FCC Won't Ask Journalists To Explain Themselves After All

It may not be in full retreat, but the Federal Communications Commission certainly seemed to be in a major strategic withdrawal from a plan that has caused a political firestorm: a study that would have asked journalists and media owners how they decide what is and isn't news.

Conservative lawmakers, talk-show hosts and bloggers had attacked the study as a threat to freedom-of-the-press rights in the First Amendment. That the FCC was starting small, with a pilot project in Columbia, S.C., hardly mattered.

Opponents raised the specter of Big Brother...