November 2009

Tribune executives announced that the company will end its employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) when the company emerges from bankruptcy. Michael Oneal reports that instead of an ESOP, the company is setting up a new 401K plan with a 4% match for employee contributions of up to 6%. There will also be a profit-sharing program. "When we emerge from bankruptcy, we expect that the shares of Tribune stock held by the ESOP will be extinguished and the plan terminated," Tribune's Chief Administrative Officer Gerry Spector wrote about the move in a memo to Tribune employees. It is unclear whether employees will retain a piece of the company.

Public interest groups Free Press, United Church of Christ and Media Access Project, testifying at a Federal Communications Commission workshop on media ownership rules, said that the broadcasting industry isn't in such bad shape and the FCC should not loosen its ownership rules as a way to "prop up" the industry. The groups favor structural regulations. FCC Media Bureau Chief William Lake said it would take five or 10 years to figure out whether the current tanking economy for newspapers and broadcasters was a cyclical event or a sea change. He asked how the FCC should take into account the economic downturn given that it did not have the luxury of waiting until those final returns were in. Derek Turner, research director at Free Press, said he didn't think the economic slump looked any different from past recessions. He said the FCC should be concerned about broadcasters' ability to make a profit, but that it was not the commission's job to prop up the industry, or to assume that relaxing the rules is going to be the answer to problems, many of which the industry created for itself. He also said that even if the FCC did loosen the rules, the tendency would be for the industry to engage in the same behavior that led to its current state.

A study by Professor Catherine Sandoval of the Santa Clara University School of Law -- partnering with SCU School of Law Professor Allen Hammond and Minority Media and Telecommunications Council Executive Director David Honig -- found that minority radio ownership has remained virtually flat over the past two years: A 2007 Free Press report found that 812, or 7.76 percent, of 10,506 licensed commercial stations were minority-owned, while the new report, as of mid-2009, found that 815, or 7.24 percent, of 11,249 stations were minority-owned. The new study looked at records from the Federal Communications Commission's Consolidated Database System and at Internet sources on ownership and formats to analyze the effect of FCC policies on minority ownership, program diversification, and public service. The study found that 324 different minority owners control the 815 full-power stations, with 139 of those Hispanic and 129 African American. Sixty-one percent of those owners own a single station. About three-quarters of the minority-owned stations air minority-oriented formats -- a Spanish format, Urban, Urban News, Asian, Ethnic, or minority-targeted religious formats such as Gospel or Spanish Christian.

[Commentary] Public Knowledge recently celebrated its 8th birthday of defending citizens' rights in the digital culture. Unlike any other public interest group in Washington or elsewhere, we are dedicated to ensuring openness at every layer of our communication system, and that includes the content layer. That's why our work to ensure balanced copyright is so important -- we cannot have an open Internet if large corporate copyright holders can exploit overly burdensome copyright laws to sacrifice legitimate speech at the altar of trying to stop piracy. Some in Hollywood, like Disney, were in favor of Network Neutrality in the late 90's because they knew well the powers that the network owner has. More recently, they changed course, believing that net neutrality would somehow prevent them from enforcing their copyrights. Copyright enforcement and net neutrality can co-exist, unless one seeks to enforce their copyrights through network level filtering.