Advocates for the hearing-impaired are making the 8th floor round...

for several hundred captioning waivers granted programmers. The FCC is weighing the groups’ Oct. 12 petitions to rethink the waivers and to grant an emergency stay on their implementation, Gagnier said: “We are certainly hopeful that the FCC will reverse what we see as an erroneous decision by the bureau, and if they do not, we will certainly determine our options accordingly.” Telecom for the Deaf & Hard of Hearing, National Assn. of the Deaf and others want the Commission to overturn waivers issued in Sept. by the Consumer & Governmental Affairs Bureau (CGB). The groups said they may sue the FCC if it lets the waivers stand (CD Sept 27 p4). A CGB official couldn’t say whether the Bureau had acted on the petition. In their application for review, the petitioners demanded that CGB review each individual programmer petition to escape closed captioning rules, not grant them en masse. “The Bureau failed to comply with the Commission’s rules because it did not put petitions for exemption on public notice and did not justify each waiver of the public notice rule,” the petitioners said. CGB’s actions created a standard that “threatens to allow a huge and totally unwarranted number of exemptions,” said the document. Many of the challenged exemptions went to programmers producing religious shows. The National Religious Bcstrs. (NRB) said CGB followed procedure because it didn’t classify a new type of programming exempt from captioning rules. “The policy… recognizes exemptions for non-profit broadcasters who would otherwise incur an ‘undue burden’ in complying with closed-captioning requirements,” said NRB’s opposition to the application for review: “Many religious non-profit organizations have not sought exemption, but have fully complied with the captioning requirement.”