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Whistleblower: FCC Spikes Own Study After It Doesn't Match Ideology

The Federal Communications Commission was accused today by a whistleblower of discontinuing and concealing a study that showed locally owned TV stations broadcast more local news because the data conflicted with its agenda of media consolidation. Reported today in the Los Angeles Times, the accusation by former FCC attorney Adam Candeub provides some of the strongest evidence to-date that the Bush FCC has become a pawn of big media companies.

"The initial results (of the study) 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 Times. "The order did come down from somewhere in the senior management of the media bureau that this study had to end … and they wanted all the copies collected."

Media conglomerates have in the past disputed that their news coverage is inferior to that provided by independently owned outlets.

The year the FCC spiked the study, the agency was run by Michael K. Powell, son of former Secretary of State Colin Powell and an infamous skeptic of all things regulatory."Losing Signal," a 2001 Mother Jones article by Brendan Koerner, provides ample background on how the FCC under Powell could have become sufficiently ideological to ignore its own research. Koerner reports, for example, that Powell gave a speech on the future of communications in which he declared with almost religious certitude: “The oppressor here is regulation.”

Koerner went on to write:

On these and other far-reaching questions, the agency's positions are shaping up to be virtually identical to the ones being drawn up in corporate boardrooms. In April, during a panel discussion conducted by the American Bar Association, Powell dismissed the FCC's historic mandate to evaluate corporate actions based on the public interest. That standard, he said, "is about as empty a vessel as you can accord a regulatory agency." In other comments, Powell has signaled what kind of philosophy he prefers to the outdated concept of public interest: During his first visit to Capitol Hill as chairman, Powell referred to corporations simply as "our clients."

Posted by Josh Harkinson on 09/15/06 at 1:39 PM | E-mail | Print

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Comments

How come everyone thinks Colin Powell is such a great guy?

He sold us out on Iraq, and nowhe's selling us out on the airwaves.

Some great guy. Ugh.

Posted by: yogi-one on 09/16/06 at 2:18 AM

Republicans are so cunning.

Republicans have politicized, corrupted and subverted every agency of the federal government in their effort to maintain perpetual plutocratic rule. Which isn’t a work in process, it’s a done deal. Their plan to replace democracy with an autocracy began long before Watergate, and what the media has so duplicitously and dismissively described as “campaign dirty tricks,” as if the subversion of the democratic process was a harmless prank.

Republicans are so cunning. They realized long ago the necessity of controlling the media to establish and perpetuate authoritarianism. First they abolished existing anti-monopoly laws, which allowed them to buy the media. Now a half dozen incestuously linked giant corporations own or control all media outlets. Bereft of any dissenting voices, Americans are now force-fed a meager diet of lies.

All else pales compared to their brilliant election strategy: It doesn’t matter if a majority of voters choose the opposing party as long as you own the voting machines. Which they do.

Short of a revolution, or civil war, we are now permanently a totalitarian state.

Posted by: rabblerowzer on 09/17/06 at 9:51 AM

Agreed, rabblerowzer. And people will call you a nut, paranoid, etc...if you voice these truths because it's too hard to think past the noses on their complacent faces, so any uprising will not be soon forthcoming. It will take stronger and broader interpretation and enforcement on the part of the government, when it starts affecting "me, now", until people wake up and smell the coffee. America has had its' glaring faults, believe me, of this I am aware, but, for all of them, it was one of the best games in town. It is, as we knew it, now a relic of the past and, as I observe what is occurring presently, I shudder to contemplate what lies in its future....

Posted by: smartblonde on 09/18/06 at 7:16 AM

Just watched the HBO movie on Wannsee. Those notes and copies of the agenda were also collected and burned. Just one survived.
Hmmmm

Posted by: Gene Touchet on 09/18/06 at 4:10 PM