Free Press today released Out of the Picture 2007, an update of the group's Out of the Picture study completed last year that assessed female and minority ownership of commercial broadcast TV stations. The new data, Free Press says, suggests that the future of minority TV station ownership is in jeopardy.

"Minority television ownership is in such a precarious state that the loss of a single minority-owned company results in a disastrous decline," said S. Derek Turner, research director of Free Press and lead author of Out of the Picture 2007. "Permitting any more consolidation will only further diminish the number of minority-owned stations."

Among the new findings:

• From October 2006 to October 2007, the number of minority-owned commercial TV stations decreased by 8.5 percent.
  
  
• African-American TV station ownership dropped by 60 percent—as the total number of black-owned TV stations fell from 19 to 8 in just a single year.
  
  
• People of color now own just five of the 845 "big four" network-affiliated stations—a 62 percent decline from October 2006.

Much of the decline, it said, can be attributed to the bankruptcy and subsequent change in ownership of a single company—Granite Broadcasting, formerly the country's largest minority-owned broadcast television company.

Free Press went on to blast the FCC, saying that “despite the worsening crisis of minority ownership, the FCC has yet to even conduct an accurate count of minority-owned stations. The most recent FCC study on this issue failed to identify 69 percent of minority TV station owners and 75 percent of female owners.”

Out of the Picture 2007 also claims that minority-owned stations are particularly vulnerable to the increased consolidation likely to result from FCC Chairman Kevin Martin's recent proposal to eliminate the longstanding "newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership" ban.

If Martin were to remove the prohibition in the top 20 markets and only let newspapers combine with broadcast stations outside of the four top-rated channels, “minority ownership would suffer serious negative consequences. Nearly half of the stations currently owned by people of color are in the top 20 markets, and none of these are among the top four stations,” Free Press said.

To read the full report, click here.