FCC Chief Talks Through his Hat on Dereg

Call off the protests! It turns out F.C.C. chairman Kevin Martin's controversial plan to relax media ownership limits is actually designed to preserve diversity and localism by keeping small newspapers alive!

Or so Martin would have readers of his New York Times op-ed believe, anyway. "If we don't act to improve the health of the newspaper industry, we will see newspapers wither and die," he writes. "Without newspapers, we would be less informed about our communities and have fewer outlets for the expression of independent thinking and a diversity of viewpoints."

One clue that he's not being entirely sincere about his motivations is the abundance of half-truths and distortions scattered throughout his essay. They begin in the first paragraph, where he intones, "In many towns and cities, the newspaper is an endangered species. At least 300 daily papers have stopped publishing over the past 30 years. Those newspapers that have survived are struggling financially."

Well, that depends on how you define "endangered" and "struggling." I assume Martin pulled that figure of 300 deceased papers from the Newspaper Association of America's tally, which shows 1,437 dailies in 2006, down from 1,756 in 1975. But according to those same NAA figures, the rate of newspaper closures was substantially lower between 1995 and 2005 than in the preceding decade: 5.3 percent versus 8.5 percent.

As for "struggling financially," a phrase like that would lead the average Times reader to believe most newspapers are losing money, or at least on the verge of it. And, Martin notes, "[n]ewspapers in financial difficulty often have little choice but to scale back news gathering to help cut cost."

In fact, as Martin no doubt knows, the newspaper business is home to some of the highest profit margins around. That's what initially made them such attractive acquisition targets to the big conglomerates that are now lobbying the F.C.C. to loosen its rules. And papers are "struggling" not because their profits have disappeared but because they can no longer deliver the eye-popping 20 percent margins that keep stock prices growing.

Martin obviously means to suggest that "many towns and cities" will soon be without a local paper unless media conglomerates can restore their old margins. Yet in the fifth paragraph, he reveals that his proposal would lift the ban on cross-ownership of a newspaper and a TV or radio station "only for the largest markets."

In other words, it would help out owners in the big cities that are in no imminent danger of losing their dailies, while doing nothing for the small towns where papers are legitimately "an endangered species."

But my favorite part of Martin's op-ed is his proviso that, under the new regime, in cases where a newspaper owner bought a TV station in the same market, "each part of the combined entity would need to maintain its editorial independence."

You hear that, Mr. Murdoch? Oh, and it would also be great if Osama bin Laden would surrender and it never rained on the weekend.