In May 2003, FMC released the results of a content analysis of nearly 10,000 comments available for public review in the Federal Communications Commission Broadcast Ownership rulemaking (Docket 02-277).

Citizen response to these proposed rule changes was overwhelmingly negative. As of May 8, 2003, 96.8 percent of citizens filing comments opposed changing existing media ownership rules that would pave the way for further consolidation.

Q: How did you review the comments?

A: The FCC has created an Electronic Comment Filing System (EFCS) on their website where citizens, organizations and corporations are able to submit comments electronically, either as an email or a PDF. The comments are then made instantly available for public review at http://gullfoss2.fcc.gov/prod/ecfs/comsrch_v2.cgi.

Q: How many comments were filed on this proceeding?

A: This is a difficult number to pin down, but here is our approximation. As of May 8, 2003 there were 5,500 comments available for review on the FCC’s website. However, this number is deceiving as there were about 4,500 comments filed within the DC portion of the docket that were collections of letters that the FCC received via postal mail and email and scanned to create multi-page PDFs. Therefore there were many entries in the DC docket that said “104 citizen letters” or “456 citizen letters”. We went through all of these as well and all 4,500 citizen comments were against the rule changes.

In addition, the FCC has a CD ROM with 12,011 other comments received via postal mail, email or fax that have been scanned but not posted on the website. We have a copy of this CD ROM but have not had the time or volunteer resources to review it.

Finally, the FCC’s Resource Center has indicated that there are more comments that have arrived via postal mail, email or fax that have yet to be scanned or processed.

Q: What did the comments say?

A: For the purposes of our project, we analyzed what was available to us via the FCC’s website in our given time period. The grand total of comments reviewed was 9,360. The summary of this review is:

Visit this page to see details about which organizations, corporations and individuals filed comments either FOR or AGAINST the proposed rule changes.