Analyzing all the various leaks to the media about the FCC’s plan...

of the 2 most important sources of news -- newspapers and local TV -- for as many as 70 million U.S. households. CFA and CU argued that the FCC proposal effectively would gut the public interest standard of the Communications Act and would afford less protection for media mergers than the antitrust laws traditionally did for other kinds of mergers. “The Justice Department doesn’t do democracy, they do commerce,” CFA Research Dir. Mark Cooper said. The FCC is set to vote June 2 on the draft proposal. CFA and CU said their own sources within the FCC confirmed the media reports on which they based their analysis. “Unfortunately, the proposed rules circulated by the FCC are driven by political deals and deregulatory ideology, not rigorous analysis or First Amendment principles,” said Gene Kimmelman, CU senior dir.- public policy. Cooper, who wrote the analysis, said the FCC draft order ignored audience size, actual patterns of media use and the dramatic difference between entertainment and the dissemination of news and information. The analysis said mergers would be allowed in 140 concentrated local markets and in as many as 100 of the local markets representing nearly half the national population there already was one dominant newspaper. Allowing a merger between a dominant newspaper and a large TV station would create a local news giant that would threaten alternative news viewpoints, Cooper and Kimmelman said. In those markets, Cooper said, one company would have half of the total audience and half of the reporters. They criticized the idea of allowing cross- ownership in places other than small rural areas, such as Atlanta, Louisville, New Orleans and San Antonio, where one newspaper would have a 90% or larger share of the newspaper circulation and a merger typically would attract 1/3 of the TV audience. CFA and CU said the FCC proposal failed to properly define markets by ignoring the fact that almost half of all broadcast stations did not provide news and would set a “dangerously low standard” for competition in local media markets by allowing the count of major news media voices to decline to as low as 3 or 4 in many markets. The groups also charged that the draft appeared to be driven by a “results- oriented political agenda.” One example they cited is that UHF stations appear to be discounted for purposes of the national cap on network ownership of local stations, but not for purposes of the cross-ownership and the duopoly rule. CFA and CU proposed that no mergers between TV stations and newspapers be allowed if the market was or would become concentrated because of the merger, that no mergers involving TV stations be allowed if the same conditions existed. At the beginning of a news conference discussing the analysis, Kimmelman wryly noted that none of the major TV networks were covering the event. Cooper later said he didn’t expect that the new analysis would necessarily sway the Republican members of the Commission. “The battle over media ownership doesn’t end on June 2. It begins on June 2” when people and communities react to a wave of consolidation, he said.