Professors at Penn State (my alma mater) have just released a new study showing that the FCC's public hearings on media ownership over the last two years were pretty much just a dog and pony show to make it look like they were listening to the public.

Jonathan Obar and Amit Schejter at Penn State's Institute for Information Policy published this report and point out that "the FCC's actions suggest that they had little interest in what the public had to say. This indifference towards the public's input was made evident not only in the way the events were run, but also by the fact that references to public opinion were almost non-existent in the documentation of the final decision."

Common Cause published a white paper in December co-authored by Gregory Rose and Harold Feld that made recommendations about how to improve processes at the FCC so that the public would actually be heard. This new report by Obar and Schejter is complimentary to our report.

You can read more about the Penn State Report at Free Press's blog.