The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will conduct national tests of the Emergency Alert System and Wireless Emergency Alerts on Wednesday, October 4, at approximately 2:20 p.m. EDT. Test messages will be sent to all TVs, radios and cell phones at that time. Note that this is not a University test: Fordham has no control over the timing nor content of the messages. The full text of the FEMA/FCC notice can be found on the FEMA website.

As always, please call Fordham Public Safety at (718) 817-2222 in case of a real emergency.

Sincerely,

Robert Fitzer, Associate Vice President
Fordham Department of Public Safety

Speaking on May 3 at the McGannon Center Conference, “Digital Diversity: Serving the Public Interest in the Age of Broadband,” Mark Lloyd said the agency does not have sufficient data to understand what is going on in our new digital age.

“This is 2011 and the data is simply not there,” said Lloyd, a former journalist and political science researcher. “We have a population that is increasingly diverse, we have new technologies and changing markets, and having this data is the only way we’re going to understand what’s going on in local communities.”

Lloyd, who said he was not speaking for the FCC, called his plea a personal one. He said he began wondering about how to ensure FCC technologies are reaching a diverse array of communities before he joined the agency.

With Philip Napoli, Ph.D., professor of communication and media management and director of the Donald McGannon Communication Research Center at Fordham, Lloyd enlisted a broad group of academics five years ago to measure and index the media usage of an array of communities.

“We found that our data was old and incomplete,” he said. “This isn’t about one group. It’s about all of us really, because many of us fall into groups, like the disabled, which may not be well served.”

Lloyd referred to the American jurist Hugo Black, who said the First Amendment “rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources” and believed that diversity is essential to the welfare of the public, that a free press is a condition of a free society.

For example, Lloyd said, there is no way to tell whether disabled people in certain regions have access to emergency warnings.

“We’ve gotten studies saying diversity has increased because today we have Tejano, urban and gospel networks on cable,” Lloyd said. “But there isn’t any information about whether those networks carry any news programs. How can we ensure those audiences have access to that?”

Lloyd encouraged the 25 or so academics in attendance to share their work.

“The FCC is seriously limited by the absence of this information,” he said.

Held on the Lincoln Center campus, the three-day conference was sponsored by The Institute for Information Policy at Penn State University and the Donald McGannon Communication Research Center at Fordham.

Daily newscasts courtesy of National Public Radio help get the 37-year-old through his long commute to work and his favorite on-air sports personality is New York Yankees broadcaster and Fordham University alumnus Michael Kay (FCRH ’82).

Napoli may love to surf the dial but that’s not to say that the director of the Donald McGannon Communication Research Center doesn’t see problems in the ever-volatile world of radio—and television, for that matter.

In fact, Napoli believes that both media are under increasing danger of losing their sense of localism and thus their grounding in the communities radio and television stations serve.

“Media content and services that address local interests and concerns,” Napoli said, “are essential to the welfare of local communities.” The problem, however, is that given policy changes in recent years, that essential role played by local radio and television station is under attack like never before.

For years, the federal government imposed strict limits on the number of television and radio stations a single company could own in one community. In 2003, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) relaxed a variety of media ownership regulations. The move resulted in large media companies acquiring many more radio and television stations in the same market. The policy change sparked a widespread debate, with critics arguing that the rules would result in fewer companies controlling more of what Americans see and hear.

So far, Napoli said, the critics were on the right track.

“The biggest disparity we see is in terms of source diversity—the diversity of information sources available—given the increasing concentration of ownership of the major media outlets,” Napoli said. “The problem has been that policymakers have increasingly emphasized economic efficiency to the neglect of non-economic policy objectives such as diversity and localism.

“A media marketplace of diverse sources is inherently inefficient in that it’s more efficient to have one source covering a story, for example, than four or five different sources,” Napoli said.

The move by media companies to buy more stations and leave fewer independent voices in local communities has implications for society as a whole and minority communities in particular, Napoli said.

“Content flows from owners,” he said. “The statistics on minority ownership are really disappointing. It simply hasn’t kept pace with the increasing numbers of minorities in the country.”

So what can be done to fix the problem?

For Napoli, at least part of the answer lies with more research and the ability of scholars and others to document what exactly is happening across the country as large media companies gobble up local radio and television stations.

It won’t be easy, Napoli said, because researchers face the challenge of gaining access to data controlled by television and radio stations. It is an obstacle that inspired Napoli’s latest project: a study for the Social Science Research Council’s Necessary Knowledge for a Democratic Public Sphere program on the data access and quality issues that impede effective policy research.

“Unlike newspapers, no solid archival system exists for television news,” Napoli said. “If you wanted to compare news programming across stations, or across markets, you can’t, because no systematic archives are kept. Yet the FCC and Congress keep asking questions like, ‘Do different types of owners provide different slants on their news?’ and keep forming policy around whatever answers they can find.”

Napoli said the government’s role in the gathering of data necessary for conducting these kinds of analyses has diminished dramatically over the past 30 years due to the reduced reporting requirements for broadcast licensees and cable systems, and the privatization of many data gathering functions once done by the government.

“They key question is, ‘What system do we have in place to allow for the verification of the accuracy and reliability of these studies that can prove tremendously influential in policy decision-making,’” Napoli said. “An academic, policymaker or a public interest organization may not be able to analyze the data because they belong to a commercial data provider, and access can be difficult or extremely expensive to obtain.”

Napoli and his colleagues at the McGannon Center have recently published a paper in the Federal Communications Law Journal calling for “legislation that specifies that once a data source is utilized in any study submitted to, or conducted by, a regulatory agency, the underlying data for that research must be publicly available for reanalysis.”

For Napoli, such legislation would be a start to getting at answers about what the consolidation of radio and television stations is doing to the media landscape. It’s an issue that the McGannon Center will continue to examine in the years ahead.

“We need a certain amount of transparency there so that we as citizens can feel confident that the process was carried out in a way that truly serves the public interest,” Napoli said.

“It strikes me as ironic that the federal government treats the First Amendment with impunity all the time,” Levinson, professor and chair of the communication and media studies department, told a group of professors, media scholars and students during his keynote address, “The Flouting of the First Amendment,” at the Sixth Annual Convention of the Media Ecology Association on Thursday, June 23, in Pope Auditorium on Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus.

Last year, according to Levinson, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which regulates television and radio, levied a record $7 million in fines for indecent broadcasts-even though FCC legislation does not define, or even mention, indecency.

Such censorship is in stark contrast to the principles set forth by the Founding Fathers when they drafted the Constitution, Levinson said. Thomas Jefferson called for the press to be protected from regulation so that it could hold the government accountable. As president of the United States, Jefferson believed that a democratic government must safeguard the right of the press to print anything-even falsities.

“This saved the United States,” said Levinson. “It saved freedom of speech and it saved freedom in the world.”

But the “Golden Age of the Press,” as Levinson called it, eventually began to meet serious challenges. When President William McKinley was assassinated in 1901, he said, many began to doubt the merits of a free press because they believed that anarchists were being encouraged by negative editorials about the president. Nearly two decades later, in 1919, the Supreme Court decided in Scheck v. United States that Congress had not only a right, but an obligation to censor speech or writing that presented a “clear and present danger.”

More recently, according to Levinson, former FCC chairman Michael Powell wanted to free network television broadcasts from most regulations, making the networks more like the less regulated cable model. However, Janet Jackson’s infamous “wardrobe malfunction” during the 2004 Super Bowl changed those plans.

“Clearly that incident traumatized and galvanized [Powell]; it led him to crack down on indecency,” said Levinson. “And what begins as a seemingly innocent campaign against indecency always segues into political censorship.”

Levinson challenged young media ecologists to return the media to its “golden age.”

“In 2005, we stand at another critical junction in the history of the United States’ freedom of speech and the press,” he said. “Become politically aware and active. Use the media to stand up for political discourse. If we are not careful, we will not ever again have a media environment like we had in the 19th century.”

The Media Ecology Association is dedicated to promoting the study, research, criticism and application of media ecology in educational, industrial, political, civic, social, cultural and artistic contexts, and the open exchange of ideas, information and research among the association’s members and the larger community. This year’s convention held at Fordham from June 22 to 26, explored the biases of media. Speakers included Eric McLuhan, son of Marshall McLuhan; media expert Douglas Rushkoff; and Andrew Postman of the New York Times.

“The Federal Communication Commission’s decision to relax media ownership regulations is deeply inappropriate,” said Rice, the luncheon speaker at the Donald McGannon Communication Research Center’s two-day conference examining diversity and localism in the media industry held in Pope Auditorium on Dec. 15 and 16. “So, if we accomplish nothing else over the next five years, let us keep the playing field safe” from media giants.

Earlier this year, the FCC approved new media ownership rules raising the national ownership cap from 35 percent to 45 percent, possibly opening the door for a few companies to gain ownership of a majority of the country’s television stations. The new rules also lifted a ban that prevented a company from owning a newspaper and a television or radio station in the same market, except in the smallest markets. Critics of the FCC’s actions fear that local media outlets, and the varying viewpoints they present, will be greatly diminished.

“Diversity and localism are central to the effective functioning of our media system,” said Philip Napoli, director of the McGannon Center. “Access to diverse sources and content is essential to a robust marketplace of ideas. Media content and services that address local interests and concerns are essential to the welfare of local communities.”

Many of the conference’s featured speakers—who are leading academics, activists, advocates, policy makers and media professionals in the field—expressed concerns that the recent policy decisions by the FCC neglect the importance of promoting diversity and localism in the industry.

Ernest Sotomayor, president of the board of directors of Unity Journalists of Color, equated the declining number of local broadcasters to a profound “disconnect to the community,” where media outlets are typically not representative of local communities and interests.

Mara Einstein, assistant professor of media studies at Queens College, said that the economics of television, which is reliant on advertising income, is mostly to blame for the industry’s subpar track record in diversity. Television executives, she said, shift industry resources away from diverse interests and toward a centrist, mainstream position to maximize viewership and earning potential. She further concluded that the industry needs “improved regulation, rather than no regulation.”

Napoli concluded, “Without attention to diversity and localism principles, we risk having a media system in which the range of viewpoints available is narrowed, and in which the opportunities to convey ideas to large audiences are available to only a select few speakers.”

A final report summarizing the research and ideas presented at the conference, as well as recommendations to foster diversity and localism in the media, will be released by the center next spring.

The McGannon Center promotes ethical and socially responsible communication policy and practices through research grants, awards programs, and an annual series of roundtable conversations, colloquia and lectures. Named after the late Donald McGannon, a Fordham alumnus and former general executive and chairman of the board of Westinghouse Broadcasting Company, the center opened in 1986 at Fordham. McGannon’s dedication to ethics and socially responsible communication policy are the foundation of the center’s operations.