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A partisan fight over media ownership rules is heating up on Capitol Hill as a group of 42 Democrat lawmakers led by New York Rep. Maurice Hinchey on Thursday wrote Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin urging him to abandon plans to loosen limits on media mergers. "We hope that you will immediately take steps to resolve significant shortcomings in your plan regarding accountability, transparency and scientific integrity,” Hinchey and the group wrote. Hinchey’s letter comes after Martin quietly circulated a timeline of his plan to other FCC members a couple of weeks ago in his attempt to bring the 18-month proceeding to a close. Martin plans to introduce a draft of his final measure in November, roughly a month before bringing the measure to a Dec. 18 vote.
Martin has indicated for years that he wishes to push through a relaxation of the newspaper cross-ownership rule, a prospect that has Democrats steaming. “At its heart, the debate over the future of media ownership in America is a debate over the future of our democracy,” Hinchey and others said. “We hope you will agree that the FCC must do everything it can to be able to honestly say that it is ending this proceeding after having considered every factor on behalf of the public whose airwaves it purports to represent.” In the letter, Democrat lawmakers expressed concern about how the FCC went about contracting and peer reviewing 10 studies used to justify any future media ownership prohibitions. “The FCC’s failure to reveal how it recruited individuals to conduct these studies; the agency's subsequent hiring of one of the authors to be its new chief economist (raising troubling questions regarding conflicts of interest); confusion over how the FCC decided to focus the research on its ten chosen topics … is deeply troubling,” according to the letter. The letter comes after FCC Democrats Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein said Wednesday that Martin’s scheduling of a meeting to examine how media ownership affects local news and public affairs programming a mere five days in advance “doesn’t bode well.” Copps and Adelstein said they agreed to clear their calendars for a Oct. 31 hearing more than two weeks ago. — Ron Orol See related post from Dealscape Ron Orol is a Washington-based reporter for The Deal and author of Extreme Value Hedging: How Activist Hedge Fund Managers Are Taking on the World. Categories Deal Video
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