FCC Suspends Controversial “Critical Information Needs” Study

The Federal Communications Commission is suspending and
revamping its controversial Critical Information Needs study, which
I blogged about
yesterday. Here’s FCC spokesperson
Shannon Gilson with the news:

By law,
the FCC must report to Congress every three years on the barriers
that may prevent entrepreneurs and small business from competing in
the media marketplace, and pursue policies to eliminate those
barriers. To fulfill that obligation in a meaningful way, the FCC’s
Office of Communications Business Opportunities consulted with
academic researchers in 2012 and selected a contractor to design a
study which would inform the FCC’s report to Congress. Last summer,
the proposed study was put out for public comment and one pilot to
test the study design in a single marketplace—Columbia, S.C.—was
planned.

However, in the course of FCC review and public comment, concerns
were raised that some of the questions may not have been
appropriate. Chairman Wheeler agreed that survey questions in the
study directed toward media outlet managers, news directors, and
reporters overstepped the bounds of what is required. Last week,
Chairman Wheeler informed lawmakers that that Commission has no
intention of regulating political or other speech of journalists or
broadcasters and would be modifying the draft study. Yesterday, the
Chairman directed that those questions be removed entirely.

To be clear, media owners and journalists will no longer be asked
to participate in the Columbia, S.C. pilot study. The pilot will
not be undertaken until a new study design is final. Any subsequent
market studies conducted by the FCC, if determined necessary, will
not seek participation from or include questions for media owners,
news directors or reporters.

As I wrote yesterday, the problem with this plan wasn’t that it
was extraordinary but that it was routine. This wasn’t some secret
Obama plot to put FCC agents in every newsroom, as some of the more
overheated reactions to the study suggested. It was a group of
bureaucrats taking it for granted that they should be able to ask
these questions of the people they regulate. Identifying and
removing entry barriers is a good thing, but it shouldn’t require a
federal agency to try to determine which stories are important or
to discern how newsrooms go about pursuing them. The fact that the
FCC felt otherwise reveals an agency culture with a bias toward
government planning; the fact that it would ask such irrelevant but
intrusive questions reveals that it doesn’t always know where its
boundaries are.

FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai, who set off the recent furor with a
Wall Street Journal
op-ed 11 days ago, is
pleased with the change, declaring that the agency “has
now recognized that no study by the federal government, now or in
the future, should involve asking questions to media owners, news
directors, or reporters about their practices.” If it’s true that
future FCC surveys will not include such questions, then I’m
pleased too. But given the mentality that the study reveals, I
can’t say I’ll be surprised if this recurs. I’ll say it again: This
wasn’t some extraordinary plot. It was business as usual, and
that’s the worst thing about it.

In the meantime, I’ll keep harping on the biggest problem: the
fact that the same agency that planned to ask those questions is in
the business of regulating radio and TV content. Take away the
process by which stations must contend with complaints about what
they did or did not broadcast each time they’re up for
relicensing—better yet, take away the requirement that they be
regularly relicensed in the first place—and I’ll be more tolerant
of what the government decides to study.