FOTP 2013 Full Report

accreditation were briefly held in custody. In another case in February, filmmaker Josh Fox wasarrested on Capitol Hill for covering a congressional subcommittee hearing withoutaccreditation. The hearing was open to the public, and congressional aides were able to recordimages without repercussions.Media coverage of political affairs is aggressive and increasingly partisan. The pressitself is frequently a source of contention, with conservatives and liberals alike accusing themedia of bias. The appearance of enhanced polarization is driven to some degree by the growinginfluence of all-news cable television channels and blogs, many of which are aggressivelypartisan. The popularity of talk-radio shows, whose hosts are primarily conservative, has alsoplayed an important role in media polarization. Nonetheless, most U.S. newspapers make aserious effort to keep a wall of separation between news reporting, commentary, and editorials.The trend toward fewer family-owned newspapers and more newspapers under corporate controlhas contributed to a less partisan, if blander, editorial tone. In December 2012, a noteworthycontroversy emerged after a newspaper in suburban New York published the names andaddresses of area residents who held permits to own handguns. The paper was subsequentlyinundated by protests and complaints, including some threats of violence. In recent years, therehave been few physical attacks on reporters in reprisal for their work, although journalistscovering the Occupy protests were repeatedly subject to arrest and detention in 2011 and early2012.Media in the United States are overwhelmingly under private ownership. Nevertheless,National Public Radio (NPR) and television’s Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which arefunded by a combination of government allocations and private contributions, enjoy substantialaudiences. Public broadcasting is periodically criticized by conservative Republican Partylegislators for an alleged liberal bias, and there have been efforts to eliminate or greatly reducegovernment funding for NPR and PBS. Meanwhile, Qatar’s internationally popular satellitetelevision network Al-Jazeera English (AJE), which previously had difficulty breaking into theU.S. market due to a political stigma dating to the Bush administration, has found a growingnumber of cable television companies willing to offer the channel to U.S. viewers.Media ownership concentration is an ongoing concern in the United States. The problemhas intensified in recent years following the purchase of media entities by large corporations withno previous experience in journalism. In 2011, the FCC approved the acquisition of NBCUniversal, including the NBC television network, by Comcast, a major cable provider. Amongthe terms of approval, the FCC stipulated that Comcast’s cable offerings could not favor contentgenerated by its own media entities over that produced by other companies. The FCC regularlyconsiders policies that would ease restrictions on a single corporation’s ownership of bothtelevision stations and newspapers in a single local market, and in recent years the trend in FCCrulings has been toward a loosening of such restrictions.Traditional media, including print and broadcast outlets, have suffered financially fromthe increasing popularity of the internet as a news source. The newspaper industry in the UnitedStates is undergoing a period of profound decline and readjustment. There are an estimated 1,400daily newspapers geared primarily toward local readerships, but even the largest and mostprestigious papers have faced falling circulations and advertising revenues and been forced to cutstaff over the past decade. A few newspapers have dropped print editions entirely, and otherspublish only a few times a week, concentrating their resources on online editions. Financialweakness has particularly affected outlets’ ability to conduct investigative reporting and coverforeign news. More recently, coverage of local news by television stations in some medium-400