Freeze point: media/docs/research-inquiry.md as committed at the start of Phase 0 (2026-08-03). Every deviation from protocol-specified method is logged here with a reason and its effect on findings. Per M6, this log is part of the record, not an appendix to it.
| # | Date | Deviation | Reason | Effect on findings |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2026-08-03 | Anchor rows 5 (civic-harms literature independence audit), 8 (broadcast ownership cap/Nexstar-Tegna), 12 (media trust survey), 13 (philanthropy-vs-revenue ratio) not attempted | Phase 0 time budget went to the seven ★ rows plus two bonus non-starred rows (6, 7) closely coupled to the starred C-18/Australia precedents; these four rows are not load-bearing for the go/no-go decision | Rows left blank, not guessed. Row 5 in particular is queued as a priority for full execution — see phase0-findings §8 re-ranking, since it is one of the two named kill-condition tests in the protocol's own execution notes and was not resolved either way |
| 2 | 2026-08-03 | Anchor verification for all seven rows delegated to five parallel subagents; results QA-reviewed by the primary session before entry | Search fan-out is parallelisable across independent anchor clusters; the two-source and root-trace rules were carried into each brief verbatim | Three of the most surprising/load-bearing claims (CPB's dissolution, the Rescissions Act's exact figures, and Google+Meta's digital-ad share falling below 50%) were independently re-verified by the primary session via direct search before being written into the permanent record, per the project's QA-before-committing discipline. No agent figure was entered without at least this spot-check tier of verification; none of the three re-checks contradicted the subagent's report |
| 3 | 2026-08-03 | Census CBP national bulk files (cbp{yy}us.zip) 404 for pre-2014 vintages at the modern URL path (www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp/datasets/{year}/) though the same pattern works for 2021+ |
Pre-2014 CBP files use a different naming/location convention not resolved within Phase 0's time budget | Blocks extending the newspaper-employment baseline back to the pre-2008/mid-2000s peak using CBP as a Census-native source. Logged in media/baseline/incompatibility-log.md #2 |
| 4 | 2026-08-03 | BLS QCEW's open CSV-slice API (data.bls.gov/cew/data/api/{year}/a/industry/{naics}.csv) returns 404 for years before 2014 for NAICS 511110, despite QCEW's underlying series extending to 1990 |
The open API's coverage window is narrower than the full QCEW historical series; reaching the 1990s-2000s data would require a different QCEW access route (singlefile/historical annual-averages files) not attempted in Phase 0 | The committed baseline pipeline covers 2014-2025 only. The mid-2000s peak figures cited in anchors 1 and 3 rest on Pew/NAA secondary literature, not a direct admin-data pull — stated explicitly in phase0-findings §7 rather than presented as pipeline-verified. Logged in media/baseline/incompatibility-log.md #3 |
| 5 | 2026-08-03 | Several source URLs returned fetch errors during subagent research: congress.gov (403 on CRS Legal Sidebar LSB11224 and CRS Report R48545), cpb.org (DNS resolution failures throughout), SAGE journals (403 on the Neff & Pickard paper itself), Brevini's Media International Australia article (403) | Paywalls and bot-blocking on primary-source sites; not every primary document was reachable within session tooling | These claims rest on secondary citation (press coverage quoting CPB, search-snippet-level access to the CRS reports, secondary summaries of the paywalled academic articles) rather than direct primary-text confirmation. Flagged per-claim in phase0-findings and in each subagent's caveats section; none of the flagged claims were load-bearing for the GO verdict, but full execution should retry primary access (e.g., via institutional access or a different fetch path) before the whitepaper cites them |
| 6 | 2026-08-03 | The two anchor-table rows not originally starred (6, 7 — Canada and Australia bargaining codes) were verified together in Phase 0 anyway, beyond the minimum ★-row scope | Both are tightly coupled precedents for the same §6/§9 workstream question (does platform-publisher bargaining actually fund local news), and verifying them together was more efficient than splitting across sessions | Produced the report's strongest bonus finding — see phase0-findings §5 — ahead of full §6/§9 execution, at the cost of not spending that time on rows 5/8/12/13 instead (see deviation #1) |
| 7 | 2026-08-03 | Post-Phase-0, executed anchor row 5 (civic-harms literature audit) and a §3 bias-sizing pass, picking up the two items ranked highest in phase0-findings §8, rather than working strictly workstream-by-workstream in protocol order | §4's kill-condition test was the single highest-priority open item per the protocol's own execution notes; §3's bias-sizing was the highest-value original work per the re-ranking | See ws03-04-findings.md. Row 5 filled in the anchor table; rows 8, 12, 13 remain blank |
| 8 | 2026-08-03 | §3 pass 2's Bias 2 (ghost papers) sizing did not reach a fresh bounded case study — it relied on an existing 2018-vintage national estimate (UNC/Abernathy, 1,000-1,500 ghost papers) and named examples, rather than a same-state audit paired with Bias 1's Mississippi check | Time budget; a fresh staffing audit of specific Mississippi "served" counties' papers was not completed within the session | Bias 1 (TV/radio exclusion) has a clean, verified, bounded result (5 of 5 MS zero-outlet counties fall in a TV DMA); Bias 2 rests on a dated literature estimate. The two biases cannot yet be netted against each other for one state — queued for the next pass, per ws03-04-findings |
| 9 | 2026-08-03 | Executed §5 (ownership), §2/§8 (public spending/philanthropy), §9 (fault-lines/trust), §10 (precedents/steelman) as a single parallel batch, closing out all remaining anchor rows (8, 12, 13) | These were the remaining workstreams needed before §11's scorecard could be built on a complete evidence base, per the user's request to complete full execution | See ws05-findings, ws02-08-findings, ws09-findings, ws10-findings. All 13 anchor rows now resolved |
| 10 | 2026-08-03 | Several primary sources in this batch were unreachable: Kielbowicz's PRC postal-history paper, a comparative-Nordic-media-systems PDF, and the Cogitatio full-text PDF all failed to extract; parliament.uk and cpb.org returned 403/DNS errors | PDF encoding issues and bot-blocking, consistent with earlier deviations (#5) | Claims resting on these rest on secondary/abstract-level citation, flagged inline in ws10-findings and ws05-findings. None were load-bearing for a GO/NO-GO call at this stage — full execution's whitepaper stage should retry primary access |
| 11 | 2026-08-03 | The §5 broadcast-ownership finding (FCC vote scheduled Aug 6 2026) is time-sensitive to the exact date of this research (Aug 3 2026) | The FCC's own published schedule, independently re-verified | Anchor row 8 and ws05-findings are accurate as of Aug 3 2026 but should be re-checked against the actual Aug 6 vote outcome before any whitepaper publication — flagged explicitly rather than presented as settled |
| 12 | 2026-08-04 | Independent blind re-score executed and reconciled (ws11-rescore-log.md): 24 cells materially reconciled — the durability axis was still leaking design labels after the first red team explicitly banned that; five below-neutral-without-evidence violations; comparator cells re-grounded on verified trajectory evidence | M6's standing second-scorer requirement; blinding procedural, disclosed. One scorer input (the CA Google deal) was already stale against the same-day moving-targets correction — the moving-target problem operating inside the re-score itself, disclosed | 4b confirmed as most-consistent performer (strengthened); the bargaining code reclassified from "stable bottom" to affirmatively multi-axis-refuted; site page, sidebar, and report PDF updated |
| 13 | 2026-08-06 | Late DOJ Google ad-tech remedy status pass started without remedy-specific M3 conditions | The prior scorecard openly recorded this as an unexecuted workstream | §13 is limited to status and the missing outcome boundary; it does not rescore or update the active site |
| 14 | 2026-08-06 | A prospective demand-side voucher pass was completed after the scorecard | The new randomized evidence tests subscription use but not the separate outlet-allocation claim; a late score change would bypass the required re-score | §14 corrects the evidence basis for architecture #5 and retains allocation as indeterminate pending payment/coverage data |
| 15 | 2026-08-06 | A current county-level capacity proxy was located after the ghost-paper audit limitation record | LJI measures modelled county capacity and article output, not outlet staffing or ghost-masthead status | §15 adds a current screening tool but preserves the outlet-level ghost-paper count and bias-netting result as indeterminate |
| 16 | 2026-08-06 | The intended same-state ghost-paper audit did not produce a count | Current web results included a same-named Texas newspaper and conflicting sources for the Virginia pilot; neither supports assigning a current staff count | §16 records the discrepancy and a reproducible future audit design; the whitepaper's 2018-only limitation remains unchanged |
| 17 | 2026-08-10 | Verification Protocol Phase 1 (fact-check) run against the whole filing by an independent session — 556 claims extracted across both public pages and all 18 research documents, every one adjudicated against primary sources fetched in that pass | The protocol's house-wide vulnerability finding: no filing had been checked against primary law, and every legal claim here had been verified at the secondary tier | 450 CONFIRMED, 27 CORRECTED, 37 OVERSTATED, 35 UNVERIFIABLE, 7 STALE. Load-bearing corrections: Moody's platform-curation reasoning commanded five justices, not six; CPB's forward funding came from the 1975 and 1978 financing acts, not the 1967 Act; Canada's "-64% national" figure is not in the cited MEO report; Australia's ~90% figure is cited to a paper that does not exist (Brevini is sole-authored, in Javnost, not Media International Australia); the desert counts are 212/1,525, not 213/1,524; the Nordic steelman's viewpoint-capture claim is not in the peer-reviewed paper cited for it; the published scorecard omitted the M7 cash comparator and the five weightings it advertises are in no committed file. Full ledger in media/research/verification-log.md. [Same-day follow-up: the first commit landed these corrections on the whitepaper and the sources digest but not on the generated sibling pages, leaving the withdrawn "-64% national" and "6-justice majority" claims live in four places — one under a "Confirmed" stamp. Propagated, along with two self-corrections to the log (the Part III–A/III–B attribution, and the deviations/commit/branch counts). See verification-log.md §0.] |
| 18 | 2026-08-10 | Verification Protocol Phase 2 (steelman) run against the filing's three stated conclusions by a session independent of the filing, its red team, its blind re-score and its Phase 1 fact-check. Tilt and targets derived from the filing's own hypothesis set and conclusions and committed before any opposing evidence was fetched | S1–S5. The filing's declared steelman (the Nordic case, §10) was built honestly but ran on the direction the filing already knew it leaned; the directions it leans hardest — against the measurement, and against the instrument it ranks last — had never been steelmanned | One target wins, two partially survive. B (bargaining code) — steelman wins: three of row 2's four 1-scores rest on a figure from a nonexistent paper drawn from deal values the Australian Treasury states it could not obtain, and are contradicted by that Treasury's own review; Canada's SOR/2023-276 puts a mandatory per-FTE-journalist distribution formula with ≤30%/≤7% incumbent caps into law, and Australia doubled its regional/small-publisher loading on this filing's own filing date. "The one architecture the record actively refutes" withdrawn. A (desert count) — partially survives: the single-root verdict stands; "we sized one of them directly" does not, because every US county sits in a DMA. C (the winner) — partially survives: 4b leads under every single-cell reading, but the load-bearing cell is C (inherited from the dissolved CPB), not B, and the negative claim capping B is false — Germany's Rundfunkbeitrag has a completed, court-enforced hostile-majority test, on a constitutional footing the US lacks. Full account in media/research/steelman-log.md; three primary sources committed under method/sources/ |