FCC Policies to Get ‘Honest’ Look in Coming Media Report, Waldman Says
The FCC will get some scrutiny in a delayed commission report (CD March 9 p4) about prospects for the media industry, its author told industry executives and lobbyists. Steve Waldman said Wednesday that his forthcoming Future of Media report will offer a close look at the regulator’s media policies and say which are working and which aren’t. “We also will try to be honest about the FCC and its own policies,” although such inward looks aren’t “always a welcome effort” at the institution examined, he said. At the FCC, “to my delight, I have found that very few want to hold onto things the way they are just because that’s the way they have been,” he said. “There is a very strong desire to make sure that policy is effective."
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The report will cover a wide array of commercial and nonprofit media, from newspapers and radio and TV stations to cable systems and the Internet, Waldman said at a Media Institute lunch. It won’t seek to bring back the fairness doctrine or programming-ascertainment policies, both junked long ago, he said. “Just because the report observes a problem” doesn’t “necessarily mean that we think the FCC has responsibility or authority to do something about it,” he said. “In many cases, the role of this report will be to point some things out,” not propose regulatory action.
The speech was partly an effort to soothe fears that the report will seek to have the FCC intervene where it has no authority. It will look at subjects outside the commission’s jurisdiction to judge, “specifically and especially the effect on communities” of media, Waldman said. The broad reach doesn’t mean the project will amount to a widescale prescription for government involvement in the media industry, said Waldman. He said his philosophy isn’t that “the government must fix” problems, as evidenced when he ran beliefnet.com. When Columbia University classmate Julius Genachowski became FCC chairman and asked him to come to the commission, Waldman left the Web operation to become a senior aide.
"The dynamic is very different between national and local” media, with some local ones having made massive staff reductions, Waldman said in Q-and-A. “You tend to see more vibrancy on the national level.” Without “good” and local “accountability journalism,” tax dollars will be wasted and democracy will suffer, Waldman said in his speech. “Any of this wouldn’t matter at all if … new media filled the gap,” he added. “So we looked very assiduously at the new media side of this, and there is tremendous innovation."
Across new media, “it’s not like it’s all horrible” or it’s “all great,” Waldman said. The study will “try to say what are the areas that are most encouraging, what are the areas that are worrisome, and we are going to try to be as precise about that as possible,” he said. It will focus more on TV than previous studies from other organizations, which have tended to discuss the subject “very little,” Waldman said.
After hundreds of interviews, plus lobbying meetings and reviews of filings in docket 10-25, the report will come out “soon,” Waldman said. He ventured a guess that it will be released this year. He'd originally hoped the document would be finished in 2010. “I naively assumed that if you wanted to find out about something, the way you did it is interview people,” but learned otherwise “when I got to the FCC,” Waldman said. “You issue a public notice” to solicit comments, “and that’s how we come to understand the world,” he said in his speech, to laughter.
There may be benefits to the commission doing interviews for rulemakings, Waldman said in response to our question. “You get different types of information when you're interviewing people” from what’s in filings and ex parte meetings, including information from those who “may not be represented in Washington or don’t know the FCC exists,” Waldman said. “A mix is really ideal” between written comments and interviews, he added. “You have to be careful, because obviously there is subjectivity in choosing who to interview,” and there are limits to the technique, he said. “I certainly don’t think it should ever replace the other ways of gathering information."
"Without looking at all media,” it’s hard to understand the industry, although the FCC doesn’t oversee many parts of it, Waldman said. “When the landscape changes so dramatically, the commission must” see if it’s policy “assumptions are still valid,” he said. “Understanding what’s going on and regulating are very different things,” and the Future of Media initiative won’t pass judgment on the quality of particular news pieces, Waldman said: It will try to determine how much some subjects are covered.