Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

On March 31, 2014, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), as part of its mandated quadrennial review, made ownership decisions that will significantly slow down the march toward consolidation in local media markets.   But, these decisions were due in 2010.  They were four years late and they represented a 180⁰ about-face for the agency.   Media reform groups embraced the new rules while the media industry vehemently denounced them as antiquated. As a result, we are in the middle of a white-hot policy debate in which hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake. In December 2016 those opposed to the rules, lead by the National Association of Broadcasters, successfully lobbied the Congress to include a rider in the appropriations bill to "grandfather in" the existing consolidated arrangements.

Previously, the FCC acquiesced to the de facto consolidation that was occurring over the past decade.  The media industry used service agreements (SAs) to overcome ownership restrictions.  These were arrangements between formerly competing stations to bring advertising, management and/or news operations under the control of one entity, often with the wholesale dismissal of the staff of the brokered station.  The FCC accepted three of the media industry's claims: (1) that the SAs did not violate ownership rules; (2) that they were in the public interest and (3) there was no research that examined their effect, anyway.   The only way to examine the first two was to carry out the third.

Media reformers and policy researchers continually pushed the FCC to look critically at those claims---to discern whether the SAs effectively took away disparate "voices" in the markets.  It was to no avail.  So, I conducted the only research to examine the effect of SAs on the information that is delivered to citizens.  I found that SAs do exactly what they are intended to do---achieve economies of scale.  Much content and production resources are duplicated across stations, effectively reducing the number of news sources within markets.

The purpose of is paper is to examine the policy research and political processes that brought the FCC to its decisions on March 31.  What was the nature of the research that it was able to offer the FCC another way of looking at the issue?  Why was that different from the information the FCC had used previously?  Who were the actors in the political process?  What was the role of the policy researcher?  What can we learn from the case?