***[Federal communications commission]{.underline}***

***Media Ownership Working Group***

Viewpoint Diversity in Cross-Owned Newspapers and Television Stations:

A Study of News Coverage of the

2000 Presidential Campaign

By David Pritchard

September 2002

[EXECUTIVE SUMMARY]{.underline}

Regulations adopted by the Federal Communications Commission in 1975
prohibit the grant of a license for a broadcast station to a company
that owns a newspaper in the same community. One purpose of the rule was
to preserve a diversity of viewpoints in local media. Some of the
cross-owned broadcast stations and newspapers were grandfathered, while
others were required to divest one of the two cross-owned outlets. Since
1975, the Commission also has granted a handful of waivers of the rule.

As part of its review of its ownership rules, the FCC commissioned the
present study of news coverage of the 2000 presidential campaign by
cross-owned newspapers and television stations in several American
communities. The study addresses the following research question: To
what extent do commonly owned newspapers and television stations in a
community speak with a single voice about important political matters?

Data about the news coverage of 10 cross-owned newspaper-television
combinations were analyzed. The results show that, in five of the 10
newspaper-television combinations studied, the overall slant of the
coverage broadcast by a company\'s television station was noticeably
different from the overall slant of the coverage provided by the same
company\'s newspaper.

In the other five combinations under study, the overall slant of
newspaper coverage of the 2000 campaign was not significantly different
from the overall slant of the local television coverage. The data do not
enable us to ascertain why the overall slants in those cases were
similar.

The limited number of observations in this study prevents us from
drawing firm or sweeping conclusions about the implications of our
findings. However, for the markets studied, the data suggest that common
ownership of a newspaper and a television station in a community does
not result in a predictable pattern of news coverage and commentary
about important political events in the commonly owned outlets.

Viewpoint Diversity in Cross-Owned Newspapers and Television Stations: A
Study of News Coverage of the 2000 Presidential Campaign

**INTRODUCTION**

In 1975 the Federal Communications Commission adopted a rule prohibiting
a company that owned a newspaper in a community from obtaining a license
for a broadcast station in the same community.[^1] When it adopted the
rule, the Commission said that "it is unrealistic to expect true
diversity from a commonly-owned station-newspaper combination." The
concern was not only that local cross-ownership might result in a
reduction of viewpoint diversity in the community\'s media, but also
that a single owner might actively manipulate the news disseminated by
its newspaper and broadcast properties in an attempt to influence local
public opinion. The Commission offered no systematic evidence to support
its view that cross-ownership has a negative impact on the range of
viewpoints circulating within a community.[^2]

In light of its concern about viewpoint diversity, the Commission
required some of the then-existing broadcast-newspaper combinations to
divest one of the two properties while grandfathering certain other
broadcast-newspaper combinations. The Commission also has granted
waivers to the rule for a small number of combinations created since
1975.[^3] By our count, there were 17 cross-owned newspaper-television
combinations and 10 other newspaper-radio-televison combinations in
communities throughout the United States in mid-2002.

The existing combinations provide a rare opportunity to assess the
validity of an assumption that provided an important part of the
foundation for the 1975 rule: That commonly owned news media in a
community tend to present similar views of important political issues.

**CONTEXT OF THE RESEARCH**

In late 2001, I published the results of an empirical study about
diversity of information and viewpoints in news and opinion regarding
the 2000 presidential campaign within cross-owned newspaper-broadcast
combinations in Chicago, Dallas, and Milwaukee.[^4] Earlier this year,
the Federal Communications Commission asked me to conduct a similar
study in additional communities. This document reports the results of
the research in the additional communities as well as incorporating
results from the study published in 2001.

The central research issue for the present study, as for the study
published in 2001, was whether information and opinion about the 2000
presidential campaign in cross-owned media had a coordinated or
consistent slant in favor of one major-party candidate or the other, and
if so, did the slant reflect the interest of the media corporation that
owned the newspaper-television combination? In other words, the research
looked for evidence of whether the news and opinion disseminated by
commonly owned news organizations in a community appears to be slanted,
consciously or unconsciously, toward the interests of the corporations
that own the news organizations.[^5]

If ever media corporations wished to slant news about a national
political campaign, the 2000 presidential campaign -- and especially the
increasingly suspenseful final few weeks before November 7, Election Day
-- offered an excellent set of conditions for such influence. The
presidential race was neck-and-neck in at least a dozen important states
as the campaign neared its end. A coordinated slant in the campaign
coverage of a powerful news organization in any of these states might
have influenced a relatively small number of swing voters whose choices
can make a significant difference in whether a state\'s electoral votes
go to the Republican or the Democratic candidate.

There were few meaningful legal restrictions on how the news media
covered the 2000 presidential campaign. In fact, broadcasters had more
legal freedom to cover the 2000 campaign than any other campaign in
recent memory. Early in the fall of 2000, the FCC announced that it
would suspend, on a trial basis, two long-standing rules that
broadcasters claimed inhibited robust journalism.[^6] The first rule,
the Personal Attack Rule, required broadcasters to notify and provide
free reply time to anyone whose honesty, character, or integrity had
been attacked during non-news programming.[^7] The second rule, the
Political Editorial Rule, required broadcasters to notify and provide
free reply time to opponents of any political candidate the station
endorsed as well as to any candidate the station opposed in an
editorial.[^8] Soon after the FCC action, and less than four weeks
before Election Day, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia
ruled that both the Personal Attack Rule and the Political Editorial
Rule, which had been in effect since 1967, violated the First
Amendment.[^9]

Finally, two key assumptions underlie the way we have interpreted the
data. The first is that the two major party candidates for president had
different views on the desirability of retaining the FCC's
newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership rule. Then-Governor George Bush was
thought to support relaxation or elimination of the rule, and then-Vice
President Albert Gore was thought to favor retention of the rule. The
second assumption is that the companies owning broadcast-newspaper
combinations themselves favored repeal of the rule. There is evidence
that the future of the ban on cross-ownership of newspapers and
television stations was an issue of central importance to major American
media corporations during the 2000 presidential campaign.[^10]

Taken together, these factors -- the apparent corporate interest in the
election of George W. Bush, the intense uncertainty about the outcome of
the election, and removal of legal restrictions on broadcast comment
about political candidates -- created favorable conditions for the
owners of cross-owned media to attempt to influence news content, if
they wished to do so.

**METHOD**

The study published in 2001 focused on cross-owned media in three major
cities: Chicago, Milwaukee, and Dallas.[^11] The current investigation
added seven cross-owned newspaper-television combinations in six
communities to the data set. News and comment about the presidential
campaign disseminated by the newspapers and television stations during
the last fifteen days of the campaign (*i.e.,* from Monday, October 23,
2000, through Monday, November 6, 2000) were coded and analyzed. Table 1
lists the news organizations included in this study.

**Table 1.** Newspaper-television combinations in the study.

**[Community]{.underline} [TV station]{.underline}
[Newspaper]{.underline} [Owner]{.underline}**

Chicago IL WGN *Tribune* Tribune Company

Dallas TX WFAA *Morning News* A. H. Belo Corporation

Fargo ND WDAY *Forum* Forum Communications

Hartford CT WTIC *Courant* Tribune Company

Los Angeles CA KTLA *Times* Tribune Company

Milwaukee WI WTMJ *Journal Sentinel* Journal Communications

New York NY WNYW *Post* News Corp. Ltd.

New York NY WPIX *Newsday* Tribune Company

Phoenix AZ KPNX Arizona *Republic* Gannett

Tampa FL WFLA *Tribune* Media General Inc.

The study\'s research question had to do with whether information and
opinion about the 2000 presidential campaign in cross-owned media had a
coordinated or consistent slant in favor of one major-party candidate or
the other. An initial challenge, accordingly, was to devise a measurable
definition of "slant."

We defined the "slant" of a published or broadcast item about the
presidential campaign from the point of view of a hypothetical
interested but undecided voter. If the coders judged an item to be
likely to make such a voter more inclined to vote for Gore than for Bush
(or more likely to vote for Gore than for a third-party candidate), then
the item was coded as "favorable to Gore." The "favorable to Gore"
category included items that were pro-Gore as well as items that were
anti-Bush. Similarly, if an item was likely to make a voter more
inclined to vote for Bush, then it was coded as "favorable to Bush," a
category that included anti-Gore as well as pro-Bush items. Items that
favored third-party candidates, items that were equally flattering or
unflattering to Bush and Gore, and items about polls and campaign
strategy were coded as "neutral."

Slant was not a judgment about whether a candidate or his staff would
have been happy with publication or broadcast of the item, about whether
an item was somehow biased, or about a journalist\'s intent. Many items
that would meet ordinary standards of journalistic objectivity were
uncritical reports of what a candidate had done the previous day. If, as
often was the case, the items depicted the candidate in a positive
light, they were coded as favoring the candidate (whichever one he was)
without any implication that the journalist who produced the story was
biased. Slant was simply an assessment of whether an item would have
made a typical undecided voter more likely to vote for Bush, more likely
to vote for Gore, or whether it would have had minimal effect on a
typical undecided voter.

The study coded all available non-advertising content about the
presidential campaign in the newspapers and late-evening local newscasts
of the media organizations under study.[^12] In other words, in addition
to evaluating the slant of traditional news stories and editorials, the
study also evaluated the slant of items such as editorial cartoons,
staff-written opinion columns other than editorials, syndicated opinion
columns, guest opinion essays, letters submitted by readers, and
free-standing photographs. Each item was coded by two members of a team
of research assistants who had been selected and trained by the author
of this report. If the research assistants initially disagreed or were
uncertain about the slant of any given item, they brought the item to
the author for review and discussion.[^13] After discussion, all parties
agreed in all cases about the appropriate slant of an item.

For each news organization\'s coverage, a coefficient of "slant" was
computed.[^14] The slant coefficient could vary from --100 (which would
indicate that all items in a given category favored Gore, none were
neutral, and none favored Bush) to +100 (which would indicate that all
items in a given category favored Bush, none were neutral, and none
favored Gore). Perfectly balanced coverage would have a slant
coefficient of 0. It is important to note, however, that slant
coefficients different from 0 should not be construed as evidence of
bias on the part of a news organization. Objective news organizations
respond to the tenor of events, and the last two weeks of the campaign
featured a certain amount of news that was almost inevitably anti-Bush
(e.g., the revelations of the decades-old drunk-driving arrests of both
Bush and his vice-presidential candidate, Dick Cheney) or pro-Gore
(e.g., outgoing President Clinton\'s late-campaign efforts to mobilize
African American voters to vote for Gore).

The results reveal the direction and magnitude of "slant" for each news
organization under study during the crucial final two weeks of the
campaign. The greater the distance between the two "slants" of a
commonly owned newspaper and television station in a community, the
stronger the evidence that cross-owned newspapers and television
stations provided different views of the 2000 presidential campaign.
Whether a slant coefficient was positive (i.e., pro-Bush) or negative
(i.e., pro-Gore) is not important to the analysis. Rather, it was the
magnitude of the difference between the slant coefficients of a commonly
owned newspaper and television station in a given community that
provided evidence for distinct views of the campaign.[^15]

We also ascertained which presidential candidate, if any, received the
endorsement of the newspaper in a cross-owned combination so that we
could compare the endorsement with the slant of the news coverage
provided by the company\'s newspaper and television station.

**RESULTS**

The analysis showed that, in five of the 10 newspaper-television
combinations studied, the overall slant of the coverage broadcast by a
company\'s television station was noticeably different from the overall
slant of the coverage provided by the same company\'s newspaper, and
often contradicted the newspaper\'s endorsement of a candidate. In the
other five combinations under study, the overall slant of newspaper
coverage of the 2000 campaign was not significantly different from the
overall slant of the local television coverage. Table 2 shows the
results, with the newspaper-broadcast combinations ordered from greatest
to smallest difference in slant.

**Table 2.** Editorial endorsements and slant of coverage.

> **TV station Newspaper Newspaper**

**[Community Slant Slant Endorsement]{.underline}**

Phoenix AZ -- 30.43 -- 4.69 Bush

NY (News Corp.) -- 3.70 + 20.49 Bush

Fargo ND + 2.33 -- 11.94 Bush

Milwaukee WI + 5.05 -- 8.15 None

Tampa FL + 3.45 + 13.73 Bush

Los Angeles CA -- 7.84 -- 15.70 None

Dallas TX -- 0.03 + 6.55 Bush

NY (Tribune Co.) -- 8.33 -- 14.66 Gore

Hartford CT -- 13.16 -- 8.67 Bush

Chicago IL + 0.01 -- 3.57 Bush

One fact not related to individual communities is apparent from Table 2:
The Tribune Company did not require its newspapers to coordinate their
endorsements for president. Of the four Tribune Company newspapers in
the study, two endorsed Bush (Chicago, Hartford), one endorsed Gore
(Newsday), and one made no endorsement (Los Angeles *Times*).

Of the seven television stations in cross-owned combinations where the
newspaper endorsed Bush, two (WTIC in Hartford and KPNX in Phoenix)
provided coverage of the presidential campaign that had a clear pro-Gore
slant. In five of the newspaper-television combinations (Fargo,
Milwaukee, the News Corporation\'s New York combination, Phoenix, and
Tampa), the overall slant of the newspaper coverage was noticeably
different from the overall slant of the coverage of the television owned
by the same company.

Nowhere was this tendency more apparent than in Gannett\'s Phoenix
properties. The slant of 192 items from the Arizona *Republic* (which
endorsed Bush) was --4.69, fairly close to neutrality. The slant of the
23 items from KPNX-TV, however, was --30.43, the strongest pro-Gore
slant coefficient in the study.

Diversity of views about the presidential campaign also was evident in
the News Corporation\'s New York media. The slant of 122 coded items
from the New York *Post*, which had endorsed Bush, was a robustly
pro-Bush +20.49.[^16] WNYW-TV\'s coverage, however, was rigorously
neutral; the television slant coefficient of --3.70 was the result of 1
pro-Gore item out of 27 coded. The other 26 televised items were
neutral.

In Milwaukee, the *Journal Sentinel*\'s coverage was a mildly pro-Gore
--8.15, while WTMJ-TV, also owned by Journal Communications, provided
coverage that was somewhat pro-Bush (+5.05). It is worth noting that a
separate analysis of Journal Communications\' Milwaukee radio station
showed its coverage of the presidential campaign to be powerfully
pro-Bush.[^17] In Fargo, Forum Communications newspaper, which endorsed
Bush, provided pro-Gore coverage of the presidential campaign (--11.94).
The associated television station, WDAY-TV, provided very balanced
coverage (+2.33).

A similar trend was apparent in the Tampa/St. Petersburg market. The
overall slant coefficient of Media General\'s Tampa *Tribune*, which
endorsed Bush, was a clear pro-Bush +13.73. Almost all of WFLA-TV\'s
coverage, on the other hand, was neutral (56 of the 58 televised items
were coded neutral).

In the other newspaper-television combinations under study, there was no
meaningful difference between the overall slants of the newspaper and
television coverage of the campaign. There was, to be sure, coverage
whose slant contrasted with the newspaper\'s editorial endorsement
(e.g., the newspaper-television combinations in Hartford and Phoenix) as
well as a wide diversity of viewpoints in the pages of monopoly
newspapers.[^18]

**DISCUSSION**

Given the limited number of observations in this study, we cannot draw
firm or sweeping conclusions about the implications of our findings.
However, for the ten markets studied, our analysis of the coverage of
last two weeks of the 2000 presidential campaign suggests that common
ownership of a newspaper and a television station in a community does
not result in a predictable pattern of news coverage and commentary on
important political events between the commonly-owned outlets. This is
not to say that the news organizations under study presented a vast
range of viewpoints or that their news coverage was helpful in enabling
citizens to make informed choices on Election Day. It is to say,
however, that we found no generalized evidence of ownership manipulation
of the news in the situations of local cross-ownership we studied.

Different news organizations owned by the same company tended to do
things differently, sometimes favoring Bush, sometimes favoring Gore,
and often favoring neither. As our previous study showed, editorial
pages carried not only management\'s opinion but also many other
opinions, including a substantial number of letters, guest columns, and
syndicated columns that offered readers a range of viewpoints. The slant
of campaign coverage broadcast by a company\'s radio and television
stations sometimes differed from the slant of news published by the
company\'s newspaper.

It is important to note that we did not assess the quality of campaign
coverage in cross-owned media; we simply examined the extent to which
commonly owned media took a common slant on the campaign. In five of the
combinations, the results enable us to say with some confidence that the
slant of the newspaper\'s coverage of the last two weeks of the 2000
campaign was meaningfully different from the slant of the television
station\'s coverage. For the other five combinations, the newspaper and
television slants were not meaningfully different.

The data to not enable us to ascertain why both commonly owned news
organizations in these five combinations might have taken a similar
slant on the campaign. One possibility is that an unseen hand of
ownership control operated to harmonize the coverage. Another
possibility is that the news judgments of professional journalists in a
community sometimes tend to converge without any influence from
ownership.

Overall, the range of viewpoints in the campaign coverage of the
cross-owned media under study tended to reflect the range of viewpoints
discussed by the leading candidates for the presidency. In other words,
cross-owned newspapers and broadcast stations covered the campaign in
the way that mainstream American news organizations typically cover
political campaigns.

**NOTES**

[^1]:
    > . Amendment of Sections 73.34, 73.240, and 73.636 Comm\'n Rules
    > Relating to Multiple Ownership of Std., FM, and TV Brdcst.
    > Stations, [Second Report and Order]{.underline}, 50 F.C.C.2d 1046,
    > 32 Rad. Reg.2d (P & F) 954 (1975) \[hereinafter [Second Report &
    > Order]{.underline}\].

[^2]:
    > . [Second Report & Order]{.underline}, supra note 1, para. 97.

[^3]:
    > . Kortes Commun., Inc., [Memorandum Opinion & Order]{.underline},
    > 15 F.C.C.R. 11846 (2000) (allowing co-ownership of newspaper and
    > AM station, based on the fact that the station was financially
    > troubled and might go off the air, and was a small participant in
    > the market); Columbia Montour Brdcst. Co., [Memorandum Opinion &
    > Order]{.underline}, 13 F.C.C.R. 13007 (1998) (allowing
    > co-ownership of newspaper and small AM station, based on the fact
    > that the station was financially troubled and could not be sold,
    > and was a small participant in a competitive, diverse market); Fox
    > TV Stations, Inc., [Declaratory Ruling]{.underline}, 9 F.C.C.R.
    > 5341 (1993) (allowing co-ownership of newspaper and TV station in
    > large market, based on the fact that the station was reacquiring
    > the newspaper such that the combination did not constitute a new
    > ownership pattern, and the newspaper might not be financially
    > viable on its own), *aff\'d sub nom.* Metropolitan Council of
    > NAACP Branches v. FCC, 46 F.3d 1154 (D.C. Cir. 1995); Field
    > Commun. Corp., 65 F.C.C.2d 959 (1977) (allowing co-ownership of
    > two newspapers and a TV station, based on the fact that the
    > newspapers were reacquiring the TV station such that the
    > combination did not constitute a new ownership pattern, and the TV
    > station had only recently become financially viable).

[^4]:
    > . David Pritchard, A Tale of Three Cities: "Diverse and
    > Antagonistic" Information in Situations of Local
    > Newspaper/Broadcast Cross-Ownership, 54 [Fed. Comm.
    > L.J.]{.underline} 31 (2001). \[Hereinafter, Pritchard, A Tale of
    > Three Cities\].

[^5]:
    > . See, e.g., Chris Powell, The [Courant]{.underline}\'s Curious
    > Endorsement, [Providence Journal-Bulletin]{.underline}, Nov. 2,
    > 2000, at B6.

[^6]:
    > . Stephen Labaton, In Test, FCC Lifts Requirement on Broadcasting
    > Political Replies, [N.Y. Times]{.underline}, Oct. 5, 2000, at A1.

[^7]:
    > ^?^. 47 C.F.R. § 73.123 (1967).

[^8]:
    > . 47 C.F.R. § 73.123(c) (1967).

[^9]:
    > . Radio-TV News Dirs. Assoc. v. FCC, 229 F.3d 269 (D.C. Cir.
    > 2000).

[^10]:
    > . Stephen Labaton, Presidential Election Could Alter Shape of
    > Tribune-Times Mirror Deal, [N.Y. Times]{.underline}, Mar. 19,
    > 2000, at C1.

[^11]:
    > . Although the initial study analyzed the content of news and
    > public affairs programming from cross-owned radio stations in
    > Chicago and Milwaukee as well as from newspapers and television,
    > only the newspaper and television data will be presented in this
    > report.

[^12]:
    > . Media coverage from Chicago, Dallas, and Milwaukee, which
    > provided the data analyzed in the study published in 2001, was
    > collected as it was published or broadcast in fall 2000. The seven
    > combinations that are analyzed for the first time in this study
    > represent all newspaper-television combinations for which useable
    > tapes or transcripts of local newscasts for the period under study
    > (October 23 through November 6, 2000) could be obtained during the
    > summer of 2002. The stations provided tapes of late-evening
    > newscasts, except in the cases of WTIC in Hartford (which could
    > supply only a full script) and KPNX in Phoenix (which supplied a
    > log sheet and tape of reporter packages). Data for the other seven
    > newspapers analyzed for the first time here was not sought until
    > summer 2002, long after the newspaper organizations had discarded
    > old copies. Content of five of the seven newspapers is available
    > on Lexis-Nexis (Hartford Courant, Los Angeles Times, New York
    > Post, Newsday, and Tampa Tribune). The other two newspapers (Fargo
    > Forum, Arizona Republic) supplied photocopies of their political
    > coverage for the dates under study.

[^13]:
    > . In the initial examination of the data, coders agreed on the
    > slant of an item in more than 92% of the cases, indicating a high
    > degree of reliability.

[^14]:
    > . The slant coefficients were transformations of the mean value of
    > the variable "slant" for each news organization to create a more
    > intuitively understandable metric.

[^15]: . We determined what constituted a meaningful difference between
    commonly owned newspapers and television stations via two-tailed,
    independent-samples T-tests which compared the slant of coverage by
    a cross-owned TV station with the slant of the coverage of the
    newspaper in the same combination. T-tests are typically used to
    compare the means of two groups randomly chosen from two
    populations, enabling inferences about the differences between the
    population means. Such tests also can be used to help assess the
    likelihood that the difference between two population means (e.g.,
    the slants of all newspaper and television coverage of a political
    campaign in a defined period) is a meaningful difference rather than
    a difference caused by chance fluctuation in the data. In the
    present study, the tests suggested that there was an 83% chance that
    a difference of the type we found with the Fargo combination was a
    meaningful difference. For Milwaukee and Tampa, the statistic was
    89%. For Phoenix, the statistic was 96%. For the News Corporations
    New York combination, the statistic was 99%. None of the other
    combinations under study had percentages higher than 65%, which we
    judged not adequate to support a finding of a meaningful difference.

[^16]:
    > . Although more than three-quarters of the items in the *Post*
    > were coded as neutral, of the non-neutral items pro-Bush pieces
    > outnumbered pro-Gore pieces by 27 to 2.

[^17]: . See Pritchard, A Tale of Three Cities, supra note 4 at 48-49.

[^18]:
    > . Pritchard discusses this issue in depth with respect to
    > cross-owned newspapers in Chicago, Dallas, and Milwaukee. See A
    > Tale of Three Cities, supra note 4, at 42-49.