. 14, with additional background on the report:

http://www.ibcnews.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=65876

Bio of Andam Candeub on Michigan State University website:

http://www.law.msu.edu/faculty_staff/profile.php?prof=370

Candeub’s photograph:

http://www.law.msu.edu/ipclp/ipclp_media/Candeub.jpg

MarketPlace Radio’s report on Adam Powell’s localism study:

http://marketplace.publicradio.org/shows/2005/08/08/AM200508082.html

Variety Weekly story about local news study by USC’s Adam Powell III:

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117928127?categoryid=1682&cs=1

Link to draft 2005 report and book, “Reinventing Local News: Connecting Communities Through New Tecnologies,” by Adam Clayton Powell III.

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