Adam Candeub

On Thursday, October 4th, the Federal Communications Commission's Office of Inspector General completed a detailed audit of "allegations that Senior Management Ordered Research Suppressed or Destroyed." The research in question consisted of two draft studies that came out the FCC's Media Bureau. One titled "Do Local Owners Deliver More Localism?" suggested that, in fact, locally owned TV stations indeed do produce more local news than non-locally owned broadcasters. The second, a "2003 Draft Radio report," noted that advertising market share among radio stations had become more concentrated immediately after the enactment of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which allowed corporations to own many more radio signals.

Yet the FCC released neither of these studies, at least not until United States Senator Barbara Boxer confronted FCC Chair Kevin Martin with the first report—"deep sixed," as she put it—during his 2006 reconfirmation hearing. The plot further thickened when Adam Candeub, a former Media Bureau staff attorney, told journalists that the Local TV news report "was stopped in its tracks because it was not the way the agency wanted to go"—that is, towards publishing evidence implying that retaining some of the FCC's media ownership caps might be prudent.

The Inspector General's report exonerates the FCC in any suppressive wrongdoing in this matter.

"We have found no evidence of a pattern of any commissioner or anyone in the Commission's senior management to suppress reports, facts, analysis, or any other material because it was contrary to a result desired by that person," the 23 page analysis concludes, even though the audit concedes the existence of "troubling issues," such as one employee who "thought the instruction basically was to lie" about the status of the second report to a Commissioner.

The audit, however, came to this conclusion without speaking to Candeub, now a professor at Michigan State University College of Law. Candeub declined to be interviewed for the investigation.

Being the nosy bunch we are here at LLFCC, we called Professor Candeub to get his perspective on the FCC audit, and why he wouldn't talk to his former employer. He was kind enough to share his thoughts with us on the controversy.

LLFCC: Professor Candeub, a lot of newspapers have cited your charge that the FCC's Local TV News report was "stopped in its tracks" because that was not the way the FCC wanted to go. But what you've said is out there in a series of fragmentary quotes. Can you give LLFCC's readers a sense of the situation you found yourself in, and what you saw happen to the local TV news study?

Adam Candeub: Sure. I worked in the same division as the authors of that study. I was familiar with their work. We were friends and had co-authored other research. I saw them go through the process of the TV news study: originate the idea, have the managers approve it and say "go for it," and then engage in the very painstaking data collection that the research involved.

And then I saw the frustration they experienced. They kept on drafting and re-drafting, making change after change in response to management's ever-shifting criticism. What was odd was that the critique they received from management became much more caviling and bizarre as time went on. Eventually it became clear that the FCC would never release the study, and the authors were told to keep the wraps on it. And that was that.

LLFCC: When was this?

Candeub: This was the Summer of 2004.

LLFCC: When the FCC approached you about being interviewed for the Office of Inspector General's [IG] audit of this controversy, you eventually declined. A footnote to the report suggests that there was a lot of back and forth between you and the FCC, but ultimately you passed. Why?

Candeub: When the IG first contacted me, the first thing I wanted to learn was whether I was under any legal obligation to talk to them. I didn't get a straight answer from the IG so I went back to the IG statute and saw what was required. I was under no obligation to talk to them.

Further, I know the people who work at and run the IG office—the IG is a [FCC Chair] Martin appointee and is answerable to him. I know how things work in the FCC and have first hand experience of the partisanship that infects everything that agency does. I just did not feel that I would get a fair shake.

And to be frank, the way the report came out justified my concern.

LLFCC: How do you think that the FCC should have dealt with this controversy?

Candeub: At the very least, the FCC should have conducted a fair and even handed investigation that answered the questions posed by the United States Senate. Unfortunately, the FCC's IG did not conduct such an investigation. The IG never establishes why the local news TV report was not released. It records that there were changes, and there were objections, and these changes were made, but then the IG's report just stops. The FCC never seemed interested in finding out why the local TV news study was simply dropped despite the countless hours of taxpayer supported research-which is the question Senator Boxer told the FCC to investigate.

Further, it should have been a much more probing of the answers that the managers gave. This failing is particularly egregious in light of the fact the IG, in the face of incontrovertible evidence, found that [then FCC Media Bureau chief] Ken Ferree did not release the radio report for political reasons and then instructed others to lie about it.

LLFCC: Let's go through some of the IG audit's conclusions and observations. The report notes that one of the authors of the Local TV News report thought that the study was not released because Ferree "was furious with the paper's findings" and that is why it was "killed." But the IG argues that personality differences between these authors and management led the authors to experience criticisms of the report as inaccurate and pretextual. Do you agree with the reports' suggestion, or perhaps implication, that they were, in essence, being paranoid?

Candeub: No. Of course the FCC's objections were pre-textual. All you have to do is look at that Local TV News report, and compare it to anything else the FCC produces. It's so head and shoulders above the type of study that generally comes out of there. Researchers in this area are replicating the report's author's approach, people like Danilo Yanich, a communications professor at the University of Delaware. If this report was so off track, why are leading experts in the field moving in a similar direction?

LLFCC: In the Draft 2003 Radio Report, the second report accused of being repressed, the IG notes that the then Media Bureau Chief, again Ken Ferree, declared in an e-mail message that the report should not go further because he "[was] not inclined to release this one unless the story can be told in a much more positive way. This is not the time to be stirring the 'radio consolidation' pot . . . All in all this is a really bad time to release something like this."

But the audit interprets this quote essentially as an attempt to shift priorities to immediate issues that management felt it needed staff to focus on. Do you agree with this interpretation?

Candeub: [Laughing] No. What did it take to release the report? They just had to put it out on the Web. I would be very surprised if the Media Bureau had anything so desperate and so important to be done that five minutes of staff time to put it on the Web couldn't be spared.

What is most disturbing about the IG's report is its willingness to credit Ferree's and management's claims that they did not stifle the TV report for political reasons—when there is indisputable evidence that Ferree stifled the radio report for political reasons.

LLFCC: The audit goes so far as to cite one FCC staffer who thought that the instructions he had been given by then Media Bureau management "basically was to lie" about the status and availability of the Draft 2003 report. Yet the audit concludes that the evidence was not "strong enough to establish with certainty that any improper or illegal acts to conceal the Draft 2003 Report took place . . . "

What's going on here, in your view?

Candeub: First, in light of these claims, even the IG's Report concedes that if Ferree had still been at the FCC, it would have recommended disciplinary actions. As I said earlier, it seems the IG is not being particularly even handed. It makes excuses for management even when there is clear evidence of stifling data and then lying about it. On the other hand, if anyone makes a claim that questions the FCC's behavior, the IG simply refuses to find such individuals credible. This suggests that the report was skewed in its judgments.

LLFCC: The IG audit goes on to say that it investigated several possible instances of suppression of data. On page 22 it notes that several FCC economists asked for permission to publish some of their FCC work in an academic journal. FCC Chair Kevin Martin's Chief of Staff denied the request for authorization. No reason was given. Someone asked if they could have a chance to edit the report and then request permission again. The answer was no.

Is this just par for the course at the FCC, or is this suppression?

Candeub: I'm not sure I know what they're talking about in that section of the report. The FCC does do research. In previous FCC administrations there was considerable freedom of publication. As long as you included a disclaimer that the research did not reflect the views of the FCC, you could publish what you wanted in scholarly journals.

FCC Chair Kevin Martin runs a very tight ship. At a recent Chairman's Dinner he jokingly referred to the claim that he runs the FCC like the KGB. There's much truth in jest. Under Martin, it's very difficult to have anything published by an FCC employee.

It's very regrettable, to me. What's the big deal? It's just research.

LLFCC: The FCC watching public knows that you have strong concerns about the way that the FCC does its business at this point. But not a lot of people know what you think about the main question on the table: whether the FCC should relax or modify its media ownership rules. Where do you think the Commission should go at this point?

Candeub: That's the funny irony of this whole thing. I'm not a hard core media ownership advocate one way or the other. The questions are very complex. The job of a regulatory agency is to get answers to those questions. I see the efficiencies of large media corporations. On the other hand there are values that smaller media outlets might further. So I certainly don't have an ideological position on it.

LLFCC: Do you think that FCC Chair Kevin Martin is effectively managing this process and this proceeding? As this comes to a conclusion, what do you think he's going to do?

Candeub: I don't know. One point that never came out in this whole brouhaha is the issue of institutional competence. The Media Bureau of the FCC for most of its history was never engaged in sophisticated economic and empirical analysis. But after the DC Circuit Court of Appeals started to strike down the FCC's ownership caps on a regular basis, the Media Bureau had to begin to engage in such analysis and hired people, like the authors of the local TV report, with the skills to do so. Unfortunately, the Media Bureau is not institutionally capable of dealing with objective social scientific analysis at this point. Chairman Martin should be engaged in creating safeguards and processes to allow objective media research to flourish at the FCC. I worry that he's just too much of a partisan figure to be serious about such an endeavor.

LLFCC: Do you have anything you want to add about this?

Candeub: [Laughing] To be frank, if I don't have to talk about this again for a long, long time I'll be happy.