Few Firm Answers for Some Media Ownership Workshop Questions
Top FCC staffers asked about how the commission should take account of the Internet, attribution of radio and TV station ownership and quality of programming in its coming media ownership review. Wide-ranging questions at a commission workshop Tuesday on ownership rules -- the second of three this week (CD Nov 3 p3) -- didn’t always yield many concrete answers, because some questions posed have no straightforward solutions, panelists’ responses suggested. High-quality news should be a goal of the ownership review, which Congress has required the FCC to do in 2010, speakers said.
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“If we can’t fix what’s broken, if we can’t rejuvenate broadcast journalism, reopen shuttered newsrooms … and take advantage of the great potential of local broadcasting, then maybe those who want that spectrum back have the better of the argument,” Commissioner Michael Copps said. “We've been asleep at the switch when we were not being downright destructive. . . . Media companies took advantage of that. Don’t blame them, blame us.” Copps was the only FCC member at the event.
Ken Ferree, the Media Bureau chief when the rule was rewritten in 2003, disagreed with Copps that additional consolidation will follow further recovery of the economy. “I suspect that this will be a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing,” he said. “I hate to introduce reality to an FCC proceeding. The fact is that broadcasting is becoming an increasingly marginalized” industry. “I don’t think anybody particularly cares anyone what the FCC’s rules are because nobody is interested in buying the stations,” Ferree said. He’s with the Progress & Freedom Foundation, the only group represented at the event that doesn’t oppose media consolidation.
Some results of the ownership are harder to measure than others, said moderator Colin Crowell, senior counsel to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. Competition can be easier to measure “because we've done it before, even though it seems like only yesterday we were doing the last media ownership review,” he said. Crowell asked, “How would you quantify, or would you, new media? Do you count the Internet as one voice? Do you count blogging sites as a voice? And if you count a major blogging site as a voice, is it a national voice, is it a local voice?”
It’s hard to “determine the ’true’ impact of the Internet” because “there is almost no original reporting, and what original reporting exists is on soft news,” said Research Director Derek Turner of Free Press. “The Internet definitely has much less impact on competition with the traditional sources. That will change over time. This is one of the pitfalls in trying to construct a diversity index” that takes new media into account (CD Oct 22 p9). The commission needs to track where content is produced, said President Andrew Schwartzman of the Media Access Project. “Identifying that which is repurposed and which doesn’t add to diversity … makes these proxies a lot more complicated.”
Media Bureau Chief Bill Lake said he’s concerned about matters that are hard to measure. “We may end up pursuing those that are most easily quantifiable,” he said. “You may want more voices than a competitive analysis would otherwise drive just for the purpose of making sure you cannot have someone stampeding public opinion.” Associate Chief Sarah Whitesell, referring to academics’ comments at a workshop Monday, said, “There were points at which more competition didn’t mean better quality. . . . How do we think about that as we measure competition?”
Crowell raised the “question of how you count ownership” and asked what role “attribution rules play in assessing whether the owner is actually local, if that is a policy goal.” He also asked about local marketing and other agreements by which a TV station contributes to the operations of another in its market. The deals had been criticized earlier by panelists. “Talk about the role of keeping score, so to speak,” Crowell said. Voting interests can be the easiest to measure, Turner replied, but “defining who is locally owned is not that straightforward.”