It’s not often that the FCC asks us how to do its job. But Sept. 6 is the deadline for the public to respond to a pretty exciting question: “Should we set aside channels for community radio in big and medium-sized cities?”

You don’t hear questions like that every day. In fact, media activists fought for more than a decade to put this idea on the table.

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Last Thursday five AT&T employees and twelve of its outside attorneys, from six different firms, got on a conference call with thirty-two officials from the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Justice. All told there were close to 50 people participating in the meeting.

Two recent reports paint a rosy picture of local TV news. Stations are launching new programs, jobs are coming back and revenues are up. Bolstering these reports are stats from the Radio Television Digital News Association, which called 2010 a record year for local news.

I just wish that were the whole picture. However, neither of these reports fully grapples with the impact covert consolidation — in which a station signs away control of its newsroom to a competitor — is having on the media ecosystem.