Marty Kaplan
When the Third Circuit of the US Court of Appeals threw out the FCC's revision of the rules governing media ownership, it said that the FCC needed way better empirical evidence to base its ownership formulas on. The FCC's own studies were widely criticized as inadequate, and media watchers have been waiting to see what kind of research the new Commission's new chairman, Kevin Martin, would order up.

Now we know.

Marty Kaplan
When a city decides what to do with its public spaces, it's better to entertain lots of ideas -- to play with designs, to encourage competition, to let a thousand potential flowers bloom -- than to close down the process and outsource imagination to developers and bureaucrats. That's the idea behind the Lear Center's
Grand Intervention project, an attempt to bring openness and a diversity of vision to the planning process for a new 16-acre park in the heart of downtown Los Angeles.

The developer of the park, the Related Cos, said nothing doing to the idea of a design competition. But a short walk away from the site of the future Grand Avenue civic park, there's an example of how competition can do a world of good. When the state of California announced its intention to turn 32 acres of land near Los Angeles's Chinatown, known as the Cornfield, into a park, they also announced a design competition which drew an amazing array of proposals.

Marty Kaplan
A new study by the Radio and Television News Directors Foundation says that most Americans -- 65 percent of them -- choose local television news as their top source of news and information. That's more than twice as many people who said that local newspapers (28 percent) or network news (28 percent) were their main sources of news, and it's nearly six times more than the number of people relying primarily on the internet (11.2 percent).

The question is, what do the majority of Americans learn about politics, government and public affairs when they turn to local television news?