The Role of Information Among Policy Elites: A Case Study of the Federal Communications Commission

For the most part, Federal Communication Commission policy has gone unnoticed by the American public for most of its seventy-five year history. That all changed in the spring of 2003. In the fall of 2001, the FCC launched its Third Biennial Review of media ownership rules. By the spring of 2003, the FCC was inundated with electronically filed comments, most of which expressed displeasure at the proposed rule which relaxed ownership rules for both television and radio. The resulting vote of 3-2 in favor of the rule change outraged many Americans. This research is a case study focused on determining the role that information played in decision making among the policy elites of the FCC. Given the limitations of a positivist approach to policy study, this study employs the methodology of Network Text Analysis (NTA) and Social Network Analysis (SNA) to discover knowledge maps. This discovery is intended to reveal what criteria guided the decisions that emerge in the written policy, the five commissioner comments, the Third District Court opinion, the 12 FCC commissioned studies, and the public record. This analysis, which uses SNA, reveals consistent concepts or knowledge maps; primarily reasoned analysis, competition, legal, and broadcast media. Additionally, this research shows that the policy itself was most responsive to ecomments filed by corporations and interest groups - not individual citizens. The research shows that the media had little influence in this policy primarily because they reported on the policy during the week that the policy was released