Speaking before the Newspaper Association of America's annual convention, Federal Communications Commission Chair Kevin Martin said that the "public has not been convinced of the need" for lifting the FCC's ban on TV/newspaper cross-ownership.

"The public needs to understand both the value that your papers offer and the struggles you face in continuing to provide news in an increasingly competitive media market," he told the Association's meeting in Chicago on Tuesday April 4th. "Indeed, the failure of the Commission to modify our rules is not our fault alone."

Martin strongly supports removing the FCC prohibition on television stations owning newspapers, which has been in place since 1975. At present, TV stations can only own newspapers if the FCC waives the rule.

In 2003 the Commission eliminated the ban as part of a suite of decisions relaxing media ownership limits. But in 2004 a federal court set aside the rulings, arguing that the research that supported them had been flawed.

At the gathering, Martin also said that the Commission needs to issue a new Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on media ownership questions. He told the newspaper owners that the FCC must evaluate "whether it makes sense to address all of the rules together or if it makes more sense to address issues separately."

The question of how to package the issues for public review is already highly politicized.

Supporters of relaxing media ownership rules say that former FCC Chair Michael Powell's biggest mistake was lumping all media ownership issues into one big docket for public comment.

Powell's move "was correct in theory, and it was a disaster in application or practice," media analyst Adam Thierer told LL-FCC in an interview on March 31st. "The reality was that that gave the opponents of liberalization a big, juicy target to go after in the courts and man did they hit a bulls eye when they went after it."

But opponents of eliminating the cross-ownership ban say that putting all the issues into one policy basket makes philosophical sense.

"This proceeding is about the overall confidence of the public that a single or a handful of entities will not control what the vast majority of Americans read and listen to and watch," explained Pete triDish of the Prometheus Project, one of the groups that sued the FCC over its media ownership decisions. "In an age of consolidated media and corporations, it makes sense that we look at it all as one problem."

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