The question hit an already nervous Federal Commmunications Commission Chair Kevin from left field, both literally and figuratively. It came during his reconfirmation hearing, held by the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee on Tuesday, September 12th.

Martin had been grilled by Senators Ted Stevens and John Sununu on the Universal Service Fund and by Byron Dorgan on the agency's media ownership proceeding. Dorgan took an "aren't-you-ashamed-of-yourself" tone with the FCC Chair. At various points Sununu got downright nasty. Now it was Senator Barbara Boxer's turn.

With a cold, polite edge to her voice, the Democrat from California asked Martin what had happened to the FCC's proceeding on localism. Martin explained that it had gotten bogged down under the leadership of former Chair Michael Powell, but now it was going again.

"Well, let me tell you why I have a problem with your answer," Boxer said. "I think that there's work that has been done, and it's been stifled. And I don't know who stifled it, but I have a copy of a draft report, dated June 17th, '04, 'Do local owners deliver more localism? Some evidence from local broadcast news'."

"Now according to this report . . . " Boxer continued. " . . . have you seen this report?"

"I haven't," Martin replied, "and I wasn't Chairman in June of '04."

"You haven't?" Boxer asked.

No, Martin repeated.

"Well, I'm going to ask you to please go back," Boxer lectured. "I'm going to ask all the Commissioners if they saw this report. Because according to it, local [television station] ownership, and this is a quote, adds almost five and one half minutes of local news and almost three minutes of local on-location news, that's almost five minutes for each 30 minute local news broadcast. In the course of a year this means that locally owned stations provide almost 33 more hours of regional news, news that's directly relevant to viewers."

Martin put on his best "this-is-not-happening-and-I'm-not-here" expression and kept his answers short.

"I don't understand who deep-sixed this thing," Boxer grumbled.

Was the "working paper" suppressed?

Since then, University of Michigan law professor Adam Candeub, who worked for the FCC in 2004, has told reporters that pressure came from above to suppress the study.

"The initial results were very compelling, and it was just stopped in its tracks because it was not the way the agency wanted to go," Candeub told the Los Angeles Times today. Former FCC Chair Powell says that he never saw the document.

Media reform groups want an independent investigation of the paper, which was written by Keith Brown and Peter Alexander of the FCC's Media Bureau.

Free Press, Consumers Union, Consumer Federation of America and Media Access Project have asked Martin to order the FCC's Inspector General "to determine the circumstances under which the public was denied access to this important, taxpayer-funded research, the parties involved and the processes that may have allowed any record of its existence to be destroyed."

But a closer reading of the document indicates that while it clearly finds a correlation between local ownership of television stations and local coverage, it also offers findings that may aid the arguments of those who want to relax media ownership limits. The report also raises some disturbing questions about what kind of local coverage TV station owners provide.

The paper's scope

The study's material comes from data collected by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, part of the Pew Research Center. It consists of 4,078 news stories, measured in seconds, from sixty stations in 20 Designated Market Areas (DMAs), an advertising agency term.

The 20 DMAs the study used were mapped out by Nielsen Media Research. They include New York, Chicago, Boston, and Los Angeles, and smaller areas like Tallahassee, Florida and Burlington, Vermont. They do not include regions like the San Francisco Bay Area and the Texas Gulf Coast.

The document defines a news story as local "if the story is of at least marginally greater importance to the mean individual residing within the DMA, and if we believe the mean individual within the DMA would identify the story as local." But the report does not indicate whether its authors used any criterion besides their own rules to make this judgment call.

The two researchers took into consideraton whether the journalists involved in these stories did any live reporting. In the end, they were able to compile 275 "station level observations," presumably news stories that they felt comfortable classifying as either clearly local or non-local. Then they looked at the ownership structures of the TV stations that broadcast the stories.

From this body of information they arrived at these now well-known conclusions:

• " . . . local ownership appears to increase total, local, and local on-location news seconds" to a TV station's local half hour newscast, the paper concludes. "Moreover, the increase in total news seconds from local ownership appears to be almost entirely driven by an increase in local news."
• Precisely: "local ownership adds almost five and one-half minutes of local news, and over three minutes local on-location news."

But the paper also makes some observations that should be less encouraging to advocates of localism and that muddy the waters of the media ownership debate.

• Not all locally owned TV stations do so well in the study, specifically "a local television owner who owns a within-DMA radio station appears to produce significantly less local news, possibly because they substitute local radio news for local television news." Media reformers could counter that this only strengthens their case for a rigorous ban on cross-media ownership, but the study also says that
• " . . . a local owner that owns a within-DMA radio station increases [emphasis added] the number of total news seconds by almost 15 per each additional DMA in which they own a radio station." In other words, TV/radio station cross ownership doesn't enhance local news, but it may enhance news service overall, an important point given that many analysts regard broadcast news as an endangered species.
• Furthermore, the report also found that "newspaper ownership is not a significant factor" in determining whether a TV station produces more or less local news. This finding weakens the claim that the FCC's newspaper/TV station cross ownership ban protects localism.

The paper also makes a disturbing speculation several times about the reason why locally owned TV stations may promote localism: because their owners have a financial stake in local politics.

"For example," the study suggests on page two, "if the local [television station] owner also develops real estate locally, they may cover the local zoning board in a way that favors the owner's real estate interests."

It is doubtful that this represents the kind of localism that the media democracy movement wants.

All in all, the FCC's "deep-sixed" localism study makes a compelling case for decentralizing ownership rules that ensure the locally owned nature of our nation's media—but not always. If Michael Powell's FCC did indeed suppress this document, the action suggests a highly politicized, even paranoid internal culture that feared even a nuanced challenge to its agenda.