ADELSTEIN SAYS FCC MADE A SERIOUS MISTAKE ON MEDIA OWNERSHIP
FCC Comr. Adelstein said Tues. the agency made a serious error in its new media ownership rules, creating a situation where a small town like Minot, N.D., could be treated as if it had more TV stations than Detroit. Adelstein said his fellow commissioners should reconsider the rules to fix what he called an anomaly that would allow greater concentration in small markets. An FCC spokesman declined to comment, but agency staffers acknowledged privately that Adelstein could have a point. However, they said such an issue should be brought up in a petition for reconsideration.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
Also Tues., Comrs. Adelstein and Copps wrote to FCC Chmn. Powell seeking a Commission vote on a temporary stay on the media ownership rules. They said the rules were not fully thought out, that the Commission should wait until Congress decided whether it wanted to reverse the agency and that the public should be given an opportunity to react to the rules before they took effect. Adelstein and Copps also sought “expeditious” resolution of any petitions for reconsideration that were filed.
Calling it “an apparent blunder,” Adelstein said he wanted the Commission to fix what he called an anomaly that would allow a single owner to dominate the media in many smaller towns. He pointed out that the new rules counted each noncommercial TV station as a separate station even if it repeated the same broadcast signal across a state. Many sparsely populated but geographically large TV markets such as the Dakotas have statewide public broadcasting systems that repeat the same signal over several transmitters across the state. They are over-counted under the new rules, exposing more communities to media consolidation than was intended, said Adelstein, who is from S.D.
Before the June 2 vote on media ownership (CD June 3 p1), stations with common ownership and duplicative programming, whether commercial or noncommercial, were not counted as independent voices. The new rules no longer require independent voices, but are triggered by the total number of TV stations in a Designated Market Area (DMA). For commercial stations, the new rules exclude stations designated as “satellites” by the FCC, which have a common owner and duplicate the programming of another station. Until now, noncommercial stations had no reason to apply for satellite status, so none has that designation. Adelstein said that even if many were functionally equivalent to satellite stations, they nevertheless were counted as unique voices, or separate stations, under the new rules.
As an example, he pointed out that under the new rules, Sioux Falls, S.D., is counted as having 6 separate noncommercial stations, even though 5 of the 6 are run by the statewide public TV network, and all broadcast the same programming. It also has 5 commercial stations. So Sioux Falls, the 112th largest DMA by population, is counted as having 11 stations, or more than Detroit, the 10th largest DMA, with 9 stations. Minot, N.D., the 155th largest DMA, which has 4 commercial TV stations, is treated as having more than Detroit and such other cities as Baltimore, San Diego, Las Vegas and New Orleans, Adelstein said.
“Nine is a key number for FCC purposes -- if a market has 9 or more TV stations, then even the few cross-ownership restrictions remaining after June 2 are entirely lifted there,” Adelstein said. He said the newspaper in Sioux Falls now could acquire 2 of the 5 commercial TV stations there and twice as many radio stations than it could otherwise. “Rather than fixing the so-called ‘Minot problem,’ we created a whole new one,” he said. Adelstein said he believed several TV markets were skewed by the oversight, including in Ia., Ohio, Ky, Mich., Neb., N.Y., and Vt.
Another example he gave was Watertown, N.Y., which for FCC counting purposes has 4 stations -- 2 commercial and 2 noncommercial. The noncommercial stations broadcast the same signal, “so the market in reality should have 3 stations,” he said. Under the new rules, for 3-station “at-risk” markets, no newspaper/radio, newspaper/TV or radio/TV cross ownership is allowed. But since Watertown technically now is a 4- station market, cross-ownership is permitted. “One owner can now own the newspaper and one of the 2 TV stations -- that is 2/3 of the major local news outlets available in Watertown. These rules should be protecting people in small cities like Watertown, not exposing them to domination by a new local Citizen Kane. Clearly this wasn’t what the rules intended for a small community,” Adelstein said.
In their letter to Powell, Adelstein and Copps said their preliminary analysis showed the rules could result in a single company’s owning up to 48 stations in the top 21 TV markets or 310 stations in the bottom 177 markets, representing 23.13% of all full-power commercial TV stations. If a company adopted an all-UHF strategy, it could own up to 370 stations in up to 208 of the 210 TV markets, representing 27.6% of all full-power commercial TV stations, they said. They also said the effect in specific markets could be “dramatic.” In Tex., for example, one company could own 33 TV stations, major papers in Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and El Paso and radio stations in every DMA in the state, as well as potentially cable channels, local cable operators and the dominant Internet service provider. In Cal., one company could own 22 TV stations, major papers in L.A., San Francisco, Sacramento and Fresno and radio stations in every DMA, as well as cable channels, local cable operators and the dominant Internet service provider, they said.