The FCC Wades Into the Newsroom

News organizations often disagree about what Americans need to know. MSNBC, for example, apparently believes that traffic in Fort Lee, N.J., is the crisis of our time. Fox News, on the other hand, chooses to cover the September 2012 attacks on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi more heavily than other networks. The American people, for their part, disagree about what they want to watch.

But everyone should agree on this: The government has no place pressuring media organizations into covering certain stories.

Unfortunately, the Federal Communications Commission, where I am a commissioner, does not agree. Last May the FCC proposed an initiative to thrust the federal government into newsrooms across the country. With its "Multi-Market Study of Critical Information Needs," or CIN, the agency plans to send researchers to grill reporters, editors and station owners about how they decide which stories to run. A field test in Columbia, S.C., is scheduled to begin this spring....

The company involved is Social Solutions Inc. Out of Maryland...claims to be a Latino-minority company and a woman-owned company....thus getting inside of gov’t contracts.

They appear to have four contracts that they’ve completed for the gov’t. One was for the State Dept...worth $78k. NOAA gave them a $56k contract. All total for 2013/2012...maybe around $180k.

The curious thing is that they got listed under GSA Advantage. So they are looking for gov’t contracts to fulfill. As long as they produce what the gov’t desires....they’ve got business. If they fail to produce the right product....they get pushed aside.

Looks like they operate out of central Maryland region....near Silver Springs. I’d take a guess that someone in the FCC met a company representative at some party or dinner...got to chatting...and figured a way to get some product out of them.

The April 2013 summary of their suggested service....was that they would simply collect data from networks....three at random...per day, and simply produce a product that measured against these eight subject areas.

If you ask me....the product would be more or less useless....unless you eyeballed all the networks and did a twenty-four hour cycle of every topic covered.

What they also suggested....was a collection and sampling of newspapers...to include non-English newspapers. Course, you’d have to have numerous experts on the staff to interpret a dozen-odd languages that typically appear in the US newspaper market. My humble guess is that they mean Latino-Spanish only, and would just leave it there (avoid Hebrew, Arabic, German, Chinese, and French).

At some point in the contract discussion...they suggested dividing up the audience in low-income, medium-income and high-income....along the lines of white, black, Latino, and Asian. This would suggest a couple of statistical collectors, and a fair amount of analysis involved.

Overall? I’d say this is a fishing expedition...doomed for failure. They might get to some point of being shocked that ninety percent of the Asian audience watch Fox News or Fox Business Channel, and haven’t watched CNN in years. For this reason...it’s just tax revenue pumped out into America, nothing more.

This is not the first time the agency has meddled in news coverage. Before Critical Information Needs, there was the FCC's now-defunct Fairness Doctrine, which began in 1949 and required equal time for contrasting viewpoints on controversial issues. Though the Fairness Doctrine ostensibly aimed to increase the diversity of thought on the airwaves, many stations simply chose to ignore controversial topics altogether, rather than air unwanted content that might cause listeners to change the channel.
. . . and what, precisely, defined the “controversial” topics? My humble opinion is that journalism was homogenized and consolidated in the mid-to-late Nineteenth Century, following the founding and nationwide expansion of the Associated Press. Just mull that name over for a minute . . . associated press. America’s “mainstream” press is associated - as in, they are all in cahoots. That would be inevitable, considering that
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (Book I, Ch 10)
. . . and a wire service is in essence a virtual meeting of its members. So the only question is whether they contrive to raise prices, or whether they conspire against the public - and what such a conspiracy might look like. I put it to you that the members of the AP conspire against the public, and that they do so first when they proclaim that the public has no interests which diverge from those of journalism. But the public interest is summarized in the preamble to the Constitution, and what journalism needs is not the “tranquility,” unity, etc. espoused in the Constitution but precisely in those things which interest the public and make a "great story” precisely because they threaten some element of stable prosperity.

From Theodore Roosevelt's 1910 speech at the Sarbonne:
There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief toward all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes to second achievement. A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticise work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life's realities - all these are marks, not as the possessor would fain to think, of superiority but of weakness. They mark the men unfit to bear their part painfully in the stern strife of living, who seek, in the affection of contempt for the achievements of others, to hide from others and from themselves in their own weakness. The rôle is easy; there is none easier, save only the rôle of the man who sneers alike at both criticism and performance.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Journalists don’t do things, they never enter “the arena” where they would be subject to bottom-line criteria of success or - gasp - failure. What they do, therefore, is criticize. And second-guess. Condemn. And complain.
And the thing they complain the most about? People who defend those whom the journalist attacks. What, to get back to the question at which we started, makes a topic controversial?
What makes a topic controversial is simply disagreement with the consensus of what journalism wants.

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