about six months ago i shifted to this new role in the content management role. >> what is your educational background? >> i have a computer science and business background. i was involved before the whole dot-com bust. i have been in a lot of networking and data communications. >> here at the consumer electronics show on capitol hill. >> on sunday, oral arguments challenging the new health care law. a three-judge panel in atlanta hears oral argument in florida vs. the board of health and human services, brought by 26 different states which opposed the law. the state argued congress exceeded its authority and is infringing on states' rights. we will have that oral arguments

sunday at 10:30 a.m. eastern on c-span. a federal communications commission report found that while the numbers of media outlets has grown considerably in the digital era, there is an increasing shortage of in-depth local journalism leaded to hold government agencies, schools, and businesses accountable. the findings of the study on the impact of technology on local media were presented to sec commission members at a public meeting thursday in washington d.c. here is a portion of the presentation. >> this project was launched at the beginning of 2010 when it was clear that we were in the time of rapid and seismic change in the media world. you had on the one hand a tremendous digital innovation everywhere, every day. at the same time you had newspaper's closing, staff being

laid off, and the traditional media going through a serious contraction. so, the idea was to therefore take a good hard look at this and the answer to basic questions. one is our citizens and communities getting the news and information and reporting that the need and what. second is policy that the fcc and others are in sync with the nature of modern media markets especially when it comes to encouraging innovation and advancing public-interest goals. the process, as you mentioned, we created an informal working group that basically demanded extracurricular time from many people at the agency across many departments as well as bringing in some really outstanding outside experts to help. would it more than 600

interviews and has a wide range of people we inerviewed. media executives, such as leaders, foundations, investors, conservatives, liberals, the old media, new media, really very broad range. we had to public workshops, public comments and significantly we also did a very careful literature review because we're the first ones to study this, there are very outstanding studies and reports that we made great use of. as you mentioned, we were very fortunate to have a really outstanding team, and you mentioned the key folks, elizabeth, andrea, james hamilton, ellen goodman, peter shane, cynthia knard and tamara who worked hard around-the-clock on this. we also as you said had people

throughout the agency working on this. i'm not going to read all the names as we would use up all the time there we can see that we had contributions frm every department which is fitting for the nature of the modern media landscape which isn't silo in the traditional ways that, you know, the agency is divided up. and we made a very aggressive use of free labor and in terms that too mh of their work to do and this is really gratifying process. i have to say of all the exciting momenthe most gratifying moment in the entire process is when one of the folks on the stuff, and i won't mention his name, who said the first four drafts were horrible, said th fifth draft was pretty good, and i know we were finally ready to release. just starting with the six come

the first principle that actually has to guide all of this is the first amendment. this confuses a lot of what we talked about and the way that we approach the recommendation as a journalist and i take them very seriously that while we care very deeply about what is happening with journalism we also have the first amendment as the basic parameters for how we approachthis both in terms of guaranteeing freedom and placing thlimits on the government intervention. the way that the report is structured and by the way the report is now as i have on the web site is a major section on the media landscape which is a description of what is happening in the landscape right now. we broke into the sections on commercial media, nonprofit media, non-media institutions by which we mean there are lots of

ways people get very important information that don't go through the media. and libraries, schools, government websites, and those are increasingly important ways people get information devotee of the policy and putting the fcc's policies and track record and i am proud really of the commission a pretty tough as some of the fcc i think that speaks well to the commission and its desire to get the right. and then we have recommendations to the recommendations are not only for the fcc. we took the sec recommendations very seriously but we also spoke about ossible ways that other players in the media landscape can help. the main findings and and not shelf are that first most of the media landscape is actuallyvery

vibrant, tremendous amount of innovation will go into more debt about that, but that is a central point. and there are some very serious issues and especially the one we keep coming back to over and over again is what we believe is a shortage of local accountability reporting and since i'm going to use this word accountability reporting a bunch of times, i should define it. this is basically things like covering city hall, the school board, the state house, the basic civic istitutions holding those institutions accountable and the information citizens need, so it very interesting moment where these elements will mean serious harm to communities but paying attention to them will mean we will be able to create i believe the best media system that we've ever had.

i know that sounds like hyperbole, but i think when you consider the advantages at have happened and the serious gaps are going to be in a very exciting moment. so first let's talk abouthe basic backdrop that helps us understand what went on. the contraction of the traditional media. it was sometimes said newspapers would have been a better position of the hit just grown their web traffic and if it were only that easy the truth is that from 20005 to 2009, newspapers online web traffic doubles and digital rvenue grew $616 million which sounds like a very big sum until you hear that at the same time it lost $22.6 billion this led to the newsper business print dollars for being replaced by digital

lines and if you look at the numbers hard it is print dollars being replaced by digital pennies, and that is the nut of the proem is that it's very hard to outrun the losses in the traditional business model. what are the implications. we ended up focusing a lot on the needy gritty subject, whh is staffed. what happe and newsrooms when these kind of revenue contractions happen? and it's a really distressing set of numbers when you look at what's happened with traditional media. just in the last few years which means it's now down to the level newspapers had before watergate. a tv network news staff are down

by half since the 1980's. news magazine, where i used to work, down by half since the 1980's. if you look a particular communities shall finish to see how this plays out you seehe impact. so a study by a few which system the best work in this area of baltimore the look of the "baltimore sun," the "baltimore sun" produced 30 more stores in 2010 years earlier so look at philadelphia these available news but public issues is dramatically diminished over the last three years by many measures air time story account and keyword measurements. if you look at a particular news room, the news and observer in 2000 for they had to hundred 50 newsroom employees. by 2011 they had 103. it doesn't take a lot of imagination to see that that can have a really serious impact.

and specifically some of the beads that lostreporters, courts, schools, legal affairs, agriculture, environment, state education, fundamental issues of concern is to citizens and of the health of american communities. statehouses. from two dozen three to 2008, when spendingy state governments we up by about 20% the number of people covering state government went down by one-third. it's not a good formula if you are concerned about safeguarding taxpayers' dollars. investigative reporting is down. this is a hard, this is hard to come up with numbers that are exactly, but to lose. membership in the investigative reporters association from 2000 to three was 5300, and now it is 4,000. the number of submissions for the public service categories and the pulitzer prizes is up 43% from 1984 to 2010. coverage of washington, the

washington bureau, 27 states have no washington reporters. the number of your nose down by about a half since the 1980's. religion, religion coverage a topic dear to my heart my chicken with a religion news writers and said what happened in the last yearith a set of religion news a the local level was nearly gone, which is very sad because the previous ten years had been a period of real growth in that area. hamsterization this is a term a columbia internal review referred to about a hamster wheel and this is the phenomenon of reporters who now have in addition to their regular beat the have a second beat and right for the website and tweet and are learning how to do video it creates the sense they feel like they're hamsters on a wheel.

since the work of the federal government i decided to bureaucratize the phrase a little bit and we are now referring to this as hampsterization, and this is a process of when you don't necessarily eliminate the become it's like it's not like there's no one there covering it but reporters are stretched and it means to use a different metaphor if you're talking about a media landscape there are still reporters who can look at the landscape and describe what is there but they have less and less time to turn over the rocks and look in the shadows. you can see in the case of calls reporting eighth important topic, the kaiser foundation did a study and said its interest in health coverage is up, the number of repoters is down and they concluded a result of that was a loss of in-depth enterprise stories. education, there's lots of education reporters, but they are less ambitious and doing less debt. same thing with local business

reporters. the ceo of bloomberg said it is currently not a market well served. now, i think this obviously has, to communities. it's wasted taxpayer dollars, corruption, schools, the did simon who was a former reporter the "baltimore sun" who may be is better known as the producer of the lawyer at a senate hearing said it's going to be one of the great times to be a corrupt politician and i wasn't there so i don't know who he was looking at when he said that, but i thought it was a very exciting moment. now it's very hard to prove in this case we are talking the impact is on stories not written. so how do you prove that, how do you prove what the impact is? and we try to get at this differently. we interview reporters about what are you doing now compared to what used to do? what did you use to do that you can't do any more? we looked at stories where there was journalism done after the crisis. so for instance, one of the

worst mining disasters in recent years is the upper big branch mine disster in virginia. some fantastic journalism was done after the disaster finding there were more than 1300 violations on the books. so one can only imagine what might have happened, whether there was 29 workers who died might not have suffered the fate of the journalism had gone before the disaster or if more of it had been done before. california is agree to example where the l.a. times eventually did a terrific piece about the chief administrative officer and a working-class city in california who was being paid more than $787,000. this was going on for five years, and because bell had no one covering it, taxpayers wrapped up $5.6 million, so we can only imagine if there had

been a reporter there whether or not taxpayers would have saved them. as often happens, in situations like this, it is it tends to be the least powerful and the most vulnerable and we were touched by people who talked about not necessarily journalists but people in communities on the front lines to solve problems for communities about this happened to their lives and effectiveness of solving community problems as the coraption that happened. as for instance, an expert on the family court system in michigan said coverage has gotten smaller and smaller in the years. why does that matter? what's the impact? he says well, for example, parents whose rights are terminated who shouldn't be terminated it just takes somebody down there to get the story but nobody has ever been down there. one thing that surprised me a

little bit is that because the internet and digital tools and general has been so in powering and you can see this in the literally the effect of the internet on helping to topple governments, and in many ways in the ability to have users and citizens engage in the media it has been a very in powering experience. so it surprised me a little but we found a countervailing shift in the other direction but when you don't have a sufficient accountability functioning in communities it leads to a power shift in the other direction towards institutions and government away from citizens and this is becaus reporters basically right from press releases and don't have time t dig is a for instance the que study of baltimore said repted as news is supposed to faster with little enterprising reporting having the officials version is becoming more important. we found official press releases often appe word for word in

first account of events though not ofn noted as such. a government in this study initiates most of the news. i've talked about newspapers so far in great depth because they traditionally played aspecial role in the ecosystem of communities and tended to be the bulk of the reporting periods of the contraction of newspaps has especial ripple affect the course they are not the only players and other media have played a central role, and i'm not going to go into quite as much debt but i want to quickly go through a radio use to play an important role providing on the resources in comunities and in some ways radio is actually doing really well nd writing. national radio, public affairs, news, talk is booming. it's a very vibrant area. at the same time, local news is not. there were 50 news stations, local radio stations, there are

now 30, about a third of the population has the benefit of an all news station. the number of reporters who work for the local stations have been down or as the person who did a study on this said, the number of people when played on the commercial radio news room has been one for quite a few years. tv news. i want to talk about tv news because this is a very interesting and in some ways exciting time for local tv news. local tv news is more productive than it has been perhaps ever. the last seven years the number of hours has risen by 45%, and they are increasingly doing very creative things. they are using their multi cast channels more creatively, they are starting to do more mobile applications, user generated

content. it's a great opportunity moment for local tv news. there's still the number-one source ofnews less about market share but they're still the number-one source of news. they are increasingly an important source of online news and the newspaper contruction creates an opportunity for them to do more of the original reporting. technology cuts have gone down so they would be able to hire more reporters and they are relatively profitable mini relative to everyone else in the community. they are not as profitable as they used to be but they had a pretty good year so the local news is more important than ever, and i really want to highlight that since i spent most of my time in the print world as a journalist i can admit that there is a little bit of a snobbery on the part of print reporters to the local tv news and i have to say i don't

agree with that because i have done circulation journalism and narrow circulation journalism and there is nothing harder and more valuable than coming up with serious substantial reporting and having packaging it in a way that is available and accessible to a very wide range of people and they do that investigative reporting and news that is really the heart and soul of what communities want and need. the next slide is interesting and is basically this is basically the volume of local news minutes. on one axis, left access and then the market size on the bottom axis and it's not surprising is that as you get to smaller markets there's less local news being produced. and the economics have become more challenging.

of course there's a lot of variation as thispoints out in a local news. the many that are seizing the moment and doing very exciting things, but some are not. and i do believe that some local tv news operations are no seizing this opportunity. so we have a few problems. the old phrase if it bleeds it leads is still tue, maybe even worse than ever. the beat system. most of the beat system like newspapers, less and less is that true which means there's less expertise being developed. the study of the l.a. market showed the results of the phenomenon was i think a pretty shockingly small amount of time beg spent on the sickly important information. specifically, they said that a little over one minute of a typical half-hour newscast was going to education, health care,

government, important topics like that. i think possibly one of the most alarming things that we saw or something that we call pay for play and these are basically situations where a station will allow an advertiser to dictate comment. it's an advertiser that literally says yeah, you can have an added deal and all you have to do is promise you only interview people from our hospital or that you were kafka story list that we have created for you. in one show they actually were charged in, half the guests to appear on the show. things like this, you know, this is not the majority of stations buy any means. but nonetheless it is a serious problem, and we had mixed evidence on whether or not it was merely persistent or growing it's a big deal. others that worried us it's that

the amount of tv news that was produced and is being produced is up by 35% they did this while cutting staff on average at tv stations. in some ways there are legitimate efficiencies built into the system that might have allowed them to do that. the term is one man band, and that means you used to have a crew of reporters and a sound video person if it was a network show it might be a three-person or four person crew and its as a result of the technology of reporter can be the videographer and the camera rson and sound person as well and in some ways this is a fantastic development. i talked to reporters who said is is great for one thing i don't have a whole crew with me so i can get into city hall in a way that is less conspicuos than i used to. it makes me more mobile and go more places and the number of people said this could be a fantastic development because instead of having 20 reporters

and 20 crew, we could have 40 reporters that's not what has happened instead of 20 reporters and 20 crew we of 20 reporters or maybe 18 reporters and as a resulthe reporters are doing more doing the reporting and the shooting and the audio and filing for the website and tweeting. in some cases this works well. i want to make it clear i am not actually of the view this is an inherently bad thing and i don't think many stations used the savings and efficienes that have gone from this disease the opportunity that they had in the local markets. i've offered some criticism was of local tv news but it should be said even the ones i have been talking about arriviste doing local programming. we look at the question of are ere other stations during local programming at all?

to was a limit to how granular we could get on this but we did for three different analytical approaches take a look at this and they all kind of came out in the same direction, which is about 21% of stations do no local news. if you add in the stations that do for 30 minutes or less, that is about one-third of the stations. now, i am offering no comment on whether that is good, bad or indifferent. i think it's somewhat depends on the situation. it is not necessarily obvious that we would all be better off if every station in america did local news. but it is nonetheless an interesting phenomenon and one of importance to the fcc to understand those that all stations to local programming. swift and talking about a contraction of theold media. so two points. first of a two years ago when you talk about the old media, traditional media is a

bifurcation between the old guys and you guys. not that the newspapers and tv stations and radio stations are doing innovative things online, too it's just as much as they are printing so that is a distinction that is getting blurred and despite the use of the phrase and the second thing is this is just part of the story. the contraction, i they happened but they were being filled and went by the growth of the new media we would be in great shape so that was a central question is we made a tremendous amount of innovation on activity. where is the trend in the gap and where is it not falling under the caps? we can spend the entire time talking about the incredible bounty of innovation that his seventh as a result of the alternative summarized and i think we all have a sense of them but lower barriers to entry, the vast amount of space on line has led to greater diversity of the voices of

increased debt for many types of coverage. there's sometimes this i think idea that the internet is a good at providing a way for people to mouth off with uninformed opinions, internet provides opportunity for tremendous debt. technology has reduc the cost of gathering news, producing news and a disturbing news. in some cases substantially. whether you're talking about computerized databases that enable someone to do a story in two hrs that might have taken two weeks previously with cost publishing images or video or the most obvious one of all, which is you can use search engine to find things out that used to take three days to find out. citizens are in power and i think it is very telling that if you think about are the most searing use images of the 1960's and 70's from the vietnam war and some images come to mind. there were images shot by brave and courageous professional photographers.

the most searing image of the sort we have now is this image of a iranian martyr being shot because she was protesting shot by someone's cell phone, and this is the potential power of user generated content. we've also seen an explosion of new web sites and those that get the most attention, the huffingtonpost.com of the daily collar, politico, there are many others really also very exciting stuff happening on all local level. texas tribune, based citizen, chico news cooperative, these are names i think you are going to hear more and more. these are entrepreneurs concerned about what is going on in the community comes all the gap and tried to move to fit it. some are for profit, some are non-profit, but the have brought tremendous energy.

some are even become self-sufficient and profitable. as i said earlier, these are hatchery's, these are tools that are no longer just limited to what we call the web native businesses, they are bleeding into all sorts of different media. maybe one of the area's most is hyper local news, it's kind of a buzzword. well it is a word that had to be invented because it didn't exist before. at least it didn't exist in the same way that it's happening now. that's because the media models for such that in the happiest days of newspapers they couldn't get a granular down to a house by house block by block level. it's not economic. you have a weekly in things like that. but hyper local information has gotten more vibrant than it has ever been. a lot of them are not big commercial enterprises, they are sick enterprises and they are

not profitable, but they don't have to be. this is a sort of civic enterprise a thousand points of journalism sprouting up in communities around the country. in 2010 as a result of all these changes, a major milestone was >> commissioners offered their opinions on the matter. we begin with remarks by commissioner michael copps. this is about 30 minutes. >> well, a alk about. i promise i will be relatively brief. thank you, first of all, steve, for your energetic presentation of the report and for all the hard work you put into it and i'll have more to say about that later. obviously we have some very serious problems here in the

issue is, what are we going to do about them? let's begin with a basic truth. the future of our country's media is an issue that goes to the heart of our democracy. a well-informed public. a well-informed public. a well-informed public. a well-informed public agreement. to make the compact work, it is imperative the sec play a vital role in helping to ensure that all americans have access to diverse and competing news and information that provide the greatest for democracy is churning mill. for most of the past 30 years, the commission has turned a blind and sometimes hostile i towards this responsibility. application is no longer an option. it will come as a surprise to few here this morning but this just-released staff report and company recommendations are not entirely doubled response for which i hope and dare to dream.

instead, the overarching pollution of the staff report seems to be america's media landscape is mostly vibrant and there is no overall crisis of news or information. but it is a crisis when is the report says, more than one third of our commercial broadcasters offer notice what the weather to their communities of license. america's news and information resources keep shrinking and hundreds of stories that confirm our citizens go untold on a date undiscovered, were his favorite day when hundreds of new strains and tens of thousands of reporters are walking the street in search of a job rather than walking their feeds in search of a story. i think it goes beyond local news. i cannot say that i share the conclusion that national and international news is in good

shape. the shrinking resources put into investigative reporting that you talk about the diminishment of investment and nationally in washington and overseas faith and tell a different story, which leads to off into the substitution of entertainment for the hard news that people really need. where is the urgency? the real urgency for the commission to weigh in and really grapple with the shortfalls that you document in this report. enlightened policy that promotes the public interest is basically glossed over as having been tried and failed. let's look for example at the claim that policies like broadcast relicensing failed and therefore need to be replaced

with something new or perhaps pay nothing. i agree that our current licensing process has failed and is primarily because beginning 30 years ago the commission white from its books most of the public interest guidelines for consumers and advocates had won after long, tough struggles of media reform. licensing approach became one of sending us a postcard every eight years in the renewal is a slamdunk certainty. no questions asked. as you point out, the sec has not taken the license away from public interest nonperformance for the 10 years i've been here for the 10 years before that. where does the commission issued warnings or impose a probationary period giving a poor performing licensee a chance to clean up its act. the point here is not to take license as a way, but she is the public interest processes available to us to in court greater emphasis on local news and information. it can be done.

when the majority of meaningful rules will dismantle it in the early 1990s, we were told there was little impact on viewers. excuse me, that turnout demonstrably not to be the case. before releasing any more rules, we should pause to recognize the yacht training of tv no longer an toaster is one chairman in the fcc put it back in the early 1980s. when the actions of government weekend to force the state, there's less of a check on government health. the report and presentation course the assignment on the next 10 or 15 years in this country will be an area for state and local political corruption. that is frightening. vigilant journalism can discourage that from happening. only if we take action now. yes, the fcc has a role to play. one of the three pillars

underlying interest is globalism. localism is about making sure the citizens and local communities are supplied with in-depth programming about public and civic affairs that they have available, programming to reflect the needs, interests and cultures of diverse people living there and that those views have some opportunity for expression on the airwaves. local means plus program homogenization. more local mosque in music and community news originated in the market for its broadcast, rather than being imported from faraway studios controlled by absentee owners. in the continuing era of media industry consolidation, we have no coverage of local music, local talent, local sports, local diversity communities, local political issues in election campaigns of odds making are more the exception of the rule. the staff report does recognize

problems in local news and information than the lack of accountability you much to its credit this underscores points i've been making for years. instead of calling for stepped-up commission, direct commission action, but too often tinkers around the edges. for example, urging philanthropy is to find better ways to do their business, asking congress to change tax code and suggesting the government to act more advertising to local media. and rather stunningly, i thought the staff report recommended shutting down a penny and localism proceeding. i participated in dozens of hearings in hundreds of meetings on the stockade. i have traveled to hearings and town hall meetings across the country to learn directly from tens of thousands of citizens what they think about their local and national media. they listen to folks fire tonight in session that sometimes lasted as long as nine

hours. we have had notices of inquiry notice of proposed rulemaking on this proceeding. we have done the analysis. we've made proposals and now it is time to act. i remarked after the localism npr and cannot for some of his proposals could and should be modified. no question about it before they became final rules. this could be quickly and easily accomplished and makes more sense to me than walking away from a huge and still relevant record. the staff report also delves briefly into media ownership and correctly alludes to some of the harmful effects of consolidation or less local news, few to reporters a diversity. and the recommendations, there is hedging about what they're consolidation we are living with today, although local independent stations brought up by make immediate interest has been good or bad. the report suggests some additional newspaper broadcast

mergers could well be beneficial in some circumstances. the policy prescriptions here as elsewhere in the staff report to track the diagnosis. keep in mind the paucity of resources dedicated to accountability. i hope the commission that some coming quadrennial review will weigh much more seriously than it has in the past, to have caused by media consolidation has inflicted on america's news and information infrastructure. diversity is another pillar in the public interest. i'll put this simply. in spite of occasional instances of progress in recent years, media's overall grade in covering, reflect and comics waning and mirroring america's amazing cultural diversity is tried for. diversity of viewpoint, diversity ownership in doing what we see on tv and diversity in who runs the companies, all of these are worse than media than most other american

industries. the staff report seems aware of a serious problem here. you alluded to it. what is lacking our recommendations for strong, implementable programs that begin to make a difference for generations of media and just as. as a starting point, i repeat my suggestion some month ago that weak tea at the face one of the recommendations of the diversity advisory committee at every meeting for the next year. the staff reports primary policy prescriptions as disclosure. but more and better information online with consumers and advocates can readily access and good things will happen. i am all for disclosure and i was happy more than two years ago when my colleagues and i voted for enhanced disclosure item which would provide significantly more program information than what is currently available. since then, the item seems to be stuck somewhere in the kind of

limbo.take could relate to come the stranded somewhere between the fcc and the office of management and budget. why don't we resolve to get it on., to whatever fine tuning is needed and vote next month's agenda meeting on the revised order of for this notice of proposed rulemaking to finish the long pending job. let's also remember that disclosure is a means to an end, not an end in of. as disclosure brings to public life actions that require retries, where is the redress to be found? somewhat doubt whether it is to be found in a commission that has sworn off public-interest rules and guidelines. why would consumers by thereupon the internet looking at public fires if there is so little confidence their effort will be rewarded with remedial action. over the years, some hardy souls have gone through paper files to

petition the commission to deny relicensing, all to no effect. what is the incentive to move that hapless process online? also on the disclosure fun, i continue to believe the sooner we can ensure fuller disclosure of political advertising sponsorship, the better off our democracy will be. voters have a right to know who's really behind all those glossy and sometimes wildly misleading ads we see on tv. concealing from voters than a gnat brought to us by the citizens for a more beautiful america is really sponsored by cabal of cable companies polluting the water we drink. it is not just nondisclosure. it is deception aimed at buying elections. we need to fix this in the fcc has been a good girl. i suggest the commission tia tonight and then the next two months in this list was made full disclosure of political advertising. the digital age, as you point

out holes in the same promise for expanding the scope of our democratic discourse. the staff report recognizes this in the present commission has focused tremendous energy on both broadband deployment and adoption. let's recognize upfront that they needed time where paved with broad and breaks and stacked with good news and information is not going to happen on autopilot. right now the vast majority of the news we read on the internet is produced elsewhere in traditional media newsrooms. interesting new and information innovations have developed on the map, although it would take some exception to the new site and the low, low, single-digit as addresses really go. the more important part is what

happened to the on the internet is the model for the mass or the momentum to sustain the resource hungry journalists and that informed electorate requires. an open internet is not the entire solution for robust 21st century journalism. it's a tougher problem from that. i for one don't believe we'll get their accents and public policy solutions. we have never had successful dissemination of news and information in this country without some encouraging public policy guidance. going back to the earliest days of the young republic on washington and madison and jefferson saw two of the newspapers were financially able to reach readers all across the fledgling young republic. they didn't see it is violent of the first amendment that they

wrote. and the supreme court more recently has not seen as violent of the first amendment to strip is we are told by the preservation of a vibrant marketplace of ideas to sustain our democracy. the same purpose of expanding the information infrastructures, what gave rise to broadcast licensing much closer to our own. so i don't see any reason why we should forsake america's workable past and deny her own history this point. there's more to be said about the staff report and i will be talking about it in the days ahead. but rather than parsing the contents of a particular report, i intend to spend most of my time encouraging the commission to take up this charge of responsible public interest oversight and to do everything

it can to encourage the news and information and diversity that americans have a right to expect from their media. at the staff report touts generated dialogue towards that end, it will have served a purpose. if we can learn from history traced in the staff report, much of it very good, we will be able to craft stronger public policy proposals. if the commission can move swiftly had on some of the good ideas offered and there are indeed good ideas offered, we can reap real benefits from it. i know very well that compiling the staff report was not an easy task. in fact, the undertaking was enormous and cognizant and appreciative of the work stephen and his team put in the report. and i hope steve and his colleagues, for whom i have tremendous respect will take the comments i've made today in the spirit in which they are

intended so we can move beyond this report after we read and digested to an action plan making the fcc central to solving the challenges we are talking about. launching a rededicating ourselves as pristine enhanced disclosure and diversity and localism in political advertising and media ownership in reinvigorated public interest licensing will put us on the road we need to travel. i also want to assess the commission should talk directly to the american people about all of this. in full commission hearings in various parts of the country. i suggest to my mr. chairman, three and the months ahead to see how well citizens across the land think they are being served by her present news infrastructure and to elicit their ideas for the future. i'm unfortunate enough to have this listening for 10 years and they never come back from such

conversations without knowing more than when i went out. let's hold these hearings, talk with citizens can't expeditiously enhance the record and take actions by the end of the year. there is real urgency here. i am cognizant of the fact that the fcc can't solve all of the problems with this report describes. but it can address and help resolve many of them. these issues mean a lot to me. i believe they mean a lot to her country. i have been outspoken about them and sometimes blunt. i know and i intend to keep speaking out about them in the months and if needed, the years ahead. this nation faces dark and threatening challenges to the

leadership that brought us in the world successfully through so many dire threat in the century just past. now we confront fundamental new uncertainties about revival of our economy, where new jobs will come from. how we will prosper in a hypercompetitive global arena, how to support the kind of education our kids and grandkids will need to thrive, indeed to survive in this difficult time, how to open the doors of opportunity of every american, no matter who they are, where they live or particular circumstances of their individual lives. we've had a lot to get on top of that the country. and if we don't have the facts that we don't have the information and we don't have the news about what is going on in the neighborhood and the talent and the nation and the world around as, our future is going to be very vastly diminished.

that's why so much rides on the future of what we are talking about today. and i'll say it again how these issues get decided will deeply affect our country's democracy and our country's future. i cannot and i will not leave these issues where they are. thank you. >> thank you, commissioner copps. commissioner mcdowell. >> thank you, mr. chairman. first of all, thank you. you and your entire team that looks like the cast to the credits for sosa b. demille to you should at the very beginning. before all of your absurd to unmask him a really significant amount of information and analysis about the current state of the media information marketplace. i look forward to reading your voluminous report in greater detail. i've been chewing on it since i got the draft a few days ago. i also look forward to thinking further about how the

developments and trends to identify the new small role in affecting just one corner for broader media landscape. at the outset, i do want to applaud you for your guidance of the process that led to the report and for your own very thoughtful nuanced and responsive leadership style and enjoyed our meetings and discussions on this. next, for the sake of those of you may not be familiar with how the commission works. i've only been here five weeks and am still figuring this out. distress of the report is simply vast. which the generated by a hard-working group of agency staffers has no binding effect. in other words, the report does not establish new fcc rules. it does not repeal any old rules. it does not even formally propose adopting new rules were discarding old rules.

rather, the report contains a set of recommendations, only some of which are directed to the commission that mankind hope she proposals for new rules to come our old rules to go. if and when that happens, forced the agency will launch proceedings that began as the lie requires, with notice and comment opportunities that afford interested parties an opportunity to weigh in with their own perspective facts and analyses before the fcc adopts any new or amended regulations. so now that i'm done with the legal disclaimer, no applause. look at some later. this one contains statements and a substance with which i agree and some with which i disagree. the responses i will share at this point are all preliminary because i have several hours of reading left to do. i would expect to read a person takes issue with reports characterization of media and information marketplace that is

vibrant, competitive, innovative and rapidly devolving. the facts supporting those conclusions have been right in front of us for years and they should no longer be ignored when it comes to making reality-based public policy. i also shared the reports general optimism about the future and welcome recognition of the government's limited ability as both a practical and legal matter to affect neither the operation or output at tomorrow's successful media and information platforms. more importantly, the government should keep its heavy hand off of journalism. journalistic freedom, as steve pointed out, is the primary protection of the bill of rights. and full disclosure, both my parents were journalists. with respect to the reports of specific recommendations, will come as no surprise to fcc watchers that i agree with several suggestions given my own past statements on many media issues correct for example,

through the enhanced disclosure form, calling it overly complex or just putting it mildly. i cast the only dissenting vote against creation of the four may may 2007 and anything we can do to hasten its demise would serve the public interest. they also agree with closing the localism proceeding without further action. pending proposals in the doctor for government mandated community advisory board from a 24 hour manning of broadcast stations and detailed accounting of local music content are indeed overly bureaucratic, unworkable and unnecessarily burdensome to quote the report. there also impractical, unneeded and classic examples of regulatory overreach. those are my words. and of course, i endorse the reports call for a for nominating remnants of the so-called fairness.turn that

still litter our rulebooks are the long-standing opposition to anything resembling the unconstitutional policy was no secret. accordingly, i call upon the commission to complete the emanation at the end of the year coming merely offering a recommendation today has no legal effect. in that spirit, commissioned by that time also should finish out the regulatory elimination proceedings discussed not only matcher magenta chassis june 6th letter to chairman upton of the commerce committee but in many 19 speeches while. i would also like to consider the elimination of the outdated newspaper broadcast day and in their upcoming quadrennial review over media ownership rules. my hypothesis is that the ban caused the unintended effect of reducing the number of voices, especially newspapers and scores of american communities. given that however, the demise of american newspapers have been

written about for quite a long time. tombstones have been written for quite some time. this reminds me of a book that i keep in my office and i'll just read you a couple quotes from it. the first quote is the printing presses on the way to obsolescence. yet journalism marches on. it goes onto say that journalism migrates into new areas of communications. its practitioners who are on the move, the commerce and information flourishes and quickened its tempo. new skills developed in the major problem for newspaper journalists is to keep their readers are migrating, too. this could have been written today. i found this in my mother's library. she passed away in 2005, a few months before i was appointed to its defeating american news ether. very clever container with a

fading. you have to ask yourself, when was this published? 2004? was a published in 1976, the year after the newspaper ownership fans are put into effect? was actually published 51 years ago, back in 1960. and my point is these issues have been around for a long time as the debate continues that journalism does mark john and continue to live. i have some reservations about other wreck nations in the report. for instance, while i appreciate calling for a new online quarterly disclosure record for broadcasters, stuffed rafters attempting to craft a more streamlined and useful obligation, continue to wonder about the need for mandate in the first place. after all, not exactly broadcasters or the business of trying to hide her on-air content from the public hear the government want to know what is being broadcast, it can turn on the tv or the radio out of the big brother implications of that also concern me. i'm also not convinced there is

a new pricing policy justification for potentially increasing the satellite tv sign for noncommercial content from the current level of 4% of satellite operators capacity to some higher percentage. many reports recommendations, as steve is violated, not corrected at the sec at all but it had intended to start debate in action elsewhere, including among private-sector entrepreneurs, nonprofits as well as other sectors of government from the federal level to local lawmakers. passionate debate ignite easily in this arena and i sense that these are subjective in this regard authority been achieved. i will watch with interest to see which numbers catch fire beyond our out regulatory balance. and just to reiterate, please keep in mind the fcc actually has not done anything today. [laughter] what we have before us is a report with a few recommendations. it is up to the four of us