Public File Searchability, Standardization Remain a Ways Off
TV stations’ public-inspection files won’t need to be standardized or searchable when the FCC requires they go online (CD March 19 p6), industry officials said. Media Bureau staff are continuing to work on drafting an order to make broadcasters put most of what’s now in paper files, including information on political spots, on the Internet, commission and industry officials told us. Some FCC staff appear to be targeting a forthcoming order that tracks with an October rulemaking notice in that stations won’t need to convert paperwork to an electronic format right away (http://xrl.us/bmzmqp), industry officials said. The commission may decide on searchability and standardization later, agency and industry officials said.
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A related proceeding for a successor to the never-finalized Form 355 for all TV stations, to report the types of local programming they air, may be the venue for commissioners to tackle both that form and whether and how public files should be standardized, agency and industry officials said. They said some at the FCC want to eventually make TV stations provide the agency with what’s in the public file in a format that can be easily searched. Bureau officials may leave that decision for another day so they can finish work on the public-file order, which could be voted on as soon as next month, industry officials said. FCC spokespeople had no comment.
Broadcasters prefer to have the option to scan any paperwork and upload that to a station’s website or to fcc.gov instead of creating a new, electronic-originated form, industry lawyers said. Nonprofits that seek more broadcaster disclosure, meanwhile, say they want the FCC to eventually require the data to be searchable across stations (CD March 12 p3), but their officials say they realize that may take time. If the agency only requires stations to scan documents, public interest groups, academics, campaigns and others won’t be able to easily aggregate data among filings. That would please some stations, which wouldn’t need to make any changes to existing software that tracks political ads, an executive and a lawyer said. A section of the rulemaking said “some of the information in the public file would be of much greater benefit to the public if made available in a structured or database-friendly format that can be aggregated, manipulated, and more easily analyzed.” While that’s the “ultimate goal,” the commission proposed broadcasters need not “alter the form of documents already in existence prior to posting them to the online public file at this time."
Abandoning the quest to require standardized filings would be good, said General Counsel Jerald Fritz of Allbritton Communications, owner of several TV stations. “If the commission were not going to pursue this, that would relieve some of our anxiety,” he said. Not pursuing standardization of political files, which Allbritton has called a “soviet-style” system, would save both stations and the FCC money, Fritz said. “Why does the commission have to spend money to design and maintain its own database? We've seen how well they've done that with the ownership reports,” he said of Form 323, whose release had been delayed and which wasn’t readily searchable. The FCC’s website would crash if political files had to be updated daily, Fritz predicted.
"The immediate priority is that the forms are made public by scanning and uploading” by broadcasters to the FCC’s website, said Media Policy Fellow Tom Glaisyer of the New American Foundation’s Open Technology Initiative. It’s gotten some paper files by visiting TV studios and posted them (CD March 2 p7) on its website (http://xrl.us/bmwmv5). Such scanning and uploading by broadcasters themselves is “a low-cost simple solution,” said Glaisyer. “In the long run, the FCC should work towards full searchability."
Free Press believes “the immediate goal should be to get these important records out of filing cabinets and online” for the FCC, Senior Policy Counsel Corie Wright said. “But the ultimate goal should be to maximize the usability and transparency of this information by putting it into a standardized, machine readable and structured format. We take the FCC at its word that this remains an important priority.”