FCC COMRS. SHOW DEEP DIVISIONS OVER MEDIA OWNERSHIP
LAS VEGAS -- What was billed as a regulatory face-off of FCC commissioners at the NAB convention Tues. didn’t disappoint as Comrs. Abernathy and Copps verbally tussled over the agency’s media ownership review. Abernathy was particularly upset by Copps’s insistence that more public comment was necessary for the Commission to reach a credible decision.
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With more than 15,000 comments on record already, Abernathy said a final decision by the FCC already was past due: “I just don’t think we need to gather any more information.” While Copps said there were questions that remained unanswered by the Media Bureau about what would be in the final rules, Abernathy said the bureau was “always coming to us” with new proposals: “The claim that we don’t have a clue of what’s going on is simply wrong. We do have it in front of us. We know what our choices are. We're going to have to find out where we have 3 votes.”
Abernathy said the Commission had evidence that, in places where newspapers and broadcast TV stations had been allowed to combine, the public had benefited from an increase in the volume of news, as well as increased depth. Copps said many communities that once had more than one newspaper, no longer do. However, Comr. Martin suggested that the Commission’s ban on cross-ownership between newspapers and TV stations might be partly to blame for that: “I certainly think that the Commission should do something to relax it, if not repeal it.” NTIA Dir. Nancy Victory, who also was on the panel speaking for the Bush Administration, said that while still on the presidential election campaign, then-candidate Bush had questioned that ban specifically.
On the 35% national audience reach cap, Abernathy said she didn’t see how the agency would be able to defend that particular number in court. Copps, who has been traveling around the country to public forums on media ownership, said the record was far from adequate on the network ownership rules. “We don’t have all the answers. We haven’t even teed up all the questions yet,” he said. Abernathy flatly disagreed: “There’s not a chance that Commissioner Copps and I are ever going to agree about the state of the record in this proceeding.”
Martin expressed skepticism at the agency’s using a “diversity index,” which has been an idea Chmn. Powell has proposed to measure the breadth and depth of media in communities. “I think it’s very difficult when you talk about trying to quantify in a strict number a particular aspect of diversity,” he said: “Generally speaking, I think the Commission would be better off to have simple rules that everyone can understand.” Martin said such an index could be used as one tool in the process, but that he wouldn’t want “a complicated mathematical formula” as a new rule.
Abernathy said the Commission was “at the stage where we are supposed to be talking to each other and we are supposed to be figuring out where we're going to land.” She said the Media Bureau had presented the commissioners with a large amount of information and a variety of scenarios but the commissioners “haven’t been willing to make the cuts.” Calling the item “the mother of all biennial reviews,” Copps said the Commission should put whatever it came up with out for public comment. Comr. Adelstein also said he thought putting the decision out for comment “could only improve the final product.” Victory, responding to a question from the audience, said that if people hadn’t made their feelings known to the Commission already, they didn’t take the opportunity the Commission put before them. “It’s really time to make a decision,” she said to applause.