Political Issue or Policy Matter?

Abstract

Throughout the third biennial review of broadcast ownership rules, it became clear that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) handled the issue as a policy matter, limiting the debate within the agency to selected groups of experts, rather than as a political matter, which would have involved a much wider range of participants. Accordingly, the authors'analysis shows howmost of the 12 studies the FCC used in its reviewfocused predominantly on economic aspects. Contextualizing media ownership primarily as an economic issue tends to disengage the broader public from such policy debates and facilitates the deregulatory agenda sought by the FCC's most active stakeholders and monitors—the regulated industries. Although this issue has begun to resonate with the broader public, such efforts to narrow the FCC's analytic perspective on media ownership rules marginalizes certain categories of stakeholders, as well as their issues and concerns, from the policy-making process.