Spiked Media Ownership Study Leads to New FCC Query

SPIKED STUDY LEADS TO NEW FCC QUERY
[SOURCE: Associated Press, AUTHOR: John Dunbar]
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. Economic research reports were at times altered to reflect a more favorable view of lifting ownership caps, and at least in some cases they were spiked altogether.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/01/25/national/w111805S57.DTL