FCC Draft Order Rescinds 300 TV Captioning Waivers
The FCC is poised to rescind several hundred waivers given in 2006 to mostly small TV programmers in a process that officials inside and outside the commission believed wasn’t done in a transparent way (CD Sept 21/06 p2). Agency officials said the draft Consumer & Governmental Affairs Bureau order would undo about 300 waivers that the bureau gave to mostly religious programmers, many of which are nonprofits, exempting them from having to caption video they produced. The order circulated Aug. 30 and should be voted on and released soon, perhaps late this week, commission officials said.
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The new order requires all the programmers that got exemptions to reapply for new ones if they don’t want to have to caption their shows, FCC officials said. There’s three months to reapply, with a showing that must be made that having to caption video would result in economic hardship, they said. The order doesn’t deal with the many requests for waivers that have streamed in steadily to the commission in recent years, commission officials said. Those requests, from cable networks and groups whose programming is carried on TV stations, are in docket 06-181 (http://xrl.us/bmfetm). A CGB spokeswoman had no comment on the draft order.
The draft order cites procedural and policy shortfalls in the process by which the earlier batch of waivers was handled and awarded, agency officials said. The waivers were awarded in letters sent directly to the groups that requested the exemption, and there wasn’t public notice given that the requests were being considered by the agency, the order is said to state. “After careful consideration we grant your petition for exemption from the closed captioning requirements,” said one such waiver letter, to the Prophecy Watch. It noted the CGB issued an order “granting exemptions from the closed captioning requirements under the undue burden standard to two entities that are similarly situated to the petitioner in the instant case,” Thy Kingdom Come.
The new order says those letters didn’t contain any individual analysis of each case for exemption, and a presumption was created in favor of granting the requests and without considering the financial resources of the programmers, FCC officials said. The waiver letters relied on the rationale of the CGB order that went to Anglers for Christ Ministries, an official noted. Advocates for the deaf and hard of hearing unsuccessfully tried to protest at an FCC meeting shortly after the order, and that day Chairman Kevin Martin said he'd ask his staffers about placing the waivers online (CD Sept 27/06 p4).
Anglers for Christ still needs a captioning waiver, even if it must request one anew, said Director Tony Sellars. He said the nonprofit is running at a loss and can’t afford to caption The Christian Angler Outdoors, on about a half-dozen religious TV stations. “I do apologize to the hearing impaired, because they would be a great audience for us, and I do think they would enjoy our outdoor programming,” he said of the half-hour show. It airs weekly during part of the year and says it can reach 120 million viewers. “We wish we were financially stable enough to do closed captioning -- we hope in the future to be able to do that,” Sellars said. “We're like most other businesses in this country, and we're really struggling now,” with sponsorship “down to almost nothing,” and the ministry is worse off financially than when it got the waiver from the FCC several years ago.