Street Crime at 5:00 - Contributing to Racism?

Jerry Kang argued in the Harvard Law Review this spring, is one of the engines driving lingering racism in the United States. So counterproductive is local broadcast news, he says, that it is time the FCC stopped using the number of hours a station devotes to local news as evidence of the station's contribution to the ''public interest," which has traditionally been a requirement for a broadcast license. (The FCC does not have quotas on how much news must be produced. But Kang points out that the FCC defended its controversial decision in 2003 to loosen ownership rules governing who can own stations on the grounds that the new arrangements would lead to more hours of local news programming.)