FCC Ordered Media Study Destroyed

LAWYER: FCC ORDERED MEDIA STUDY DESTROYED
[SOURCE: Associated Press, AUTHOR: John Dunbar]
Former FCC staffer Adam Candeub, now a law professor at Michigan State University, says senior managers at the Federal Communications Commission ordered that "every last piece" of a draft study that suggested greater concentration of media ownership would hurt local TV news coverage 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 in 2004, came to light during the Senate confirmation hearing for FCC Chairman Kevin Martin. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) received a copy of the report ''indirectly from someone within the FCC who believed the information should be made public,'' according to Boxer spokeswoman Natalie Ravitz. In a letter sent to Martin Wednesday, Boxer said she was ''dismayed that this report, which was done at taxpayer expense more than two years ago, and which concluded that localism is beneficial to the public, was shoved in a drawer.'' 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 five and one-half minutes of total news to broadcasts and more than three minutes of ''on-location'' news. The conclusion is at odds with FCC arguments made when it voted in 2003 to increase the number of television stations a company could own in a single market. It was part of a broader decision liberalizing ownership rules. The authors of the report, Keith Brown and Peter Alexander, both declined to comment.
http://www.tvnewsday.com/articles/2006/09/14/daily.5/

* Officials Ordered FCC Report Destroyed, Says Ex-Staffer
http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/CA6372324.html

* Probe Called for in FCC's Quashing of Local News Study
http://www.tvweek.com/news.cms?newsId=10757

* FCC Lawyer Says TV Study Was Hushed
http://www.latimes.com/business/printedition/la-fi-fcc15sep15,1,6351522.story?coll=la-headlines-pe-business

* In a USA Today Op Ed in 2003 on the FCC’s media ownership proceeding, then-Chairman Powell accused opponents of “substituting personal ideology for and opinion for the facts.” According to the Associated Press, however, when a study Powell ordered to prove deregulation did not hurt local news coverage proved the opposite, Powell ordered the study not merely suppressed, but destroyed. “It appears that it was Michael Powell, not the public, who preferred to make decisions based on ‘personal ideology,’” said Harold Feld, Senior Vice President, Media Access Project.
http://www.mediaaccess.org/press/Powell%20Statement.pdf

* MAP, Free Press, Consumers Union, Consumer Federation of America letter to FCC Chairman Martin:
"We urge you to immediately seek an independent investigation, through the Office of the Inspector General, to determine the circumstances under which the public was denied access to this important, taxpayer-funded research, the parties involved and the processes that may have allowed any record of the report’s existence to be destroyed."
http://www.mediaaccess.org/filings/2006%20-%200914%20Ltr%20FCC%20-%20Local%20News%20Study.pdf

* Do Local Owners Deliver More Localism?
http://www.freepress.net/docs/fcclocalnews.pdf