News Clips

“It’s hard to see the FCC approving this deal, given the evidence against it and given that key members of Congress have voiced their concern,” Yosef Getachew, Media & Democracy program director at the advocacy group Common Cause, said in an interview. Common Cause has asked the FCC to deny the merger.

“Oregon generally embraces a positive voting environment,” said Kate Titus, executive director of Common Cause Oregon. “All of these little changes around the edges help.” Titus said the state could revisit further expanding its automatic voter registration system to allow registration to occur through other state agencies in the coming years.

Common Cause, news and broadcast unions and UCC Media Justice, Which petitioned the FCC to deny the Standard General-Tegna merger, told the FCC Tuesday (Aug. 2)  just what it thought of the those merging parties' defense of the deal, including that the petitioners had no legal right to challenge it. In their comments, the groups minced no words. "The Applicants and their anonymous funders located in the Cayman and British Virgin Islands have proposed a complex series of transactions designed to weaken local journalism and jack up cable subscriber fees," they said. "Grant of their pending applications will do nothing to create a more accurate, diverse or independent media." 

Common Cause, joined by the NewsGuild-CWA union and Public Knowledge, have filed a formal motion for both additional documents that the FCC and the public can peruse and an extension of time to weigh in. Currently, the FCC has set a May 23 deadline for those wishing to formally oppose the deal. "Congress and the Biden Administration extended billions of dollars in taxpayer money last year to ensure the survival of local journalism during the COVID-19 pandemic," the motion says, adding: "Contrast that with the proposed transaction, apparently financed on the back of local journalism job cuts and centralized news operations."

Former acting FCC chairman and Common Cause special adviser Michael Copps was on the same page when it came to Sohn being a key piece in the broadband connectivity puzzle. “[N]one of the White House’s initiatives around halting ongoing consolidation in the broadband sector, restoring a free and open internet, and ensuring marginalized communities have equitable access to communications services can be fully achieved if the FCC remains deadlocked,” he said in a statement following the event. “Congress must take action now to ensure Ms. Sohn receives a vote,” Copps said.  Copps said those gatekeepers were conducting a “sleazy” campaign to undermine Sohn because they knew that “a functional FCC would hold them accountable and prevent them from engaging in anticompetitive and discriminatory practices that undermine our ability to get online.”

“It was a long and winding road for Jessica Rosenworcel, but she stayed the course and good sense has now finally prevailed with today’s Senate vote," said Common Cause special advisor Michael Copps, himself a former acting FCC chairman and Rosenworcel's former boss when she was on his FCC staff. "Jessica faces a daunting agenda as chair but she has the experience and dedication to make historic progress leading the FCC. Past commission mistakes must be corrected and new trails blazed to provide our country with the communications ecosystem our democracy so clearly must have." Copps also put in a plug for confirming a third Democrat to the commission so Rosenworcel has a majority. "Needed now is a fifth commissioner, so that a full FCC can get on with its important mandate of protecting the public interest.”