Online Public File Rhetoric Heats Up, as FCC Vote Nears
Debate between broadcasters and nonprofits about what information TV stations should be required to report online, by moving paper files in studios to the Internet, heated up as an FCC vote on an order nears. The Media Bureau continues work on an order to require many parts of stations’ public files to be put online, and may circulate an order in time for a vote at the March 21 meeting, agency and industry officials said. Public interest groups and broadcasters continued trading FCC filings about the merits of scaling back the commission’s proposed rules, with industry wanting fewer requirements than the commission has proposed and nonprofits urging the agency to stick with what was floated in an October rulemaking notice.
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A public file order hasn’t circulated yet and may not in time to be sent to commissioners’ offices three weeks before the meeting, as is the customary practice of chairmen, industry and agency officials said. FCC officials said Chairman Julius Genachowski and his staff appear to be considering whether to put it to a vote at the meeting, and if it’s not ready by then the order likely will be shortly afterwards. Also in the works, on a separate track, is a forthcoming rulemaking notice proposing to require a new form for broadcasters to file quarterly reporting of the type of local programming they've aired. Industry and public interest groups are also at odds over the successor to Form 355. (See separate report in this issue.)
Genachowski’s aides said Monday that work on the rulemaking notice for a new programming reporting form, which would replace the issues/programs list TV stations keep, and on an order about online public files are high priorities, said Free Press Senior Policy Counsel Corie Wright. She met with the chairman’s office about those proceedings. A spokeswoman for the Media Bureau, whose staff is working on both proceedings, declined to comment.
A plan from 11 broadcasters with more than 200 stations to scale back the requirements from what the FCC proposed for putting the political ad file online as part of moving the documents to the agency’s website from main studios doesn’t go far enough for public interest groups. Wright and Director Angela Campbell of Georgetown University’s Institute for Public Representation, which represents the Public Interest Public Airwaves Coalition (PIPAC), are among those telling us that more parts of the political file need to go online. Barrington Broadcasting, Belo Corp., Cox Media Group, Gannett, Hearst TV, Meredith Corp., the Washington Post Co.’s TV unit and others made the new proposal (http://xrl.us/bmshpc) last week (CD Feb 17 p5). That group of companies wants to work with the FCC to implement political file rules, and believes its proposal is sufficient and that what nonprofits seek is too onerous, broadcast-industry officials said.
It already takes “a fair amount of work” for staff at TV stations to assemble the information in the paper versions of public files, “with very little interest on behalf of the public in examining this work,” at least at the stations where Mike Cavender has worked, he said. “It’s easy I think to understand where a broadcaster would say, ‘So now we're going to make it even more extensive and create more requirements, and to what end?” said the executive director of the Radio TV Digital News Association. “I certainly don’t think there is anyone in the business who argues against more transparency” but “there has to be a balance between those transparency requirements” whether “that information is truly utilized,” Cavender said.
What the commission proposed “is actually the easiest and simplest solution,” for TV stations to upload electronically their entire public files, “so broadcasters can swap out their paper files for online files,” Wright said. “That is a reasonable compromise for this interim solution,” because the PDF or scanned versions of paper documents may not be initially searchable, she said. Last week’s two-page broadcaster proposal has “lots of unanswered questions” about implementation, said Campbell, who represents Common Cause, Free Press, New America Foundation and others. “We have a lot of concerns with the way it’s written, but that doesn’t mean with further discussion there couldn’t be some reasonable accommodation.” The PIPAC wants to know what are TV stations’ lowest unit charge, the price campaigns pay for ads around the time of elections, as do campaign ad buyers “and I think the public does, too,” Campbell said. Stations don’t want to provide that information. “Why are they so upset about this?” Campbell asked. “We really don’t quite understand that.”
There’s an “inequity” to making TV stations report such information while not requiring it of “our competitors for political advertising dollars,” a News Corp. lawyer reported she and executives at the NAB, Comcast’s NBCUniversal and Disney told an aide to Genachowski and an aide to Commissioner Mignon Clyburn during separate meetings. “We can continue to make ‘dates and dollars’ information available over the phone to political time buyers,” said a filing in docket 00-168 (http://xrl.us/bmsynp). The information the 11 broadcasters seek to put online is “statutorily inadequate under Section 315 of the Communications Act,” Wright reported she told a bureau lawyer (http://xrl.us/bmsyne). “Broadcasters would have to maintain two separate political records -- one online and one offline -- while diminishing the amount and types of information that members of the public could conveniently access via the internet.”