By Patrick Murck
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Chairman Martin gets the three votes he needed to pass the highly controversial media ownership rules loosening the restriction on newspaper-television cross ownership. The vote fell along party lines as the two democratic commissioners, unsurprisingly, voted against loosening the restrictions.

Now all eyes turn to Congress to see if they will follow through on their threat to pass a bill explicitly overturning the Commission’s action today. 

Meanwhile, the Chairman’s proposals concerning further examination of media ownership issues – including possible initiatives looking to promote increases in broadcast ownership by women and people of color – were adopted by the Commission, although not without some grumbling by the Democratic Commissioners (Copps and Adelstein) about how those proposals might be too little too late. 

The same happened with Martin’s localism order: it was unanimously adopted, but the Democrats would plainly have preferred stronger, and earlier, measures.  From the discussion at the open meeting, it appears that the localism order will include a range of proposals which would impose substantial new burdens on all full-service broadcasters, radio and TV alike.  Among the proposals on the table are the mandatory formation of “representative” community advisory groups, the imposition of processing guidelines by which renewal applications would be assessed based on the nature and amount of the applicant’s locally-oriented programming, and the return of some form of community ascertainment and program logging.