Transcript
BOB GARFIELD: The FCC is poised to scrap most of its ownership limits -- a move that public advocates fear will leave virtually all of local TV in the hands of a very few media giants, and according to a new study by the Pew Research Center in collaboration with the Project for Excellence in Journalism or PEJ, nearly three-quarters of the public knows, quote, "nothing at all" about it. Nothing at all is also about all that was known until recently about the impact of consolidation on the quality of local TV news, and when the courts prodded the FCC to find some hard data on the issue, the PEJ was more than happy to oblige. For the last 5 years it's been assessing the quality of newscasts from local TV stations in more than 50 markets. Amy Mitchell, the organization's associate director, says the research led to some surprising conclusions. Amy, welcome to the show.
AMY MITCHELL: Thanks. Good to be here.
BOB GARFIELD: Well first of all, how do you measure quality in local news programming? How do you objectively determine which newscast is better than another?
AMY MITCHELL: Well it's a difficult question, and what we did was assemble a design team of 14 local TV news directors to answer it for us. So they came up with a list of criteria for what makes a quality newscast. It involved things like covering the whole community; being significant and informative; demonstrating enterprise and courage in the coverage. Being fair and balanced; being highly local; authoritative. So we took that list of criteria that they developed and then had a team of academics translate it into a way to actually quantify if you will, story by story, a TV newscast.
BOB GARFIELD: What are the results of that research?
AMY MITCHELL:The three main findings, in a nutshell, are that smaller is better. Stations owned by small companies -- those we defined as owning 3 stations or fewer -- were more than twice as likely to produce the highest quality work than were those owned by the top 10. So the argument the proponents of large companies put forward which is that by being owned by a large company you have access to greater resources, to a more experienced staff, and therefore could raise the quality of your newscasts -- well that clearly was not the case in these findings. The second main finding is that local ownership, perhaps surprisingly, was not necessarily better. Many people feel or argue that having a, a local owner -- one that's tied to the community - that, that's involved in the community him or herself would then lead to more sensitive, serious coverage of the issues of the community. But we did not see support for that argument. The third central finding was that stations with cross-ownership, which is when a parent company owns a newspaper in the same community - that those stations actually produced higher quality work than did stations without cross ownership. Now there are very few cross-ownership stations that currently exist, but we certainly did see a third tendency to those in our study having higher quality.
BOB GARFIELD: Those stations had been grandfathered in before previous regulations prohibiting cross-ownership.
AMY MITCHELL: Exactly.
BOB GARFIELD:The anti-deregulation forces tend to want to eliminate cross-ownership all together. Do you find yourself making an uncomfortable recommendation along those lines?
AMY MITCHELL: Well our goal is to provide objective data, and I think what we have to put forward when we talk about cross-ownership is that it is a very small number of stations and so-- there's always a risk that perhaps what you're looking at there's an anomaly. But it does suggest that perhaps having a broader base of news-gathering potential could give you some benefit by having some depth in newspaper-gathering, you might be able to increase your quality. We did see a couple of interesting side notes, though, with cross-ownership which was that the enterprise reporting - the actual sending a reporter out to the scene doing investigative work - that was not better -that cross-ownership versus non-cross-ownership. And that may be because they're relying on the newspaper to provide them with the story rather than going out themselves. We also saw when we brought in the ratings how well the station was trending when it came to the viewership that cross-ownership stations were not doing better when it came to ratings, and that may suggest that there's a little bit of difficulty in translating the elements of newspaper into television.
BOB GARFIELD:All right now the FCC for some months now has been kind of half-heartedly soliciting input from various interested parties on the question of de-regulation. What do you suppose the Federal Communications Commission will do with the data that you're providing?
AMY MITCHELL: Well we hope that they would add this public service element of the quality and character of the news to their decision-making process. Right now, it's absent. Some of the rules certainly do still serve the public.
BOB GARFIELD: Well Amy, thank you very much!
AMY MITCHELL: Thank you.
BOB GARFIELD: Amy Mitchell is the associate director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. [MUSIC TAG]