A Republican ex-FCC commissioner agrees with a former Democratic commissioner that...
A Republican ex-FCC commissioner agrees with a former Democratic commissioner that the agency should vote every month on some media ownership diversity proposals that have been pending for years. Deborah Tate said she backed the suggestion of Michael Copps in…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
2007, when they were both FCC members, though the two “probably don’t agree about much regarding media ownership.” Her hope now: “Just please do something in 2013 to ensure that women and minorities can participate fully in America’s broadcasting industry,” Tate wrote Thursday on the blog of the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council (http://xrl.us/bn8cao). “The latest FCC draft media ownership decision spends over 30 pages recounting legal arguments against any action regarding policies that would help minority and female ownership, although there are dozens of pending proposals that do not run afoul of the Supreme Court’s standards for race-conscious actions.” The council, of which Tate is a director, has backed such proposals. Two business professors separately clarified a research paper the FCC paid them to write as part of studies on ownership conducted for the upcoming media ownership order. An assumption by Adam Rennhoff of Middle Tennessee State University and Duke University’s Kenneth Wilbur “which we thought was innocuous, was not innocuous,” they wrote. The determination was a result of feedback from peers before a version of “Local Media Ownership and Viewpoint Diversity in Local Television News” is published in an academic journal, they said. “Viewpoint diversity is positively associated with increases in the number of co-owned television stations within a market,” the professors wrote in further revisions to the study posted on the agency’s media ownership report website (http://xrl.us/bkz6ju). The academics had no immediate further comment.