The Federal Communications Commission released its long-awaited report on the future of media, now re-titled "The Technology and Information Needs of Communities.” The document spans a whopping 450 pages and touches on nearly every aspect of American media. The scope and depth of the report is impressive and the FCC future of media team should be commended for their tireless work on it. 

However, at first glance, there are some glaring problems in key parts of the report that suggest troubling trends for those who care about better news and information for American communities. While the report does highlight a number of promising policy ideas—many proposed by Free Press and our allies—almost all of them are outside the jurisdiction of the FCC. We’ll post more on these policies soon.

Where the FCC actually has the power and jurisdiction to help local communities, the agency abdicates its responsibility, backing away from even the small but positive steps made by his Republican predecessors. Instead of striking a bold path forward, the report takes one step forward and two steps back. The report is full of contradictions. “The policy prescriptions here [...] don’t follow from the diagnosis,” said FCC Commissioner Michael Copps.

There are three key examples of this: Localism, Media Consolidation and Enhanced Disclosure.

Localism

The biggest take away from the agency's report is that there is still a crisis in quality, local news. However, oddly, the FCC report seems to embrace policies that would make this problem even worse. For example, the FCC has an open proceeding on localism - one of the three pillars of its Congressional mandate. The agency has held numerous hearings, received thousands of comments from citizens, and spent years developing recommendations to encourage broadcasters to better meet local information needs. However, even though the absence of local news is a central theme in this report, the report suggests shuttering the Localism proceeding and taking no action on it. 

Media Consolidation

In addition, the report highlights the detrimental impact media consolidation has had on local newsrooms, and then stunningly suggests that the Commission should consider more consolidation between newspapers and broadcast stations. This is in spite of the fact that the FCC’s own data shows that prior consolidation and cross-ownership lead to an overall decrease in local news production. It seems obvious that we should avoid addressing the problems wrought by consolidated ownership by permitting further consolidation. Uniting two failing business models in an effort to save journalism is akin to tying together two rocks and hoping they will float.  

Enhanced Disclosure 

Finally, one of the reports main recommendations is to abandon enhanced disclosure, which requires broadcasters to report how much - or how little - local news and programming they air. It’s ironic that the authors spent so much time and effort gathering and analyzing data on the problems facing the media, yet the report concludes that one solution is to collect less data on the problems with existing local media. Doing this hides the problem this report was intended to help resolve by making our media less transparent and less accountable. In exchange, the FCC report recommends that broadcasters post their public files online - a poor substitute to gathering real data. 

What’s most bizarre is just a few years ago the FCC adopted enhanced disclosure on a bipartisan basis with all but one commissioner supporting it. The FCC had determined that the information in the public file was inadequate for communities to evaluate how broadcasters were serving the public interest. Now the agency is backpedaling, and their only justification seems to be that they believe the form would have been "burdensome" for broadcasters who use the public airwaves for free, and make millions.

As noted above, there is much in this report that resonates and validates the research and recommendations we have made in the past, and supports other critical policy recommendations from the Knight Commission, Columbia University and USC Annenberg. However, the three issues outlined above are important because they are fundamental to the FCC’s responsibility to foster competition, localism and diversity, and because they are related to open proceedings currently at the FCC. These are all issues that could be decided in coming months, and this report suggests that the agency may be heading in a troubling direction. 

The report makes clear that we face urgent challenges in our communities and the stakes of these decisions are high. Commissioner Copps noted in his remarks, “The irony here is that when the actions of government weaken the Fourth Estate, there is less of a check on government itself.” 

Check back here for more analysis and breakdown of the FCC’s report “The Technology and Information Needs of Communities.”