FCC Gets a Slap From the Courts

Áine on June 25th, 2004 filed in General

The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia has rejected the FCC’s media ownership concentration rules adopted last year, and sent them back to the FCC for a rewrite. The court ruled that the FCC did not do a good enough job explaining its rationale for changing the rules and failed to justify that loosening the 35% ownership cap on numerical limits for local television ownership, local radio ownership and cross-ownership of media within local markets would be in the public interest. The court’s ruling, in Prometheus Radio Project v. FCC, requires the agency to rewrite its controversial June 2003 decision relaxing the regulation of ownership of the newspaper, television and radio industries. The court rejected the agency’s methodology as “faulty,” finding the so-called Diversity Index, a key tool used by the agency to weigh the relative influence of various media channels on local publics, to be “hopelessly flawed.” [Source: Reuters]

Three cheers for media diversity!