Following a firestorm of media attention regarding the FCC’s efforts to examine newsroom decision making as part of a Critical Information Needs (CIN) Study, the FCC had announced a week ago that it would modify the study to eliminate the questions directed at media entities regarding their newsroom decisions.
That announcement, however, did not calm the furor, with calls from Congress for hearings and legislation to prevent the FCC from proceeding with the study. Late today, the FCC sought to put an end to this certainly unwelcome attention. It released a terse statement, the entirety of which is: “The FCC will not move forward with the Critical Information Needs study. The Commission will reassess the best way to fulfil [sic] its obligation to Congress to identify barriers to entry into the communications marketplace faced by entrepreneurs and other small businesses.”
Whatever else it may represent, this past week’s activities demonstrate the challenges for a government agency forced to operate on “Internet Time” and facing a continuous news cycle. In prior eras, FCC dramas like this would have played out over months or years. In this case, once it became clear that the study was turning into political fodder, the FCC moved with surprising speed to back away from it, and then abandon it entirely, rather than continue to be the subject of news reports and late night monologues. The typo in today’s one sentence announcement (which was subsequently fixed in later versions) presumably indicates the haste with which it was issued, likely in an effort to put the issue to bed before the weekend and avoid a fresh round of media commentary regarding the Study next week.
While the speed with which the FCC moved is impressive, perhaps the most interesting aspect of this week’s events is that, without even conducting the study, the FCC learned a lot about how newsrooms operate, and probably wishes it hadn’t.