News organizations cultivate a reputation for demanding transparency, whether by suing for access to government documents, dispatching camera crews to the doorsteps of recalcitrant politicians, or editorializing in favor of open government.

But now many of the country’s biggest media companies, which own dozens of newspapers and TV news operations, are flexing their muscle in Washington in a fight against a government initiative to increase transparency of political spending.

The corporate owners or sister companies of some of the biggest names in journalism 2014 NBC News, ABC News, Fox News, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Politico, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and dozens of local TV news outlets 2014 are lobbying against a Federal Communications Commission measure that would require broadcasters to post political ad data on the Internet.

As we have recently detailed, political ad data is public by law but not easy to get because it is kept only in paper files at each station. The FCC has proposed fixing that by requiring broadcasters to post online the details of political ad purchases, including the identity of the buyer and the price.

(ProPublica has been inviting readers and other journalists to send in the files to be posted as part of our Free the Files project.)

Over the past few months, several major media companies have dispatched top executives or outside lobbyists to the FCC to oppose the proposed rule or to push a watered-down version, disclosure filings show. (The FCC will vote on the issue April 27.)

Among them are:

• News Corp., which owns The Wall Street Journal and Fox News;
• Walt Disney, which owns ABC News and ESPN;
• NBCUniversal, which is owned by Comcast and includes NBC News;
• Allbritton, which owns several TV stations and Politico;
• Gannett Broadcasting, a division of Gannett, which owns USA Today:
• Post-Newsweek Stations, the broadcast division of The Washington Post Co.;
• Belo Cos., which owns 20 TV stations;
• Cox Media Group, which owns The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Austin American-Statesman and other newspapers and TV stations;
• Dispatch Broadcast Group, which owns Ohio and Indiana TV stations;
• Barrington Broadcasting Group, which owns several TV stations around the country;
• The E.W. Scripps Co., which owns TV stations and newspapers, including The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, Tenn.;
• Hearst Television Inc., which owns 29 stations;
• Raycom Media, which owns TV stations;
• Schurz Communications, which owns newspapers and TV stations nationwide.

(ProPublica has published stories in partnership with many of these news organizations, and has an agreement with NBC’s owned and operated TV stations for pre-publication access to our news apps and a contribution by NBC to ProPublica.)

In a speech this week at the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski excoriated the broadcasters as working “against transparency and against journalism.”

The industry’s opposition to the transparency proposal has sometimes been heated. In filings submitted to the FCC in January and March, Allbritton Senior Vice President Jerald Fritz raised the specter of “‘Soviet-style standardization” of ad sales if political ad files are required to be put online in a single format.

In a February meeting with the FCC, Walt Disney executives complained about the “logistics and burden” of putting the political ad information online.

That month, executives from Disney, NBC and News Corp. argued in a meeting with FCC officials that posting the political ad data would allow “competitors in the market and commercial advertisers [to] anonymously glean highly sensitive pricing data.”

Television stations must by law offer political candidates the lowest rates on ads. Broadcasters have argued that making this information available online 2014 and not just at stations 2014 would hurt their ability to negotiate with other advertisers.

Advocates for the online disclosure rule have countered that the political ad information is already public by law and the measure would simply make the existing disclosure rules relevant for the Internet age. Advocates have also pointed out that keeping paper files in electronic form should actually be more efficient for stations.

Allbritton, NBC and Walt Disney did not respond to requests for comment on the FCC chairman’s charge that they have positioned themselves “against transparency and against journalism.” News Corp. declined to comment.

Some media companies have also pushed a watered-down proposal to post only some of the public political ad data, and to put it up on individual station websites instead of a central FCC website.

Washington lawyers representing the other companies fighting the rule 2014 Barrington Broadcasting, Belo, Cox, Dispatch, E.W. Scripps, Gannett, Hearst, Meredith Broadcasting, Post-Newsweek Stations, Raycom Media and Schurz Communications 2014 lobbied FCC officials in February, March and again this week.

The group suggested that instead of putting the full, itemized political ad data online, stations would post aggregate data once a week.

“What we were saying is, if you want the public to be informed about what’s being bought at what price, maybe there’s a simpler way to do it,” Mary Jo Manning, an attorney representing the group, told ProPublica. “Transparency is giving people information that is useful.”

But when the FCC pressed the group for details on its plan, the stations said they opposed posting even the aggregate data in a single format prescribed by the FCC. They also opposed posting the data on a central FCC website, saying they wanted to post the limited data only on the stations’ own websites. If enacted, both of those stances would make it more difficult to get and analyze the data.

Since there is a one-week sunshine period ahead of FCC votes, today is the last day that interested parties will be able to lobby the commission before its public meeting April 27.

by Justin Elliott ProPublica, April 20, 2012, 10:50 a.m.

Image Courtesy of    Walter G Arce / Shutterstock.com

The article Meet the Media Companies Lobbying Against Transparency appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

Every local broadcast station has a repository of documents about political advertising that you have a legal right to see but can do so only by going to the station and asking to see “the public file.”

These paper files contain detailed data on all political ads that run on the channel, such as when they aired, who bought the time and how much they paid. It’s a transparency gold mine, allowing the public to see how campaigns and outside groups are influencing elections.

But TV executives have been fighting a Federal Communications Commission proposal to make the data accessible online. They say making the files digital would be too burdensome 2014 it “could well take hundreds of hours for a single station,” according to comments filed with the FCC by the National Association of Broadcasters.

Others have taken their case a step further. As reported by Bloomberg Government, Jerald Fritz, senior vice president of Allbritton Communications, said in an another FCC filing that online availability “would ultimately lead to a Soviet-style standardization of the way advertising should be sold as determined by the government.” (NPR’s On the Media did an excellent segment recently on broadcasters’ opposition to the proposal.)

We tend to like the idea of public data being online. Since TV stations won’t put it online themselves, we decided to do it ourselves 2014 and we want your help. Working with students at the Medill journalism school at Northwestern University, we looked at five local stations in the Chicago market.

You can explore the results yourself: Here are detailed breakdowns of when the ads aired, during which programs, and how much each spot cost: Read the documents from the local affiliates of ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX and CW.

Big thanks to Medill students David Tonyan, Julie O’Donoghue, Vesko Cholakov, Safiya Merchant and Gideon Resnick, who visited the stations Monday.

We intend to enlist more readers in checking their local stations as the election campaigns slog on. The general election is likely to usher in even greater spending, and such spot checks could keep an eye on how big spenders are influencing the election. If you’d like to join in, please fill out this form.

Campaigns and super PACs are required to report their spending on independent expenditures to the Federal Election Commission within a day or two, but they often just report how much they paid ad-buying firms, which can disguise how much actual ads cost and where they’re airing.

What’s more, the files could be a window into what may be otherwise undisclosed spending by “dark money” nonprofit groups that are playing an increasing role in the elections .

For our experiment, we asked our Chicago volunteers to check on spending by five super PACs that individually support Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich and Barack Obama. There were no records of spending in Chicago by four of them, but Restore Our Future, a pro-Romney super PAC, advertised on all five stations. The super PAC paid the five stations about $800,000 in the past month.

As our PAC Track interactive chart shows, Restore Our Future has spent more than twice as much as any other PAC so far 2014 nearly $37 million. Medill student O’Donoghue said getting the files from the ABC station took her about half an hour, most of which was spent wrestling with the copy machine. Tonyan, another graduate student, said he spent 15 minutes at the CW affiliate, plus a 15-minute drive.

Both said the station employees who helped them were friendly and accommodating. We encountered the same when I visited five stations in New York, Missouri and Florida. Typically, a station employee will simply show you the room where the files are kept and let you dig in. Such visits don’t seem to happen often. A log at the New York CBS affiliate showed only six registered visitors since October 2011.

The Campaign Media Analysis Group, a unit of Kantar Media, tracks ads that have hit the airwaves and estimates what they would cost, but the company charges high rates to obtain the information. The Wesleyan Media Project publishes some CMAG data.

Rich Robinson, executive director of the Michigan Campaign Finance Network, found that $70 million in advertising had been unreported from 2000-10 in Michigan. He got that number by personally examining public files, at one point driving 14 hours for a 15-minute visit to a station.

He told the FCC: “I can testify to you, unequivocally, that the threshold of effort necessary to report this important public interest story is too high for every news organization in Michigan, except mine.” Which is why we’re asking for your help. You can help expose spending that might otherwise remain hidden in your television market. Sign up here.

by Daniel Victor ProPublica, March 20, 2012, 3:29 p.m.

Image Courtesy of  Frontpage / Shutterstock.com

The article If TV Stations Won’t Post Their Data on Political Ads, We Will appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.