FCC Report: Media Studies Not Suppressed
Investigation Finds Agency Staff Didn’t Hide Ownership Study On Local News Delivery
By Ted Hearn -- Multichannel News, 10/5/2007 11:26:00 AM
Washington – An internal investigation concluded Friday that Federal Communications Commission senior staff did not suppress a 2004 study showing that locally owned TV stations provide more local news than non-locally owned stations.
A second report, about radio ownership, also wasn’t suppressed, the investigation found.
“The Inspector General of the Federal Communications Commission has released a report finding that the evidence did not substantiate allegations that two draft research reports of staff economists in the [FCC's] Media Bureau had been suppressed by senior managers at the [FCC] or that senior managers had ordered one of the reports to be destroyed,” the FCC said in a statement.
The investigation was directed by Carla Conover, Deputy Assistant Inspector General for Investigations. It was launched after Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) accused the FCC of hiding the reports from the public because they ran counter to the deregulatory positions of then-FCC chairman Michael Powell and Media Bureau chief Kenneth Ferree. Both left the agency in early 2005.
“They didn't like what the report said, so they put it in a drawer,” said Boxer communications director Natalie Ravitz.
The FCC relaxed radio and TV ownership rules in June 2003. The rules never took effect because of a court injunction in September 2003. In June 2004, the rules were largely sent back to the FCC by a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit in Philadelphia.
FCC member Michael Copps, a Democrat who opposed the 2003 rules, said the internal report was flawed.
"Today's report is most notable for what it fails to contain. It doesn't include interviews with key FCC staff. It declined to seek interviews with FCC officials all the way up the chain of command. And it doesn't explain why a study that reached striking and exceedingly relevant conclusions wasn't finalized and made a part of the record, even though supervising economists concluded that the technical flaws could be easily fixed,” Copps said. “The nagging feeling remains that we don't yet have the entire story."
The 23-page report stressed that its scope had been broad, including a review of 150,000 pages of documents and the search of more than one terabyte of electronic data. One terabyte equals about 10% of all printed material in the Library of Congress, according to a 2003 study by the University of California at Berkeley, School of Information Management and Systems.
“This investigation was the largest ever conducted by the Commission’s Office of Inspector General,” according to the report.
However, FCC investigators were unable to interview Michigan State University law professor Adam Candeub, the former FCC staff member who claimed the two media studies had been suppressed.
“I didn’t trust the process,” Candeub told Multichannel News Friday afternoon, adding that the report contained errors. “It says I supplied information to senators. That’s not true and it’s not substantiated.”
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