Still flush with good feelings from our holiday break, my heart warmed this week when I learned the Federal Communications Commission had posted dozens of its studies on media ownership on its web site.

I dashed over to fcc.gov to unwrap this wonderful electronic gift. Oh look. They even put out a press release. I read through the press release and learned that the big report dump had come at the request of FCC Chairman Kevin Martin himself. Wow. Talk about your open government. Maybe I've been wrong about the FCC constantly conducting the public's business in private.

Then I came across the following paragraph, which, I must say, struck me as rather odd.

"The FCC is legally entitled to withhold certain internal documents under the deliberative process privilege of Freedom of Information Act Exemption 5D. However, in light of the unique circumstances present in this instance -- principally, the FCC's current consideration of the media ownership rules and the very strong level of public interest in this proceeding -- the Commission is solely, in an exercise of its own discretion, releasing these materials." You can read the full release here.

In my previous life as an investigative reporter, I had become intimately familiar with Exemption 5D of the Freedom of Information Act. It is one of several exemptions in the disclosure law commonly cited by government agencies who don't want to give you the information you have requested.

But why would they be talking about Exemption 5D? Wasn't the agency releasing these reports to serve the public, which is quite understandably interested in the FCC's current effort to rewrite its media ownership rules?

Puzzled by this non-sequitur I started looking around the FCC web site for answers. Nothing. I headed off to Google. I came across a couple of blogs saying the FCC released the reports because it was about to be sued by the aptly named Institute for Public Representation at the Georgetown University Law School.

Angela Campbell, the Institute's director, confirmed the FCC had released the reports to avoid getting sued. She said the agency had not posted all of the reports requested by the Institute, however.

"We’re still talking to them," said Campbell. "We will see what happens."

It gets worse.

It turns out the FCC issued its press release and posted the reports late in the day on December 29, which just happened to be the Friday before the New Year weekend.

This particular tactic -- sometimes employed by government officials to tamp down attention from the media and public -- appears to have become standard operating procedure for the FCC on its media ownership studies. The agency chose to release the details of a new set of studies it was ordering up on media ownership late on day before the Thanksgiving holiday weekend a few weeks back.

The reports aren't exactly easy to find on the web site either. They appear on a subpage about media ownership issues, under the less-than-enlightening title "Additional Materials"

As a public service, we’ll save you the looking. You can view the studies by clicking here.