Diversity in Programming Is Maintained, FCC Study Finds

Viewing it as the apocalypse for the radio industry, critics have long said the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and its subsequent whirlwind of ownership mergers have doomed the airwaves to bland, repetitive playlists churned out at corporate headquarters. But a series of studies released this week by the Federal Communications Commission seems to buck that conventional wisdom, and contend that little coming out of the speakers has changed since 1996.

The FCC commissioned a dozen reports on media ownership, as part of a biennial process to overhaul its rules regarding mergers, consolidation and companies that own combinations of print and broadcast outlets. Among them was a look at the relationship between ownership concentration and diversity on the airwaves, by a trio of researchers from the FCC’s Media Bureau. They examined radio-station playlists as reported by the trade magazine Radio & Records, in what the authors said “represents the first attempt to measure diversity in radio markets using actual songs.”

They found that diversity on the radio, as measured by the numbers of times songs were repeated between stations of the same format, stayed about the same from 1996 to 2001, on average. Overall, stations nationwide duplicated 7.4% of their songs in 1996, compared to 6.8% in 2001.

And for stations of the same format within the same listening area, song diversity increased an average of more than 11% in the six years.

But the study looked at only the top 10 songs at each station, and didn’t examine how many of the rest of the songs were identical from station to station. Also, when looking at the formats separately, song diversity actually dropped in nine of the 12 categories the FCC examined. For example, adult contemporary outlets duplicated songs 35% of the time in 1996, and did so 45% of the time in 2001.

“I’m not at all sure their study addresses the real issue--what variety of music is played over time,” said Christopher H. Sterling, professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. “Critics say what is played is far more conservative now, with much less variance over time, and a far higher incidence of advertising,” which, he noted, wasn’t addressed.

“The argument about narrower format choice is not resolved by this study, which looks at only a portion of the popular-format stations,” he added. “The sample is 300 stations out of more than 12,000 on the air.”

In the Telecommunications Act of 1996, Congress relaxed the rules regarding ownership, saying that a single owner could have up to eight stations in a large market, such as Los Angeles, and eliminated the nationwide cap on station ownership. It used to be a single company couldn’t have more than 20 AM and 20 FM stations; now the largest, Clear Channel Communications, owns nearly 1,200, including the maximum eight in L.A.

“We speculate that concentration may be partly responsible for more uniformity for stations within formats and more diversity between formats,” said the authors of the FCC’s diversity report, George Williams, Keith Brown and Peter Alexander. They added that changes in diversity might also stem from outside factors that affect all stations simultaneously. “Further, changes in ownership among stations within a format have led to increases in playlist diversity. Our results at this time suggest that recent consolidation has played very little role in playlist diversity.”

Consolidation defenders say that having fewer owners can actually increase programming diversity, because a single owner of several stations who wants to maximize his or her audience would offer as many formats as possible, to cover every possible taste. On the other hand, they say, multiple owners in the same market would each vie for the biggest share of the audience, and all try to compete for the same, large slice of the pie, resulting in several Top 40 stations, for example.

But such reasoning doesn’t translate to the real-world marketplace, said Andrew Schwartzman, president and chief executive of the Media Access Project, a Washington-based public-interest telecommunications law firm.

“They seek to maximize revenue by identifying and serving demographically attractive audiences. They slice and dice existing formats, and they tend to drop classical, because the audience is too old,” he said, and ethnic and children’s programming, because the audiences don’t have enough income.

“They say, ‘We have an incentive to go serve people.’ They have an incentive to go serve who their advertisers want to reach,” Schwartzman said.

Other researchers say that diversity increases with competition, because different owners who air the same programming would then be forced to compete on advertising prices, so instead they set themselves apart by what they play.

Advertisers also are wary of ownership consolidation, saying that a single owner who dominates a market can raise advertising rates appreciably.

One FCC report seems to justify their fears, showing that in 1996, the largest owner in a given market averaged 36% of the advertising revenue for the entire area, while in 2002 the largest owner takes in 47% of that money.

But another of the 12 FCC studies released this week shows that, even though advertising rates have jumped 68% from 1996 to 2001, the agency attributes only 3% to 4% of that rise to consolidation, with the rest coming from economic factors.

With the publishing of the reports--available on the FCC Web site (www.fcc.gov)--the agency now will take comments from broadcasters, the general public and any other interested parties until Dec. 2, and use those in crafting the final regulations on media ownership.