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Article Excerpt
INTRODUCTION: THE DIVERSITY INDEX THAT DIDN'T INDEX DIVERSITY
I. THE CONVERGENCE HYPOTHESIS A. Viewpoint Diversity and the Empirical Turn in the Law of Media B. Scholarly Dissensus II. LIMITATIONS OF EXISTING MEASUREMENTS OF VIEWPOINT DIVERSITY A. The FCC's Diversity Index B. Manual Content Analysis C. Language Processing D. Political Endorsements III. EMPIRICALLY CAPTURING SUBSTANTIVE VIEWPOINT DIVERSITY A. The Data: Supreme Court Editorials, 1988-2004 B. Coding of Editorials C. Statistical Inference of Viewpoint Diversity D. Mergers and Acquisitions E. Caveats IV. EMPIRICAL RESULTS A. Static Newspaper Viewpoints B. Time-Varying Newspaper Viewpoints 1. Atlanta Journal-Constitution 2. New York Times--Boston Globe 3. Chicago Tribune Los Angeles Times 4. Houston Chronicle--San Francisco Chronicle 5. USA Today--Arizona Republic V. CONVERGENCE OR MONOPOLY DIVERSIFICATION? AN IN-DEPTH VIEW A. Atlanta Journal-Constitution 1. Divergence in the face of common ownership 2. Viewpoint diversity in the face of convergence B. New York Times--Boston Globe CONCLUSION: POLICY IMPLICATIONS APPENDIX A. Editorial Data Collection B. Editorial Board Data Collection 1. Atlanta Journal-Constitution INDEX OF FIGURES AND TABLES Figure 1. Illustration of Diversity Index from Appendix C of Biennial Order Figure 2. Illustration of Word Frequency "Cosine (Dis)similarity". Figure 3. Halavais Dissimilarity Methods Applied to Supreme Court Editorials From Six Major Newspapers Figure 4. Presidential Endorsements of Major Newspapers, 1992-2004 Table 1. Newspapers, Abbreviations, and Supreme Court Terms Covered Figure 5. Supreme Court Editorial Publication Rates by Newspaper and Prominence of Case Figure 6. Editorial Coverage of the Supreme Court by Term Figure 7. Direction Position of Newspapers on the Legal Merits Figure 8. Fraction of Conservative Decisions on Cases from 1994-2004 Terms for Justices and Newspapers Figure 9. Fraction of Conservative Decisions by Term for Selected Justices and Newspapers, 1994-2004 Figure 10. Illustration of Model-Based Differential Weighting of Votes with Four Cases Figure 11. Editorial Viewpoints and Judicial Ideal Points from Pooled Analysis of 1994-2004 Data Figure 12. Dynamic Editorial Viewpoint Estimates for 25 Major Newspapers, 1988-2004 Figure 13. Viewpoint Estimates for the Atlanta Constitution (solid), Atlanta Journal (overlaid), and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Figure 14. Viewpoint Estimates for the Boston Globe (solid) and the New York Times (overlaid) Figure 15. Viewpoint Estimates for the Chicago Tribune (solid) and the Los Angeles Times (overlaid) Figure 16. Viewpoint Estimates for the Houston Chronicle (solid) and the San Francisco Chronicle (overlaid) Figure 17. Viewpoint Estimates for the Arizona Republic (solid) and USA Today (overlaid) Figure 18. Circulation for the Atlanta Journal (top-left), the Atlanta Constitution (top-middle), and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (top-right) Figure 19. Nationwide Circulation Trends in the Newspaper Industry Figure 20. Median Household Income in Atlanta Journal-Constitution Designated Market Area Figure 21. Geographic Readership Distribution of the Journal and Constitution Figure 22. Readership Substitution in Largest Counties Figure 23. Editorial Board Composition for the Journal and Constitution Table 2. Distribution of Editorial Positions on Supreme Court Cases for All Types of Opinion Pieces in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Papers, 1994-2008 Figure 24. Viewpoint Estimates for Cynthia Tucker and Jim Wooten Figure 25. Circulation (in 10,000s) for the New York Times (left) and Boston Globe (right) Figure 26. Circulation (in 10,000s) for the Times (black) and Globe (gray) for Sunday (solid) and Weekday (dashed) Editions Figure 27. Editorial Board Membership of the Globe Figure 28. Editorial Board Membership for the Times
INTRODUCTION: THE DIVERSITY INDEX THAT DIDN'T INDEX DIVERSITY
It is a rare federal rulemaking that unifies the National Rifle Association, Catholic Conference of Bishops, MoveOn, National Organization for Women, and Common Cause. Together this motley crew rallied its troops, leading to the submission of over 500,000 comments to the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) review of media ownership regulations in 2002. The large majority of these comments opposed the proposed relaxation of the FCC's ownership regulations, which restrict the number and types of media outlets a single entity can own. FCC Chairman Michael K. Powell wasn't so much moved by the submissions: "You don't govern just by polls and surveys." (1)
Yet Powell proceeded to do just that, albeit in an unexpected fashion. Relying on a Nielsen poll to calculate market shares for all media outlets, the former Department of Justice (DOJ) antitrust lawyer adapted a well-known antitrust measure (the Herfindahl index) to index diversity. The so-called "diversity index" would be used to determine whether a merger or acquisition of a media outlet harms viewpoint diversity.
But the diversity index would be short-lived. Consumer groups assailed its validity, and the Third Circuit would have none of it on review. Despite the fact that the index was based on poll and survey data, the court held that the diversity index was unjustified. (2)
The result has left media regulation in a state of quandary. Over the course of the past decade, courts have increasingly demanded empirical justification for the Commission's ownership rules. At heart, these rules rest on what we call the "convergence" assumption that media consolidation reduces viewpoint diversity. By restricting consolidation, the theory goes, ownership regulations preserve diverse and antagonistic viewpoints that broadly further democratic goals. Others counter that media conglomerates do not speak in a single voice. Media consolidation may capitalize on efficiencies, ultimately increasing the quality of the content and viewpoints expressed. Indeed, monopolists might have an incentive to diversify viewpoints in a way that competing outlets would not. The intense disagreement between critics of media consolidation and regulatory critics, as Professor Waldfogel notes, may seem to some as "an argument between 'the sky is falling' versus 'we have a working missile shield.'" (3)
Our Article contributes to this important legal and policy debate in two principal ways. First, we fill the empirical void by developing a valid statistical measure of editorial viewpoint diversity for twenty-five top newspapers from 1988-2004. The measure--based on an exhaustive and new data collection of over 1600 editorial positions on every nonunanimous Supreme Court case decided during that period--is directly and substantively interpretable as the editorial viewpoint of a newspaper. To our knowledge, it is the first measure that directly quantifies, with valid uncertainty intervals, the political viewpoints of newspaper editorial boards at any given point of time. By capitalizing on modern statistical approaches to measurement and data collection, we address considerable shortcomings of previous approaches, which have ignored viewpoints, diversity, or both. Second, our Article directly assesses the overarching assumption that consolidation should lead to convergence in viewpoint diversity. Using finely tuned statistical methods, we examine the evolution of editorial viewpoints for all five mergers and acquisitions amongst our newspapers from 1988 through 2004: the New York Times Company's acquisition of the Boston Globe, the merger of the Atlanta Journal and Atlanta Constitution into the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Chicago Tribune Company's acquisition of the Los Angeles Times, Gannett's purchase of the Arizona Republic, and Hearst's acquisition of the San Francisco Chronicle. For each of these ownership changes, about which a cacophony of commentators have speculated, we provide direct measurements on editorial viewpoints of each paper pre- and postownership change, allowing us to directly test for breakpoints in views. (4)
With these measures and evidence, we are able to speak to a host of fundamental questions in regulation, media, markets, and the First Amendment: When the government intervenes to promote "diverse and antagonistic" voices, (5) is it successful? Does the empirical record reveal a trade-off between liberalizing media markets and preserving deliberative democratic values? Can we quantify regulatory benefits for diversity in a tangible way? How well-founded is populist hostility towards media consolidation? Do the media respond in meaningful ways on editorial pages to ownership changes? Can a solid foundation for statutory and doctrinal mandates for empirical evidence be built?
Our findings defy extant accounts. First, we show that the convergence assumption that underpins federal regulation receives little support from three of the five of the ownership changes we study. There is no evidence of convergence--i.e., a decrease in the difference of political viewpoints--between newspapers already owned by the acquiring party and the Los Angeles Times, the Arizona Republic, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Second, for two cases of consolidation, we detect marked shifts in editorial viewpoints that are consistent with convergence and, counterintuitively, divergence. Under common ownership (but with separate editorial boards), the Atlanta Journal and Atlanta Constitution diverged sharply in editorial viewpoints prior to the merger of their editorial boards. This provides some evidence for monopoly diversification. Yet upon merging, the editorial viewpoint of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution fell squarely between the positions of its parent papers, providing strong evidence for convergence. Lastly, while ideologically indistinguishable preacquisition, after consolidation of ownership the New York Times and the Boston Globe separated sharply into liberal and (relatively) centrist newspapers, respectively, suggesting diversification instead of convergence.
To study each of these ownership changes in more detail, we amassed data from several other novel sources to document (to our knowledge, for the first time) editorial board composition and broad-based demographic data for each of these transactions. These data shed substantial light on the puzzling findings: divergence and convergence may be best explained by differences in editorial policies, and seeming convergence in Atlanta may be divergence in fact. Our findings challenge long-held assumptions about viewpoint diversity. The implications for law and policy are considerable, particularly for the FCC's merger review and what we argue to be a sharp tension in the statutory interpretation of the 1996 Telecommunications Act.
While our approach to measuring viewpoint diversity has significant advantages over alternative measurement strategies, it is no panacea. Most importantly, our analysis does not directly speak to the causal impact of modifying the newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership rule (or other ownership rules). Further, because the measure is based on editorial positions of major newspapers, we do not directly capture slant or bias in news reporting or trends in small, locally owned newspapers. We discuss such limitations more fully in Part III.E.
This Article proceeds as follows. Part I discusses the hypothesis that consolidation should lead to convergence in substantive viewpoint diversity. We review how commentators, scholars, courts, and the Commission have grappled with the conceptually muddy convergence hypothesis. Part II demonstrates how existing measures of viewpoints fail--none truly measures viewpoint diversity. Part III sketches our finely tuned statistical measurement approach, which we show solves both the conceptual muddiness and measurement challenges. While the technical details of our approach are complex and make use of state-of-the-art developments in applied statistics, the intuition is straightforward: we locate every newspaper editorial that takes an express position on a Supreme Court case and "scale" the newspaper in the same substantively meaningful dimension used to descriptively characterize the Justices. (The technical details of our approach are reserved for Subpart C of the Appendix.) Upon publication, easy-to-use software to estimate dynamic viewpoints will be made publicly available for free. (6) Part IV presents our empirical results. It first demonstrates that our static measure (pooling time periods) reliably, consistently, and intuitively quantifies editorial viewpoint differences across papers. We then present the dynamic measures (accounting for temporal trends), demonstrating the seeming paradox of stability, divergence, and convergence depending on the newspaper. In Part V, we conduct a detailed study of the most puzzling cases of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the New York Times / Boston Globe. We contextualize the mergers and acquisitions of interest with new editorial board and demographic data and highlight the fundamental importance of editorial policy and the organizational structure of a board. We conclude with legal and policy implications for communications law. In addition to the primary tension we highlight in the interpretation of the 1996 Act, we suggest that in its waiver review the Commission should scrutinize the organizational structure of editorial boards and newspaper personnel policies, because our study suggests that these play a considerable role in determining editorial viewpoints.
I. THE CONVERGENCE HYPOTHESIS
As with most areas of administrative law and regulation, the central struggle in media regulation involves competing conceptions of the public interest. The Federal Communications Commission has historically interpreted its "public interest" mandate as involving three overlapping but distinguishable values: competition, localism, and diversity. (7) While competition is more readily susceptible to economic analysis, diversity and localism do not easily lend themselves to existing analytical tools, setting up what has been described by some as a clash between market and democratic models of the media. (8) What do we mean by diversity? How is localism to be distinguished from diversity? How do we measure the attainment of each? While the Commission has grappled with such underlying questions for decades, the concepts remain elusive. Nonetheless, one central animating assumption behind the Commission's ownership regulations is that common ownership reduces viewpoint diversity, which we call the "convergence hypothesis." (9)
Due to First Amendment constraints, Congress and the FCC have largely adopted a structural approach to regulating the media, as opposed to directly mandating content, based on the empirical assumption of convergence. Limiting concentration of media ownership is therefore a means to the ultimate end of furthering substantive viewpoint diversity, (10) and, in turn, fostering broad democratic goals of an informed citizenry, deliberation, and accountability. (11)
The convergence hypothesis pervades federal law and regulation. The "newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership" rule, promulgated in 1975, restricts common ownership of a newspaper and broadcast station (television or radio) in the same market. (12) The "radio/television cross-ownership" rule limits the number of television and radio stations an entity may own in a single market. (13) The "national television ownership" rule caps the aggregate television audience any single entity may reach at 39%. (14) The "dual network" rule prohibits a merger between any of the top four networks (that is, ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC). (15) And, from 1970 to 1995, the "financial interest and syndication" rules barred television networks from having a financial stake in the syndication of programs. (16)
While the convergence hypothesis forms the empirical bedrock for media regulation, it remains contested terrain. The Commission and the courts have taken a sharp empirical turn, increasingly requiring greater evidence to validate the foundation of the convergence hypothesis. (17) Scholars have come to no agreement on basic questions of whether consolidation has happened, and if so, whether it has any connection to viewpoint diversity. (18) We sketch these developments below to demonstrate the pressing need for the reliable, valid, empirical measurements that we offer in this Article.
A. Viewpoint Diversity and the Empirical Turn in the Law of Media
For the better half of the existence of federal ownership regulations, which date back to the 1940s, the Commission offered and the courts required little evidence of the connection between ownership and viewpoint diversity. (19)
When the Commission first proposed the newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership rule in 1970, some twenty-five studies were submitted, but the Commission dismissed them as "inconclusive or unrealistic." (20) Challenging the rule in the Supreme Court, the American Newspaper Publishers Association argued in FCC v. National Citizens Committee for Broadcasting (NCCB) (21) that the Commission had failed to establish the connection between diversity and ownership. (22) The Court made short shrift of the argument. While the Court conceded that the connection was not well supported, it held that the Commission hadn't acted irrationally because the connection would be difficult to document: "diversity and its effects are ... elusive concepts, not easily defined let alone measured," (23) and abuses by common owners are difficult to detect. Because of these measurement difficulties, "the Commission was entitled to rely on its judgment, based on experience, that 'it is unrealistic to expect true diversity from a commonly owned station-newspaper combination.'" (24)
While the NCCB Court's deference to the Commission's expertise was par for the course for the better half of the lifespan of ownership regulations, the tide has turned over the past two decades. Courts and, in turn, the Commission have increasingly mandated some form of empirical evidence. (25) Broadly speaking, three factors may account for this shift. First, the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which eliminated and revised several ownership rules, mandated review of the Commission's ownership rules every two years to determine "whether any of such rules are necessary in the public interest as the result of competition" and to "repeal or modify any regulation it determines to be no longer in the public interest." (26) The increasing requirement for an evidentiary basis for the convergence assumption has therefore been derived from the seemingly deregulatory mandate of the 1996 Act. (27) Second, the standard of review for informal rulemaking may generally have increased in scrutiny since NCCB. (28) Third, empirical science has progressed significantly over the past 20 years, increasing both the supply and demand for empirical evidence. In its 2002 Biennial Review, for example, the FCC commissioned a dozen empirical studies to determine whether the ownership regulations were still necessary to the public interest. (29)
Even prior to the 1996 Act, appellate courts had become less deferential to the Commission than the NCCB Court. In Schurz Communications, Inc. v. FCC, (30) the Seventh Circuit, in an opinion by Judge Posner, struck down revised "financial interest and syndication" rules as arbitrary and capricious, finding that the FCC failed to explain how the rules would enhance diversity in programming. (31) Judge Posner conceded that economic theory provided no solace: "[E]conomists do not agree on the relation between monopoly or competition, on the one hand, and the ... variety of an industry's output...." (32)) Like the NCCB Court, the Schurz Court noted the difficulty of measuring diversity, (33) but unlike in NCCB, that difficulty provided no grounds for deference to the Commission. (34) Despite the fact that the Schurz court admitted that economic theory provided no answers, it invoked the potential for monopoly diversification: "It has long been understood that monopoly in broadcasting could actually promote rather than retard programming diversity." (35) Combined with the fact that the Commission "made no attempt to explain" how "restrictions on network participation in programming ... promote diversity," the theoretical possibility was fatal. (36)
Relying on the 1996 Act, the D.C. Circuit in a series of cases has questioned and demanded evidence for the Commission's invocation of the convergence hypothesis. In Time Warner Entertainment Co. v. FCC, the court found arbitrary and capricious the 40% "vertical" limit on the number of channels that can be occupied by affiliated programmers. (37) The court found wanting the evidence for the 40% limit, compared to some limit above or below, noting that "given the pursuit of diversity, one might expect some inquiry into whether innovative independent originators of programming find greater success selling to affiliated or to unaffiliated programming firms, but there is none." (38) In Fox Television Stations, Inc. v. FCC, the court vacated the cable/broadcast cross-ownership rule and remanded the national television station ownership rule to the Commission. (39) For the cable/broadcast cross-ownership rule, it found the Commission's diversity rationale--which ignored the rule's arguably small marginal effect on diversity due to the historical increase in broadcast outlets--"woefully inadequate." (40) For the national television rule, the court pointed to an earlier FCC report, which found no evidence that group-owned stations were less responsive to local needs. (41) The Commission had not shown any studies to the contrary, and thereby failed to establish that the rule enhanced diversity. (42) In Sinclair Broadcast Group, Inc. v. FCC, the court reviewed the local television ownership rule, which limits common ownership of television stations to markets with at least eight remaining independent voices. (43) Examining the empirical bases the Commission relied on (e.g., a Roper study of television behavior and data from the Commission's annual report), the court found arbitrary and capricious the Commission's exclusion of nonbroadcast media from the eight voices. (44)
In response to this increasing scrutiny on appeal, the Commission harnessed empirical evidence in its 2002 Biennial Review, commissioning twelve empirical studies on localism and diversity. (45) Compared to the Commission's prior rulemakings, the Biennial Order is unique in this respect: the order is littered with discussions of, analyses of, and references to empirical studies on a full range of topics, from media penetration, to consumption and substitution patterns, to ownership. (46) Defining viewpoint diversity as "the availability of media content reflecting a variety of perspectives," (47) the Commission specifically "sought comment on whether th[e] longstanding presumed link between ownership and viewpoint could be established empirically." (48) One of those studies, for example, collected information about news stories and editorials during the 2000 presidential campaign by ten cross-owned television and newspaper combinations. (49) The study coded each item as "slanted" in favor of Bush or Gore, finding inconsistent patterns. (50) The Commission discussed the study at length in its order, but ultimately concluded that it suffered from the "significant methodological flaw" of no control group. (51) The Commission pored over several other studies: an examination of news slant and editorial endorsements of Senate candidates, (52) a Pew survey of journalists suggesting that journalists act to benefit the interest of the news organization, (53) and a study finding a correlation between television revenue and editorializing on spectrum allocation. (54) As to the newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership rule, the Commission found the record wanting: "[T]he record does not contain data or other information demonstrating that common ownership ... poses a widespread threat to diversity of viewpoint...." (55) The Commission hence repealed the blanket ban on newspaper/broadcast cross- ownership, adopting instead "cross-media limits" based on its diversity index. (56)
On appeal, the Third Circuit, reversing other parts of the Biennial Order, affirmed the repeal of the newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership rule, citing to the mixed record, such as examples of newspaper owners' affecting news and editorial pages and Tribune company papers' endorsing different presidential candidates. (57) But in a two-to-one split, the court struck down the cross-media limits and diversity index for failure to justify the market shares (despite the fact that they were empirically informed from a Nielsen media survey) and failure to justify why market shares are the same for all outlets of a given medium. (58)
On remand, in an order released in early 2008, the Commission adopted a presumption that permits newspaper-broadcast combinations in the twenty largest media markets and a negative presumption in all other markets. It held that it "will require any applicant attempting to overcome a negative presumption about a major newspaper and television station combination to demonstrate by clear and convincing evidence that ... the merged entity will increase the diversity of independent news outlets." (59) How exactly this is to be shown remains unclear, further underscoring the pressing need for empirical measurement of diversity.
The empirical turn has played prominently in the FCC and the courts, culminating the 2002 Biennial Order. The assessment of the convergence hypothesis is also not strictly limited to the Commission. Formally, antitrust considerations do not contemplate viewpoint diversity, (60) but one section chief responsible for newspaper matters at the DO J, Alan J. Marx, noted that "the theory we always had [was] that if you find commercial competition for advertisers, you get the preservation of editorial competition. Preserving editorial voices was an important consideration.... Justice asks a lot of questions about editorial competition ... but has yet to see how to use the answers." (61)
Our Article responds to this sweeping empirical turn in the law, providing direct measures of whether a merged entity continues to exercise "independent news and editorial judgment," the lynchpin of the Commission's current proposed approach. (62)
B. Scholarly Dissensus
At the same time that the law has mandated empirical verification of convergence, scholars have come to little theoretical or empirical agreement about the effects of consolidation on viewpoint diversity. (63)
On the one hand, a large number of media critics invoke the convergence hypothesis. Professor Wildman notes, "[I]t is widely accepted that ownership structure does influence viewpoint diversity and policy has generally reflected a presumption that viewpoint diversity increases with outlet diversity." (64) Professor Bagdikian, "dean of American media critics," (65) argues that five conglomerate companies dominate media content, leading to dramatic homogenization of content. (66) As evidence of convergence, Bagdikian points to homogeneity in editorials (e.g., on the FCC's fairness doctrine), uniformity in editorial endorsements of political candidates, and instances of executive pressure influencing editorial endorsement decisions. (67)
On its face, the convergence hypothesis seems plausible: it is tautologically true that if two media outlets merge, one "voice" is lost. Yet in the nontautological sense, when one outlet is acquired but not eliminated, the effects of consolidation may be more complex. Some have offered a directly contradictory theory of monopoly diversification. (68) The intuition for monopoly diversification (really divergence with consolidation) is simple: in a competitive market, firms may compete for the median consumer, for example, by adopting centrist editorial positions. Any deviation from the median consumer may cause one firm to lose consumers to the other. (69) But a monopolist's optimal strategy may be to cater products to different market segments, for example by producing a liberal and a conservative paper. Others suggest that, even in competitive markets, the media will reflect biases of consumers such that there's no convergence towards the median consumer. (70) Sophisticated theoretical economic analyses of the impact of ownership rules suggest no clear answers as to the effects on viewpoint diversity. (71)
At an empirical level, there is even less agreement, primarily because of the conceptual and measurement difficulties of viewpoint diversity. A number of economic studies assess the effect of monopoly diversification on product variety but not viewpoint diversity. (72) Economics Professor Owen notes that "content diversity is an impractical policy target because it cannot be defined or measured, and because there is no analytical linkage between ownership concentration and even abstract concepts of content diversity." (73) Professor Barron, a leading authority on the media and the First Amendment, argues that "diversity resists both definition and quantification." (74) Communications Professor Einstein notes that conceptually defining diversity presents "a major stumbling block in this debate," (75) and that "no one has been able to develop a working definition of diversity--not the content providers, not the policymakers, not the scholars, and not the courts. Not only is diversity difficult to define, it is equally difficult to measure." (76) Indeed, recently, Professor Napoli edited a landmark volume, with contributions by twenty-one scholars in the field, dedicated to the topic of measuring diversity and localism because of the "disappointing paucity of previous research addressing such issues." (77) (We discuss below some of the approaches taken in that volume.)
Because of the difficulty of measuring diversity, the results of extant studies have been wildly inconsistent. (78) Professor Horwitz notes that "[m]ost empirical studies of the effects of ownership rules and other diversity remedies on media content and format are inconclusive at best." (79) He attributes this largely to the problem of measurement:
[H]ow can an empirically oriented social scientist measure viewpoint diversity? ... Even approaching that particular problem resurrects the quandary of who does the measuring .... [because] different people often read different messages into and derive different values from the same entertainment (and news) content.... Thus, it's not surprising that empirical social scientists trying to assess media diversity will gravitate to the stable, if less consequential, measures of format. The problem, of course, is that format or program diversity is just one of several gauges of diversity, yet commentators often leap to broad, general conclusions about the efficacy (or not) of the market in expanding diversity. (80)
Even more pessimistic, Professor Compaine, reviewing the literature on the effects of consolidation, concludes, "[A]ll that was written ... about the need for regulation to foster diversity and competition on television because of limited spectrum is irrelevant." (81) Professors Entman and Wildman insist that economic approaches fail to notice what cannot be quantified. (82)
While considerable work related to the question of how ownership structure affects viewpoint diversity exists in communications scholarship, (83) the inconclusiveness of extant work is understandable: policy-relevant quantities are difficult to derive in this context with limited variation in policies of interest, even more limited data, and, to date, no reliable methods of measuring viewpoint diversity. Existing studies, as we demonstrate...
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