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Consumers Union blasts FCC crossownership evidence

One of the arguments the FCC used in justifying its relaxation of media cross-ownership rules was a diversity index, which weighted various forms of media in terms of their use by the public for news and information. The Consumers Union and the Consumer Federation of America are saying that the FCC's weighting system was seriously flawed. In particular, it undervalued newspapers and overvalued radio and the Internet.

The report was based on a telephone survey of over 1,000 adults. It was conducted by Opinion Research Corp.

The key finding was that 61.3% of survey respondents cited newspapers as their most important news source. The FCC's weighting system, on the other hand, gave newspapers a weight of only 28.8%.

On the other hand, Internet and radio were cited by only 10% of respondents, but were weighted at 37% by the FCC. Breaking it out, radio was cited by 7.5% but weighted at 24.4%, and the Internet was cited by 2.2% but weighted at 12.8%.

TV was the only near match. It was cited by 29.8% and weighted at 33.8%.

"Since newspapers are a much more important source for local news than the FCC gives them credit for, and TV is the second most important source, mergers between these two effectively eliminate diversity f viewpoints and competition of ideas in our local media, which is exactly what the FCC is supposed to protect," said CU's Gene Kimmelman.

CFA's Mark Cooper added, "The FCC based its new rules on information that is just plain wrong, and as a result we can expect to see a wave of mergers and acquisitions that will spell an end to independence in our media. The FCC must go back and rewrite these rules based on reality, not myth, and protect diversity in the media."