inkbluesky

white washed fence 

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 in 2004, came to light during the Senate confirmation hearing for FCC Chairman Kevin Martin.

Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. 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.
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(Note: In June of 2006, the FCC announced the start of a new review of media ownership, including a “series of public hearings on media ownership issues at diverse locations across the nation”.  That review is still ongoing.)

‘Every last piece’ destroyed
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.

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.”

Martin said he was not aware of the existence of the report, nor was his staff. His office indicated it had not received Boxer’s letter as of midafternoon Thursday.

Local ownership benefits
In the letter, Boxer asked whether any other commissioners “past or present” knew of the report’s existence and why it was never made public. She also asked whether it was “shelved because the outcome was not to the liking of some of the commissioners and/or any outside powerful interests?”

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.

Community responsiveness
At that time, the agency pointed to evidence that “commonly owned television stations are more likely to carry local news than other stations.”

When considering whether to loosen rules on media ownership, the agency is required to examine the impact on localism, competition and diversity. The FCC generally defines localism as the level of responsiveness of a station to the needs of its community.

Why is this important, because it matters who owns the media and the consentration of media power in the hands of the very few. Who owns the media 

In 2004, Bagdikian’s revised and expanded book, The New Media Monopoly, shows that only 5 huge corporations — Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch’s News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, and Viacom (formerly CBS) — now control most of the media industry in the U.S. General Electric’s NBC is a close sixth.

If corporate ownership of the media expands to include very little outlet how much diversity of news coverage do we get. As it stands all the major news outlets are just pale imitations of one another. How can it be that all the major networks cover the same “big” stories in the same way. Why is there so little difference between what the news editors at one network think is the big story of the day compared to the editors at the network down the street. Local news is already a formula, you just about have to wait for the scroll across the bottom of the screen to tell which city you’re in. Maybe its too late to make a difference. That is at least part of what explains the growing internet audience for news. There is a general feeling that the major media outlets are not covering issues or events in the frequency or depth that they should.

Interesting bonus story, Dubya Could Learn a Lot from Sun Tzu

It’s too bad The Art of War wasn’t on your summer reading list. If you’d read it, maybe we wouldn’t be mired in Iraq. According to the author, Sun Tzu, esteemed for thousands of years as the Sage of Warfare, you’re doing it all wrong.

Exactly what military principles you’ve broken - and how many - I learned by chance. On the first day of classes at Washington College, the title on a shelf of paperbacks caught my eye. I opened at random and found this on Page 10: “In war, better take a state intact than destroy it.”

Then came a critique of your plan to recall reservists for more tours: “The skillful warrior never conscripts troops a second time.” And, “Supplying an army at a distance drains the public coffers. … Six-tenths are spent on broken chariots, worn-out horses.” That last is archaically put, but don’t we have thousands of war-wrecked Humvees and tanks now - while short of funds to fix them?

On Page 13, I found: “Treat prisoners of war kindly, and care for them.” How does that square with Guantanamo?

Page after page, Sun Tzu has something to say to you, even though the principles were stated something like 2,500 years ago.

But your reading list this summer, so the White House said, included a three-volume history of the Louisiana Purchase. In a summer past, as casualties mounted, we were told you read a comprehensive history of salt.

That’s hardly as germane as The Art of War, which states, “No nation has ever benefited from a protracted war.”