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.
Thank you for your level headed analysis. This is a useless fishing expedition and waste of money at best; but is it a portent of things to come? It is repugnant and should never be allowed.