Three advocacy groups charge that the Federal Communications Commission has not provided enough time for the public to consider its ten new studies on media ownership. Not only that, say Free Press, the Consumer Federation of America, and the Consumers Union, but the FCC is being stingy with access to the data on which the studies are based.

"The Commission cannot expect the public to be able to address these studies when it provides limited access to much, though not yet all, of the necessary underlying data more than a month into the comment period," the three groups wrote to the FCC on September 11th. The Commission posted additional related data to the studies in early September.

The contested media surveys, part of the Commission's ongoing media ownership proceeding, have always been a source of suspicion and acrimony within the FCC. The agency announced their launching just before Thanksgiving last year, apparently without telling either of the Commission's two Democrats very much about them.

"Today's announcement of the Commission's new media ownership studies, unfortunately, raises more questions in the public's mind than it answers," Commissioner Michael Copps declared on November 22nd, 2006. "How were the contractors selected for the outside projects? How much money is being spent on each project - and on the projects collectively? What kind of peer review process is envisioned?"

Neither Democrat celebrated either when the agency released the studies on July 31st of this year, offering a two month public comment period for the documents.

"Just when we hoped an open media ownership process was developing here at the FCC, along comes this bucket of ice water," Commissioners Jonathan Adelstein and Copps declared in a press release issued that day. "These are ten supposedly serious studies put together by teams of economists and analysts over an eight month period. One study alone contains over 13 million data points. Yet the Commission expects the public to analyze all ten studies, and reams of underlying data, and file comments 60 days from today!"

The three media reform groups argue that the process by which the FCC released these studies runs foul of guidelines for the Data Quality Act (DQA). According to the complaint, the DQA requires the FCC to "initiate an adequate peer review process before disseminating these studies."

But if the FCC insists on going ahead with the comment cycle, the filing asks the Commission to extend the comment period at least 90 days from the conclusion of negotiations with reform groups to make the data from the studies more publicly accessible.

"This extension would provide researchers, academics, and other members of the public time to analyze, test, and reproduce the Commission’s studies," the statement concludes. "The Commission cannot expect the public to be able to address these studies when it provides limited access to much, though not yet all, of the necessary underlying data more than a month into the comment period."