[Mediaresearchhub-News] Napoli statement to Congressional Briefing on "Local Media Diversity Matters" 1/30

Wed Jan 31 11:39:36 EST 2007

Dear Colleagues,

Dr. Phil Napoli, a partner of the Necessary Knowledge for a Democratic Public Sphere Program, delivered the following statement yesterday to a congressional briefing on "Local Media Diversity Matters to All Americans" sponsored by the
Center for American Progress.  Dr. Napoli summarizes well the challenges of access to data issues in media and communications policy and offers a number of key recommendations to Congress and the FCC.

Rik Panganiban
SSRC
Panganiban at ssrc.org

Local Media Diversity Matters to All Americans

Congressional
Briefing

Sponsored by the
Center for American Progress

January 30th,
2007

Remarks of Philip M.
Napoli, Ph.D.

Associate Professor, Graduate School of Business

Director, Donald McGannon
 Communication Research
 Center

Fordham University

New York, NY

Thank you for
the opportunity to speak here today.  My
name is Philip Napoli. I am an Associate Professor of Communications and Media
Management in the Graduate School of Business and the Director of the Donald McGannon
Communication Research
Center at Fordham
University in New York. 
I have had the privilege of working with Mark Lloyd and the Center for
American Progress on this project.

I am going to
focus on some of the logistical issues surrounding conducting the type of
analyses that Mark Lloyd has presented. 
Our experiences in developing a research project with this level of
detail taught us some very valuable lessons about the current information
environment in the area of media policy.

If we are in
agreement that making effective media policy requires these kinds of detailed
assessments of media markets, then there are a couple of practical realities
that we need to acknowledge, and some problems that need to be corrected, for
efforts such as these to successfully move forward.

The first is
that, over the past 30 years, the federal government’s role in the gathering of
the data necessary for conducting these kinds of analyses has diminished
dramatically.

Some examples:

n     
The FCC no longer gathers financial data from
broadcast licensees,

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Nor does it any longer gather any meaningful
data on program practices such as the provision of local news and public
affairs.

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The gathering of data on minority and female
ownership of media outlets has become increasingly haphazard and has been shown
in recent studies to be incredibly flawed.

n     
 The FCC’s
gathering of employment data has been gutted, such that it is very difficult
today to get any sense of how employment in these industries is changing over
time, particularly in relation to the employment of women and minorities.

All of these are
categories of data that are vital to rigorously assessing issues of
competition, diversity, and localism that are central to making well-informed
media ownership policy decisions.

Developments
such as these have coincided with a parallel development: The privatization of many
of the data gathering activities that used to be conducted by the federal
government.

As researchers,
we are at least fortunate that there is a sizable market within the
advertising, financial, and media industries for many types of data related to
media industry performance.

This has meant
that a number of private companies have stepped in to pick up the slack left by
the FCC.

And it is these
companies’ products upon which we must increasingly rely in our research, as,
unfortunately, most researchers do not have nearly the resources necessary to
conduct the kind of large-scale data gathering that is becoming increasingly
important to producing the kind of research that has influence within the FCC,
Congress, and the courts.

Unfortunately,
when the gathering of such data is a function of marketplace demand, data that
have commercial value are gathered quite well, while data that might have
little commercial value, but tremendous policy value, are not gathered as well,
if at all.

As a result, we encounter
a variety of gaps in available data that make it difficult to produce studies
that effectively address specific policy issues.

Thus, for
example, we have found in our research that:

n     
Even the largest, most comprehensive commercial
databases on media ownership, media markets, and media revenues fail to gather
or report data on many of the minority-targeted or foreign language newspapers
in the U.S.

n     
Similarly, commercial ratings often will only
provide minority audience estimates for those markets with large minority
populations.

n     
And ratings data for many radio stations in
remote, rural locations aren’t gathered or reported at all.

And so we often
are operating under a very incomplete picture of the media markets we are
trying to analyze because the needs of the primary clients for these commercial
data providers do not correspond with the needs of policymakers or policy
researchers.

However, as flawed
as these data sources are, they generally are the best information that is
available, and so they are still relied upon quite heavily.

Therefore, much
of the research that influences the FCC’s decision-making still draws quite
heavily from these sources.  The FCC
itself relies quite heavily on these sources in its own work.  And so, access to these data remains critical
for researchers. 

Unfortunately,
sufficient access to these commercial data sources is often very difficult to
obtain.

One reason is
that these data sources often are enormously expensive, as they are priced with
commercial clients in mind as opposed to the not-for-profit policy researcher.

This means, that
when it comes time to submit studies to the FCC, it is really only the large,
very well funded organizations that are able to gain access to all of the
best-available data.

Another reason
is that these are proprietary data bases that often have very restrictive
access provisions – sometimes so restrictive as to prevent collaboration or
divisions of labor between researchers, or to hinder the wide dissemination of
research results.  

This problem
becomes compounded when the data provider is faced with the prospect of
providing data to a researcher whose results could ultimately contradict the
policy positions of some of the data providers’ most important clients.

Let me
illustrate some of these problems with an example from research I have
conducted with my colleague, Michael Yan of the University of Michigan,
on local television news and public affairs programming.

The FCC
traditionally has placed a tremendous emphasis on broadcasters’ provision of
local television news and public fairs as a key way of both serving the needs
and interests of local communities and of providing a diverse array of ideas
and viewpoints to the citizenry.

Consequently, we
have looked into the overall levels of local news and public affairs
programming available.

We have also
looked into whether there is a significant relationship between various ownership
characteristics and the provision of local news and public affairs programming.

Our research has
shown that more than 50% of commercial television stations in the U.S.
air no local public affairs programming.

Our research has
also shown that a quarter of all commercial television stations in the U.S.
air no local news.

Our research
also has shown that neither stations that are part of larger ownership groups,
nor stations that are part of duopolies, generally convert the economies of
scale that such ownership arrangements presumably allow into providing more
local news and public affairs programming than other stations.

Results such as
these raise some questions about broadcasters’ commitments to serving the
informational needs of their local communities, as well as questions about
whether we can expect any significant benefits from allowing greater
concentration of ownership within individual media markets.

But what is
perhaps more important is that, if we wanted to look beyond how much local news
and public affairs programming is available, and consider also issues of how
much of this programming actually deals with local issues, how much political
news or information is provided, or even what kind of diversity of viewpoints we’re
seeing on these programs, the data necessary to do this in a rigorous way are
ridiculously difficult to obtain.  And to
do a similar analysis for radio would be even more difficult.

For our work, we
have had to rely on commercially-produced program schedule databases that are
far too expensive to allow us to analyze more than a relatively small (though
representative) sample of television stations, and that provide very little of
the detailed content information that would allow us to look beyond basic
quantities of available programming.

This is in large
part because we have no comprehensive archive of local broadcast news
programming in this country.  

There are
instead about 40 small, poorly funded local television archives scattered
across the U.S. as part of state historical societies, universities, or other
entities, that generally seek to record and store limited amounts of local news
programming from very confined geographic areas – and certainly aren’t
conducting their work in a particularly systematic way, or with an eye towards
supporting rigorous policy-related research.

There also are
no federal archiving requirements for broadcast licensees, which means that
broadcasters are under no obligation to make recordings of their programming
available for research or public policymaking purposes.

And, getting
local broadcasters to willfully provide access to local news broadcasts is very
difficult, as researchers generally receive very little cooperation from
broadcasters when they issue such requests.

According to a
report by the Library of Congress, “Every group that has studied the selection
of television for preservation has concluded that all news programs should be
retained and preserved as aired,” yet according to this same report, most local
newscasts are destroyed within a week.

In 1976 we saw
the establishment of the American Television and Radio Archives within the
Library of Congress, yet this collection remains haphazard at best.

The paradox of
all this is that the FCC and the courts all continue to demand very detailed
answers to very complex questions about the relationship between ownership, market
conditions, and content – whether it be news, public affairs, violence, or
indecency – when the information environment is completely inhospitable to
doing this well.

Consider, for
instance, that the FCC recently commissioned a study intended to: 

“analyze the effect of ownership
structure and robustness . . . on various measures of the quantity and the
quality of different types of TV programming, including local news and public
affairs, minority programming, children’s programming, family programming,
religious programming, and violent and indecent content.”

This is an ambitious and
potentially very valuable study that could provide very useful information to
help in assessing current ownership policies. 
Unfortunately, I can say with confidence that obtaining truly systematic
and representative samples of the various kinds of programming necessary to
conduct such a wide-ranging analysis is not something that can be accomplished
in the contemporary information environment, in which much of the relevant data
are either not gathered or are tremendously difficult to access.

This study will, instead,
inevitably employ a variety of necessary shortcuts and proxies, all of which
will make the results vulnerable to the intensive scrutiny of whichever
stakeholder groups find themselves dissatisfied with the results.

We saw the same pattern in 2003,
when very few of the studies that the FCC commissioned in connection with its
2003 ownership proceeding were able to hold up very well under intensive
scrutiny.

In this way, we run the risk of our
efforts to improve the state of knowledge on these issues becoming exercises in
futility unless the availability and accessibility of the necessary research
inputs improves dramatically.

I hope that this
presentation will encourage some inquiry into the quality, quantity, and
accessibility of the information that guides media policymaking.

Considering the
kinds of evidentiary demands being put forth by the FCC and the courts these
days, it is vital that more be done to provide researchers with access to the
raw materials necessary to meet these demands.

We need the
federal government to return to a more active role in the gathering of
policy-relevant data, particularly in the areas of ownership, employment,
revenues, and content.  Ceding all of
these activities to the commercial sector means that important policy-relevant
information will not be gathered effectively, if at all.

We need a system
of archiving television and radio programming (particularly local news and
public affairs) that is as thorough and rigorous, and as accessible, as our
system of archiving newspapers.

We need a return
to more rigorous reporting requirements for employment data, financial data,
and programming practices.

We need policies
in place that provide more equitable access to the large commercially-generated
databases that increasingly serve as the backbone for research related to media
ownership, diversity, and localism, in those instances when the research is
being conducted for non-profit, public policy purposes.

As important as
the systematic assessment of diversity and localism in media markets is to
contemporary media policymaking, it is equally important that the resources
available to policymakers and policy researchers to conduct such assessments
are of sufficient quality, integrity and accessibility.

Thank you.  

____________________________________________________________________________________
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