On December 13, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies sent a letter to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski urging the FCC to develop a robust record on minority and female broadcast media ownership before it considers relaxing rules intended to promote media ownership diversity. The Joint center notes the recent release of the FCC’s broadcast ownership report, but said the report does not contain reliable data dispositive of either how relaxing the FCC’s media ownership rules will favor minority and female broadcast ownership or whether relaxing the rules would not buttress existing market entry barriers.

See the article at the Benton Foundation.

The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies submitted a response to the Federal Communications Commission regarding MB Docket No. 07-294, Promoting Diversification of Ownership in the Broadcasting Services. In this letter, Joint Center President and CEO Ralph B. Everett, along with Vice President and Media and Technology Institute Director Dr. John Horrigan, discusses the FCC's recent Commercial Broadband Station Ownership report and subsequent plans to relax rules intended to protect diversity in media ownership. Namely, the Joint Center argues that there is not enough data on minority and female media ownership to justify changes in ownership rules at this time.

To read the letter in its entirety, click the icon below.

"...In the final week of the campaign, both Fox News and MSNBC became even more extreme in how they differed from the rest of the press in coverage of the two candidates, the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism reported on Monday.

"On Fox News, the amount of negative coverage of [President] Obama increased -- from 47% in the first four weeks of October to 56% the final week. Meanwhile, positive discussion of [Mitt] Romney grew, from 34% of segments to 42%. On MSNBC, the positive coverage of Obama increased from 33% during most of October to 51% during the last week, while Romney's negative coverage increased from 57% to 68%."

The Center also said, "In the final week of the 2012 presidential campaign, Barack Obama enjoyed his most positive run of news coverage in months . . . Only during the week of his nominating convention was the treatment in the press more favorable."

A series of screening questions in its poll of likely voters led the venerable Gallup polling organization to underestimate the turnout of blacks and Hispanics and thus miss President Obama's impending election victory this month, David Bositis, a senior research associate and pollster at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, said on Saturday.

"They ask you how interested you are in the election, if you know where your polling place is, whether you've voted there, how often you vote, whether you'll vote on election day, how sure are you to vote, and whether you voted in 2008," Bositis told Journal-isms in a follow-up email on Monday.

Read more at The Root.

Joint Center President and CEO Ralph Everett submitted a letter to the Commission on Presidential Debates to express his concern about the lack of journalists of color serving as moderators for the 2012 presidential debates.

"I write to express the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies' deep concern that the Commission on Presidential Debates has not selected any journalists of color to moderate any of the presidential debates being broadcast this election season," he writes. "We respectfully ask the Commission to reconsider its approach for selecting moderators."

He also writes, "We also ask that the Commission take measures to remedy this oversight by adding more debates to the calendar. As such, we ask it to reconsider its decision to deny Univision’s request for a forum to be hosted by two of the nation’s most respected journalists--Jorge and Maria Elena. We further ask the Commission to pursue similar initiatives with other media outlets boasting large audiences of African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans, Native Americans, and other people of color."

To read the full letter, click the download icon below.

In advance of the November election, Univision Communications and a civil rights group stepped up a campaign to create an additional forum for presidential candidates to address issues important to Latinos and African Americans — and to get a person of color into the presidential debate schedule.

This week, the Commission on Presidential Debates selected Jim Lehrer of PBS News Hour, Bob Schieffer of CBS News, Candy Crowley of CNN and Martha Raddatz of ABC News as moderators for this fall's debates among candidates for president and vice president.

"It has long been the practice of the television industry to avoid putting people of color in front of the camera for fear of running afoul of ... mass market concerns," Ralph B. Everett, chief executive of the civil rights group Joint Center for Political and Economic Studios, wrote in a letter Thursday to Janet H. Brown, executive director on the Commission on Presidential Debates.

Read more at the Los Angeles Times.

The Federal Communications Commission held a nearly three hour-long public hearing at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication to discuss recent findings on the needs of local coverage in journalism.

The hearing consisted of three panels of media experts that focused on different topics: broadband access, broadcasting rights and new digital media.  The topics related to the recent FCC report, “The Information Needs of Communities: The changing media landscape in a broadband age.”

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Nicol Turner-Lee, vice president and director at the Media and Technology Institute, Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, addressed the needs of impoverished citizens.

“More than 40 percent of African Americans are going to smart phones but news consumption is severely limited,” Turner-Lee said.

Read more at Arizona State University's State Press.

Investigative journalism is on life support, real news is increasingly replaced with fluff and democracy is suffering because of it, a Federal Communications Commission member said Monday.

“Hundreds of newsrooms have been shuttered, thousands of reporters walk the streets in search of a job rather than walk the beat in search of a story,” Michael Copps said at a public hearing on the FCC’s report on media in the digital age.

His comments preceded three panels discussing the report’s recommendations at a session hosted by Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

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Nicol Turner-Lee, vice president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies and director of its Media and Technology Institute, said the lack of universal access to broadband is leaving behind millions in under-served groups, particularly residents of rural areas, African-Americans and those with less than a high school education.

“That’s a problem if we are migrating our media to online,” she said.

This article was previously available at MSNBC.

As part of its effort to promote the expansion of broadband services to all Americans, Time Warner Cable has pledged to carry $1 million worth of Public Service Announcements (PSAs) for the Broadband Opportunity Coalition (BBOC). The PSA series emphasizes the importance of broadband Internet adoption for economic success in the 21st Century economy, particularly for struggling communities.

Time Warner Cable will carry the PSAs in English, Spanish and five other languages during a two-year period beginning in 2012.

Read more at benzinga.com.

This article was previousuly available at MarketWatch and streetinsider.com.