2004 FCC Report on Local TV News Allegedly Suppressed

From the Associated Press, September 14, 2006:

The Federal Communications Commission ordered its staff to destroy all copies of a draft study that suggested greater concentration of media ownership would hurt local TV news coverage, a former lawyer at the agency says.

...

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 report was commissioned by then-FCC Chairman Michael Powell in August 2003 and authored by Keith Brown and Peter Alexander, who have written extensively on media and telecommunications policy.

The existence of the report, finished in 2004, came to light during the Senate confirmation hearing for FCC Chairman Kevin Martin. The report has since been published on the FCC website.

Senator Barbara Boxer of California, who received a copy of the report from someone within the FCC, sent a letter to Martin inquiring about the report and its subsequent suppression.

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."

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Boxer's office said if she does not receive adequate answers to her questions, she will push for an investigation by the FCC inspector general.

Martin and former Chairman Michael Powell have both been advocates of deregulation of ownership and this report would have been damaging to allowing media corporations to own more local stations. A report concluding that locally owned stations provide more local news content and more news content overall is very telling about how larger, national owners are affecting content. When the local news stations are bought, they frequently endure cuts to their newsroom, making it more difficult to cover local stories and at the same time making it more necessary to derive content for their newscasts from the wire or from other stations under the same company. It will be interesting to see how this report is dealt with in the October 3 hearings on deregulation in Los Angeles and what investigations into the alleged suppression will discover.

Additional Links:
Full text of the report from the FCC
"FCC Destroyed Media Ownership Report" from FAIR.org