De Commerciele Massamedia 41

'News: It's not the Internet that's killing newspapers. It's the equity-chasing investors and their friends at the FCC who have put outsize profits before a free press.
By Eric Klinenberg

March/April 2007 Issue

Senate reconfirmation hearings tend to be predictable affairs, marked by polite give-and-take and senatorial grandstanding, but generally free of surprise plot twists. And so it was supposed to go last September 12, when Federal Communications Commission (fcc) chairman Kevin Martin appeared before the Commerce Committee. In March 2005, following the departure of Michael Powell (Colin's son), President Bush had named the young Republican lawyer to head the extraordinarily powerful five-person panel that oversees the nation's media and telecommunications policies. Martin, a boyish-looking 40-year-old who'd been on the fcc since 2001, planned to carry on much of his predecessor's unfinished business, particularly stiffening penalties for on-air indecency and the sweeping deregulation of media ownership rules. But unlike Powell, who was confrontational and contemptuous of his critics, the bland and soft-spoken Martin seemed unlikely to attract controversy.
But controversy caught up with him when Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) strayed from the script at his reconfirmation hearing. Boxer began by asking Martin about an fcc study, commissioned by Powell, on the impact of media ownership on local news. Unsuspecting, Martin said that it had never been completed. Then, as he watched glumly, Boxer brandished a draft of the study, which had, in fact, been written more than two years earlier, only to be buried by the fcc. The report found that locally owned television stations, on average, presented 5 1/2 minutes more local news per broadcast than stations owned by out-of-town conglomerates. The findings squarely contradicted the claims made by Martin, Powell, and big media companies, who have argued that lifting limits on ownership would improve local news coverage.
"Now, this isn't national security, for God's sakes," Boxer continued, unable to resist making Martin squirm. "I mean, this is important information. So I don't understand who deep-sixed this thing." Martin meekly said he had no idea, and promised he'd look into it. Within a week, a former fcc lawyer claimed that "every last piece" of the report had been ordered destroyed before it was leaked, and a second unreleased study came to light, prompting Boxer to refer the matter to the fcc's inspector general.'

Lees verder: http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/03/breaking_the_news.html