While corporate America deluged the Federal Communications Commission today with comments on the media ownership docket, a small battalion of media reform groups publicized new research and public filings that urge the FCC not to scotch its broadcast ownership rules.

"These studies make clear that media consolidation does not correlate with better, more local or more diverse media content," former FCC Commissioner Gloria Tristani told reporters at a press conference held in Washington, D.C. "To the contrary, they strongly suggest that media ownership rules should be tightened not relaxed."

Tristani, now president of the Benton Foundation, announced the release of four academic papers sponsored by Benton and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) that take a critical look at media consolidation. The studies respond to the FCC's latest attempt to reconsider its media ownership regulations. Up for grabs are rules that limit how many radio stations, TV stations, and newspapers a company can own in the same market.

At the same time a host of corporations have filed comments with the FCC urging the agency to take the opposite approach: relax as many of its ownership rules as possible. All parties are filing on the last day of the comment cycle of the FCC's media ownership proceeding.

The Benton/SSRC reports contend that:

• Larger radio station groups do not offer more variety.
  Future of Music Coalition economist Peter DiCola concludes that big radio station groups that own the maximum allowed number of stations in a market "offer less variety in programming formats than station groups that are under the cap." Some big companies, by finessing the rules, have even managed to buy up more than the limit—eight in cities like New York and Los Angeles—to the detriment of formats like classical, gospel, jazz, folk, and tejano.
• Newspaper/TV cross ownership doesn't facilitate more local news.
  Michael Yan of the University of Michigan finds that, contrary to claims often made in FCC filings, TV stations that own newspapers, thanks to waivers on the FCC's cross-ownership ban, don't provide better local news and public affairs coverage. Yan's comparison of the coverage provided by 27 cross-owned stations with a larger sample concludes they offer no "meaningful improvement" in local fare. "Thus, changes in ownership rules by the FCC can not be justified in terms of claimed improvements in local news and public affairs programming."
• Women and minorities own almost no radio and television stations.
  Howard University's Carolyn M. Byerly reports that of 12,844 radio and TV stations that filed documentation with the FCC in 2005, minorities own 3.6% and women own 3.4% of these frequencies.
  "FCC policy has done almost nothing to open access to the airwaves for women and minorities," Byerly concludes. "Communication policy must include ways for women and minority groups to acquire more stations in communities of all sizes."
• Minorities intensely distrust mainstream news.
  Byerly's ethnographic survey of African-Americans, Latinos and other minority groups found that 40 percent of them distrust the medium they use most, television, to cover the issues they care about most: "safety, lack of income, and lack of affordable housing."
  "The study supports the existing FCC rationale for encouraging minority ownership, while raising serious questions about whether current measures go far enough," Byerly recommends. "We conclude that the FCC needs to reaffirm and expand its commitment to diversity of ownership—especially at the local level and among minority groups."

Asked by reporters how media ownership rules might be tightened, Peter DiCola urged the FCC to rethink its radio ownership rules.

"From an economic perspective we've seen unprecedented concentration in local markets since the Telecommunications Act of 1996," he explained, "so if you want to reign in those concentration levels back to a level that would be deemed competitive by the Department of Justice or the Federal Trade Commission, you need to lower the caps, something closer to four or five or six stations, rather than five to eight."

Meanwhile a consortium of eight public interest groups filed comments with the FCC today urging the Commission to "unite with Congress and the public" on the media ownership rule question. The groups signed on to comments submitted by the Media Access Project which urged the agency to acknowledge that "there is no reason to suggest that a repeal or relaxing of the rules would promote diversity, localism, and competition" and promote "only those policies and regulations that in fact support the ideals of citizen participation, citizen representation, and democracy."

The groups included Common Cause, the Prometheus Project, Media Alliance, and the New America Foundation. The United Church of Christ filed its own comments on the matter.

Corporations step up their filings

Meanwhile Corporate America may not be holding press conferences, but they rushed the FCC today with statements on the issue:

• The Belo media group filed comments with the FCC: "After many years of regulatory uncertainty, the Commission must finally move forward in this proceeding to eliminate the newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership ban and substantially relax the current local television ownership rule," the company's attorneys wrote. Belo owns 19 TV stations across the country, reaching almost 14 percent of U.S. TV households.
• NBC/Telemundo filed urging the Commission to relax its rules limiting how many TV stations an entity can own in a single market.
• Shamrock Communications, which owns six radio stations and the Scranton Times in Pennsylvania, submitted comments calling on the FCC to "eliminate all restrictions on newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership. . . . At a minimum, there should be no restrictions on newspaper/radio cross-ownership."
• Fox Television's attorneys argued "the only rational conclusion for the Commission to make is to eliminate the media ownership rules once and for all."

Ditto for Morris Communications, Cascade Broadcasting, Cox Enterprises, Nextstar Broadcasting, the Newspaper Association of America, CBS, Sinclair Broadcast Group, Hearst-Argyle, the National Association of Broadcasters, Media General, and Clear Channel, which submitted a 144 page filing today with the FCC.

Clear Channel's statement argued that "marketplace developments have rendered the current local radio ownership caps entirely unnecessary in light of competition." The company reiterated its request that the FCC let entities own more radio stations in big markets, from the present eight to at least ten stations in regions like New York City.

Today concludes the last day of the comment cycle period of the FCC's media ownership proceeding. Interested parties can still file responses to the comments of others for the next sixty days