FCC Draft Nixes Form 355, Asks About Other Disclosure, Proposes Web-based Public Files
The FCC will put an end to Form 355, under a draft order set to be voted on at the Oct. 27 meeting (CD Oct 7 p13), commission officials said. The document is a quarterly programming report the agency approved in 2007 but which TV stations were never required to complete. The Office of Management and Budget under both the administrations of President George W. Bush and Barack Obama didn’t approve the form under the Paperwork Reduction Act, industry officials noted.
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A Media Bureau draft overturns now the commission order that approved the form, and with it a requirement that TV stations post their public inspection files online (http://xrl.us/bmf3qn), commission officials said. The initial order was approved at an agency meeting that ran into the night, where several media items were approved over objections of some commissioners (CD Bulletin Nov 28/07 p1). The present bureau draft proposes that TV stations post their public inspection files online, and starts an inquiry on a successor to Form 355, agency officials said. Putting online the paper versions of files that are at radio and TV stations was a recommendation of the report on the future of the media industry issued this summer under the auspices of FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. He said last week he planned to implement that proposal (CD Oct 4 p4).
Commercial and nonprofit broadcasters and nonprofit groups had asked the commission to overturn the order, and the new draft acts partly on those requests, agency officials said. Industry filers in docket 00-168 (http://xrl.us/bmf3qt) in 2008 had said the agency didn’t show a need for all TV stations to file reports quarterly on the types of shows they aired, while public-interest groups wanted the commission itself to post the reports online, not broadcasters. An industry lawyer said Thursday he still doesn’t see the need for putting the data online, while a public-interest group lawyer said the commission should be taking further steps to implement a successor to Form 355. A bureau spokeswoman declined to comment.
The agency proposes non- and for-profit TV stations put online their entire public-inspection files, FCC officials said of a draft further notice of proposed rulemaking. It accompanies the order. They said the FNPRM proposal includes the political part of the public files, which report on requests by candidates for advertising time. The FCC order four years ago required stations to post their public-inspection files on their own websites or on those of state broadcast associations, and exempted the political file, agency and industry officials noted. The bureau draft now proposes that the commission itself be the host of the data, so the agency could serve as a repository of sorts for it, FCC officials said.
It’s the “antithesis of localism,” which the initial order was meant to promote, for the FCC to post online the files of stations, said industry lawyer Harry Cole of Fletcher Heald. Making the documents available “to anyone, anywhere in the universe” doesn’t serve the cause of localism because a person doesn’t need to live in the service area of a station to see and comment on its file, he said. If the agency “really wants to encourage local dialogue and local interaction, putting it online and allowing kind of remote access from wherever, by whomever, the commission is not really achieving its goal,” said Cole. He’s been critical of other FCC broadcaster reporting requirements.
A notice of inquiry asks about what could amount to a replacement for Form 355, agency officials said: It essentially starts a fresh look at the issue of what if any program information TV stations should be required to disclose with some regularity that they've carried. The NOI appears to start with the presumption that some sort of standardized reporting of what’s shown on commercial and public TV stations is good, an agency official said. Commission officials said the draft inquiry asks about what sort of information should be on the form, how frequently broadcasters should be mandated to file it and what sort of programming should be covered.
Free Press Policy Counsel Corie Wright would have liked to see more FCC action on the programming disclosure front, and said an NOI only starts a proceeding, although the disclosure docket was opened in 2000. “The NOI part makes not a lot of sense to me -- it’s a decade-old proceeding” and “there’s been a whole lot of inquiry in that period,” said Wright. Like Cole, she hadn’t seen or been briefed by agency officials on the contents of the draft. It “is a positive development” that the agency and not individual broadcasters or their associations would play host to the public files, and “we're really pleased they're taking up this issue,” Wright said. She hopes the commission makes it easy for people to find the public files and search for the information contained in them.