Searchable TV Station Files Would Bolster Research Into News Sharing

There should be ways to aggregate the data to try to measure trends such as the number of stations with shared services agreements (SSA) with other broadcasters owned by another company in the same market, said the academics. Some of them have opposed station consolidation, while others have done work for the industry. Some at the FCC hope the agency, after adopting final rules, will act quickly to make the data searchable, to assist in research and other efforts to hold stations accountable to serving their audiences, commission officials said. “The FNPRM is a first step on the way to a searchable and machine-readable goal,” an FCC spokesman said.

Broadcast lawyers said they remain skeptical of the benefits to the public or the industry of online files, and especially to the rulemaking’s proposal to add SSAs and other agreements to the list of what stations must report to the FCC. They continue to contend (CD Oct 14 p7) that putting files online will mostly benefit people who may have an ax to grind against stations but don’t live in their viewing area. One lawyer wondered why, with the privacy concerns Media Bureau officials cited in proposing to keep letters to stations offline, broadcasters would even need to keep the letters in the public file. “Magnanimous gesture or stepping stone to greater content control?” asked Fletcher Heald’s Dan Kirkpatrick of the commission’s proposal to host the data. It was representative of a host of other blog posts from lawyers representing TV stations.

"At least some broadcasters will be unhappy about this, but it’s just making more widely available what’s already public,” said Hofstra University Professor Bob Papper, who has done research for the Radio TV Digital News Association. “Whether academicians use it for research is hard to tell, but it would make looking at these issues on a macro level a lot easier. I suspect that various community and interest groups may be the first to look into what’s going on.” Professor Danilo Yanich of the University of Delaware, who this month submitted research to the FCC on the number of SSAs and other news-sharing agreements (CD Oct 25 p9), said “the data in the files will be helpful.” It doesn’t “provide the content that is required for much analysis,” he added: “That is the most important data. For researchers like me, we must always pay (high prices) for content, or somehow have it provided."

There’s also a concern among some at the commission that, since the files won’t all initially be searchable, efforts toward that goal may lag, agency officials said. They said much of the discussion among commissioners and their staffs on changes to the item before it was adopted centered on searchability. But they said there seems to be a commitment to make the data searchable. A vote on a separate but related notice of inquiry on a replacement to Form 355, which Thursday’s order nixed, may occur in the next few weeks, and some small changes are likely to the inquiry, commission officials said.

Having complete figures on the number of SSAs and similar deals between different stations in the same market would have helped Yanich with his research, he said. The same is true for Co-Director Angela Campbell of Georgetown University’s Institute for Public Representation and University of Hawaii Professor Gerald Kato, who worked together to oppose an SSA between three stations in Hawaii. Having information from the FCC about those stations’ deals would have helped “tremendously,” said Campbell. “We had to fight to get [a copy of] this contract. We couldn’t get access to their public file."

Researchers don’t know exactly how many stations have SSAs, local marketing agreements (LMA), or joint sales agreements (JSA) because the commission doesn’t require that they be disclosed in any manner, professors said. “The most important thing is that everyone is going to know who has these agreements,” Campbell said. “Just having the contracts there, especially if they are redacting proprietary information” could prove limiting, she noted. The proposed disclosure requirements read: “For commercial television stations, a copy of every agreement or contract involving sharing agreements for the station, including local news sharing agreements and shared services agreements, whether the agreement involves stations in the same markets or in differing markets, with confidential or proprietary information redacted where appropriate.” Stations with JSAs and other such deals would need to update their file when the arrangements change, the rulemaking proposed (http://xrl.us/bmhbcc).

Widespread availability of such information could open up stations to unfair attacks from critics who live far away, lawyers for them said. “The placement of this material online, while commendable on one hand, could open the floodgate for the filing of spurious petitions against broadcasters,” wrote David O'Neil of Rini Coran. “Broadcasters could experience a significant increase in expenses in defending against such frivolous complaints. One need look no further than the deluge of indecency complaints made possible by the FCC with on-line filing to see how ineffective and costly this process (no matter how commendable) could be.” Lauren Lynch Flick of Pillsbury said it “will be hard to justify the additional burden on TV stations if the primary ‘benefit’ of an online file goes to academicians and distant advocacy groups rather than to a station’s local audience."

The FCC envisioned letting a “member of the public” type a station’s call letters to “access an electronic version of the public file, making the Commission’s website a one-stop shop for information about broadcast television stations.” The approach would be “be easier for the public than searching for individual stations’ websites,” the FNPRM said. It said “researchers” need “access to standardized data that are aggregable and searchable in order for the data to be useful in their analyses of industry performance."

"The FCC finally is taking a step in the right direction toward greater transparency on programming and station operations,” said Kato. “Having the information machine-readable and searchable would be of immense help to academics like myself and the public. The FCC should have done it sooner, since digital technology falls within its sphere. The current system of public files is, to be charitable, haphazard. In our experience, just looking at what was available took hours and a lot of hand-wringing by station managers who were responsible for keeping the files."

There are an estimated 83 TV markets with a JSA, SSA, LMA or local news sharing agreement, Yanich’s paper to the FCC estimated (http://xrl.us/bmgxdy). Those areas have 55 percent of the nation’s TV households, he estimated. He wishes the FCC had approved his proposal in response to an agency request for them for the ongoing media ownership review to study such news arrangements. But he said the agency decided instead to do that study internally, and then studied common ownership of TV stations and daily newspapers in the same market, not SSAs and the like. The commission spokesman had no comment on the contracting process. Yanich said the upshot is that the agency “has essentially not considered the SSA/LMA phenomenon and it has no research to examine its effect.”