New Survey Finds Americans Rely On Newspapers Much More Than Other Media For Local News And Information: FCC Media Ownership Rules Based On Flawed Data

This paper reports the results of a new national survey designed to find out how people actually use local media. Based on this more detailed local media usage data, we find that newspapers are more than twice as important a source of local news than the FCC found, and that radio and the Internet are less than a third as important as the weight the Commission accorded them. Therefore, the Commission’s local media ownership rules are based on faulty information about local media usage.