Some at FCC Ponder Changing Draft to Exempt Political Ad Rate Web Disclosure

The FCC didn’t grant the NAB’s request to delay the so-called sunshine period for four days so lobbying on the order could have continued until the close of business Tuesday. The public file order was included on the sunshine notice issued electronically by the agency at around 4:45 p.m. Friday.

Commissioner Robert McDowell seems likely to vote against the order, or file a concurrence or partial dissent, regardless of whether lowest unit charges need to go in the online public files the order mandates, agency and industry officials predicted. They said Clyburn and aides are considering whether to support proposals from TV station owners that would keep LUCs out of the online files and leave them on paper. Less clear is what Genachowski wants to do, although in recent days his office and the Media Bureau have seemed somewhat more open to considering a compromise, industry officials said. A bureau spokeswoman declined to comment.

There’s uncertainty at the commission and within industry about whether a compromise can be reached for Genachowski to modernize public files by putting most of them, including political information, on fcc.gov while also addressing broadcaster concerns, agency officials and communications lawyers and executives said. They said the crux of the issue is whether Genachowski will determine that his goals of transparency can be achieved even by withholding from the Internet LUC rates. That information would remain at stations, and they'd provide on the Internet names of candidates buying ads and how much campaigns spent on total ad buys but not individual commercials. Seven nonprofit groups that seek more broadcaster disclosure remain opposed to keeping LUC information only in paper files, they said among the filings posted Friday in docket 00-168 (http://xrl.us/bm4mv7). At a panel Friday, representatives of some of those groups said the order helps brings transparency to broadcasting. (See separate below.)

NAB wanted more time so talks could continue. “Certain of the proposals in this proceeding (particularly those involving placing broadcasters’ political files online) have proved controversial and difficult to resolve,” the association said Friday (http://xrl.us/bm4mwj). “Discussions between broadcasters, Commissioners and FCC staff about these proposals continued during the NAB Show in Las Vegas, which ended only yesterday.” A delay would let “interested parties continue these informative discussions and to work toward resolution of the final issues,” NAB said. “Very few topics were hotter” at the NAB’s Las Vegas meeting than the looming public file order vote, TV station lawyer Paul Cicelski wrote on the blog Friday of the Pillsbury law firm (http://xrl.us/bm4mws). “There may be a few more twists and turns before we are done."

More broadcasters formally lent their support to efforts by 11 owners of more than 200 stations (CD March 19 p6) to post online aggregate spending information but not LUC details. Disney backed the plan, becoming the first broadcast network to do so, while News Corp.’s Fox came up with a similar proposal. “Concealing more detailed information about how much stations charge for the purchase of political advertising time” and other data still won’t fly for the Public Interest Public Airwaves Coalition, it said (http://xrl.us/bm4mxe). “Broadcasters have no right to suppress these records, but have an affirmative duty under the law to disclose them.” Common Cause, Free Press and the New America Foundation are among the coalition’s members.

Fox’s plan includes listing online what candidates spent in an election window, the number of spots and their length and total cost. The information would be posted every other day during the periods around elections when candidates must be offered LUCs by stations, and daily during the seven days before an election. Besides the LUC, “ALL OTHER RELEVANT INFORMATION WOULD BE ONLINE,” Fox said. Campaigns can visit stations for LUC data, while the “general public” that’s “most interested in the amount of money that candidates are spending” could find that on the Internet, the broadcaster said (http://xrl.us/bm4mxz). Disney backs industry efforts including the 11 other broadcasters’ proposal to resolve the LUC aspect of the rulemaking, ABC Owned TV Stations President Rebecca Campbell told Genachowski the day after he spoke to the NAB Show. There are “potential anti-competitive effects of making individual advertising rate information widely available in a manner by which competitors and commercial advertisers could anonymously glean pricing data,” Disney said (http://xrl.us/bm4mx9).

Commissioners should vote at the April 27 meeting to split off the political file part of the public file order, so the political section becomes a further rulemaking notice, executives from more than a dozen state broadcast associations told Genachowski during their meeting (CD April 18 p4) in Vegas. They asked that the FCC propose to also post cable operators’ political files online, in meetings with Genachowski (http://xrl.us/bm4my8) and McDowell (http://bit.ly/IEWpwZ). Before the sunshine notice released Friday, “realistically we have only a few days to develop a win-win resolution of the political file issues involved in this proceeding,” a lawyer for the 11 broadcasters that made the first non-LUC disclosure plan told a bureau official Tuesday (http://bit.ly/IX6P97). “The Station Groups’ proposal to place on the FCC’s website an aggregated dollar figure for the dollars spent by each candidate or other purchaser of political time was just such a win-win solution and would better serve the goals of the Commission and of various non-broadcaster groups than would disclosure of spot-by-spot purchase prices” as the FCC proposed, said the lawyer. He represented Barrington Broadcasting, Belo Corp., Cox Media Group, E.W. Scripps, Gannett, Hearst Television, Meredith Corp., the Washington Post Co. and others.