Order Would Require Broadcast Ownership Forms to List All Investors
A draft FCC order would expand the types of broadcast investors that must be disclosed annually to the agency and require more stations to file the paperwork, said commission and industry officials. Acting FCC Chairman Michael Copps is circulating the Media Bureau proposal concerning form 323, they said. A related rulemaking notice would ask about further expanding the ranks of those who must complete the documents, commission officials said. The commissioners will vote on the item at or before their next monthly meeting, April 8 (CD March 10 p10).
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.
The draft would carry out part of a 2008 minority-media order in which the FCC tentatively concluded that it “should make changes to Form 323 to increase the accuracy of the data and the potential uses for the form.” Sole proprietorships don’t have to file the document, but that would change under the draft order, commission officials said. All investors in companies majority-owned by a single entity, not just the majority owner, would have to be listed on the form, they said. That would eliminate the so-called single-majority- shareholder exemption. An FCC spokesman declined to comment.
The form asks for the race and sex of station owners, and information from additional filers would help the commission get a better sense of the extent to which people of color and women own radio and TV stations, said industry and commission officials. The proposed order would require form 323 to be filed by all low-power stations, which don’t have to do it now, said agency officials.
Low-power TV officials said they're concerned about the prospect of having to file form 323. “This would significantly increase the paperwork burden on small businesses without any real value,” said Peter Tannenwald, a lawyer for the Community Broadcasters Association. The proposed order might require the FCC to redo the form, because it would make mandatory a question on race and ethnicity that’s now optional, he added. The association’s executive director, Amy Brown, noted that the order comes shortly after a survey by her group (CD March 9 p6) found that 43 percent of low-power stations are at least partly owned by minorities and 60 percent are owned by women.
The related rulemaking notice would ask whether noncommercial stations should file the form, commission officials said. Form 323e, which they now complete, doesn’t ask about race or sex, an official said. The FCC notice asks whether low-power FM stations should disclose the race and sex of their operators, the official said.
A supporter of improving the FCC’s collection of information on minority ownership said the changes envisioned by the order would help. “That certainly plugs a big hole in the unreliability of the commission’s database,” said Minority Media and Telecommunications Council Executive Director David Honig. In the earlier commission order on minority ownership, “they couldn’t rely on their own data, because they knew it was unreliable,” he said. “The NAB supports policies that encourage more minority ownership of broadcast properties,” a spokesman said.