Associated Press via Houston Chronicle:
The Federal Communications Commission ordered its staff to destroy all copies of a draft study that suggested greater concentration of media ownership would hurt local TV news coverage, a former lawyer at the agency says. [..]
Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. received a copy of the report "indirectly from someone within the FCC who believed the information should be made public," according to Boxer spokeswoman Natalie Ravitz.
Adam Candeub, now a law professor at Michigan State University, said senior managers at the agency ordered that "every last piece" of the report be destroyed. "The whole project was just stopped _ end of discussion," he said. Candeub was a lawyer in the FCC's Media Bureau at the time the report was written and communicated frequently with its authors, he said. Read on...
So Former Chairman Michael Powell commissions a study to prove that allowing corporations to own multiple stations in regions doesn't actually hurt the public's interest in quality or quantity of local news information and the study shows the exact opposite: local media ownership DOES give the consumer greater and more relevant local news.
What's a Bush appointee to do?
Bury the report in a drawer and order all the work product to be destroyed--destroyed, not shoved in a vault, not filed in some "mislabeled" folder to be shuffled in some bureaucratic hell. Then go ahead and approve more corporation ownership of local stations, thereby working against the public interest of which they are charged. Current Chairman Kevin Martin claims he was unaware of the report in his letter to Barbara Boxer.
FAIR has more and an action item to call for an investigation.
