Viewpoint Diversity and Media Ownership‪.‬

I. INTRODUCTION The premise of Professors Daniel Ho and Kevin Quinn's "Viewpoint Diversity and Media Consolidation: An Empirical Study" is a repeated assertion. They believe that the claim that media consolidation reduces viewpoint diversity (the "convergence hypothesis") "forms the empirical bedrock" of federal regulation for restricting media consolidation (1) (presumably beyond what would be independently required by antitrust law). The FCC's ownership rules, they say, "[a]t heart.., rest on ... the 'convergence' assumption." (2) Given this premise, they apply innovative statistical techniques to a sample of five cases to show that mergers do not correlate with reductions of viewpoint diversity. (3) On this basis of having "challenge[d] long-held assumptions about viewpoint diversity," (4) they conclude that their findings justify cautious relaxation of existing ownership restrictions. (5) Specifically, Ho and Quinn use statistical techniques to categorize editorial positions on Supreme Court opinions as liberal or conservative. (6) They then analyze editorial positions about these Court decisions taken by papers before and after five mergers--for example, the merger of New York Times and the Boston Globe--and find no systematic reduction of viewpoint diversity.