Media workers' unions joined members of Congress and other groups in calling for full public hearings if the Federal Communications Commission revisits its new rules on media ownership.

Last year, the FCC revised regulations governing cross media ownership in local markets and national media market shares. The new regulations would have allowed media giants to own more newspapers, television and radio stations in the same market, among other changes. The changes had been sought by such major media companies as Gannett, the Tribune Co., and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.

On June 24, the Philadelphia-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in a 2 to 1 decision ordered the FCC to reconsider its new rules.

The court majority said the FCC had fallen "short of its obligation to justify its decisions to retain, repeal, or modify its media ownership regulations with reasoned analysis."

The court criticized as "not rational" the FCC's reliance on a "diversity index," which was a formula the agency developed to set values on the impact on consumers of various media.

"A diversity index that requires us to accept that a community college television station makes a greater contribution to viewpoint diversity than a conglomerate that includes the third-largest newspaper in America also requires us to abandon both logic and reality," the court said.

The court's ruling does not affect the FCC's change in the maximum percentage of the national television audience reached by any single company. The FCC had increased the maximum to 45 percent from its former level of 35 percent. In January, Congress split the difference and set the level at 39 percent.

The lawsuit against the FCC's deregulation was filed by a diverse coalition of groups led by the Prometheus Radio Project – a Philadelphia community radio organization – and the Media Access Project.

The Republican majority on the five-member commission had issued the new rules despite a storm of more than 2 million postcards, letters, and e-mails from citizens objecting to the changes.

Unions and other groups charged that relaxing the rules would lead to a greater concentration of media ownership and threaten the nation's democracy by decreasing the diversity of opinion expressed through the media.

John Connolly, president of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, said "the public suffers, democracy suffers, and workers suffer" as media ownership becomes concentrated in fewer and fewer companies.

Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein, the Democrats on the commission who voted against the new rules, criticized FCC Chairman Michael K. Powell for holding only a single public hearing on the proposed regulations. Meanwhile, according to the Center for Public Integrity, FCC commissioners met more than 70 times with telecommunications and broadcast officials and industry lobbyists before issuing the rules.

After the court's decision, Copps and Adelstein called for a new series of FCC hearings across the country to gain a better understanding of the impact of media concentration on communities. The FCC also has the option of appealing the ruling to the Supreme Court.

Free Press, a non-profit organization, launched a petition campaign to demand that the FCC schedule hearings in every state. The group's website is at http://www.freepress.net.

For more information on the current concentration of media ownership, visit the Columbia Journalism Review's website at http://www.cjr.org/tools/owners.