[BC] Localism

[Alan Kline]

I found a website that posted a PDF of the draft report: 
http://www.stopbigmedia.com/blog/?p=24

The link is in the first paragraph of the story.

Just skimming through this, it's evident to me that this nonsense was written
by a couple of statisticians who have never set foot in a radio or tv station
in their lives, and have absolutely no concept of how the business operates.

The report is a scan of a paper document, and not OCR'd, so I can't cut and
paste and at 3AM, I'm not going to retype a lot.  I'll leave it to anyone 
interested to get a copy.  Suffice to say that the paper spends a great deal
of time trying to explain that a locally-owned station has "lower monitoring
costs of local events." Howzat? In English, this would suggest somehow that
it costs less for a local owner to buy scanners and hire reporters than a 
group owner would spend.  It makes no sense to me.  The report also puts
much emphasis on "on-location" news.  That would be the useless 10PM standup
outside the cop shop, when the bad guy du jour has long since been booked
into the county jail.

I'm beginning to think that this report was scrapped not because of some
grassy-knoll theory, but because the thing was so badly written and
reasoned that even Michael Powell realized that he'd look like a fool
for actually releasing it.

ak 

------ At 07:45 AM 9/15/2006 -0600, The Most Honourable Sid Schweiger wrote: -------
>Content-Disposition: inline
>
>>>LAWYER: FCC ORDERED MEDIA STUDY DESTROYED...<<
>
>Does this really surprise anyone?  This administration has a long history of suppressing opinions it doesn't want to hear.