SUPPORT OF RETENTION BY BROADCASTERS OF PROGRAM RECORDINGS
Few would dispute that local broadcasters are a primary source of political information for the American public. Indeed, the broadcasters have submitted numerous surveys to Congress and the FCC over the years proving just that point. The question is: are mechanisms in place to make that power transparent and thus accountable to the American public? The answer to that question, resoundingly, is no.
The field of political communication, for example, studies mass media. One of its major research goals is to study the relationship between media claims and actual media practice. For local TV broadcasters, this has been almost impossible to do. The vast majority of scholarly studies of mass media center on daily newspapers because they are readily searchable via commercial database providers such as Nexis and Factiva, and are also stored on microfiche at major university libraries and at the Library of Congress (which keeps comprehensive records of more than 300 daily newspapers). There are also a fair number of studies of network TV broadcasting, partially because transcripts of network news and public affairs shows are now readily available via commercial databases, but also because of the Vanderbilt Archives, which for several decades has kept archives of network TV news. The Copyright Act of 1976, after a long fight with network TV broadcasters, created a provision to allow this type of archive, which, extremely limited as it is, fostered a generation of research on network TV news.
Nothing similar exists for local TV news. Consequently, the studies of local broadcasting are few and far between. The scholarly cost-benefit analysis just doesn't warrant it. The only exception are a handful of major scholars who have received large grants to record and archive local TV programs in real time. These studies, which can be hundreds of times more expensive than comparable studies of local newspapers, tend to have extremely circumscribed topics because of their small number and the inability to do any retrospective research. To my knowledge, there is no other political science field where scholars must, at such expense, suffer the burden of creating their own historical archives while doing research. The FCC's recent broadcast flag decision, making it illegal for scholars to retransmit local broadcast programming, including public affairs and ad coverage, has made this type of research all the more costly.
For the full document, please see the PDF file linked below.
