FCC Considering Voluntary 'Designated Hitter' Emergency Info Plan
The FCC is considering creating a voluntary “designated hitter” plan to provide multilingual emergency information during disasters, said broadcast and emergency alerting officials. Under such plans long touted by the Multicultural Media, Telecom and Internet Council, English-language stations in a market would use their broadcast to host foreign language emergency information translated by local foreign language stations if those stations have been knocked off the air. Broadcasters argued that such proposals are impractical and unlikely to work, but in an ex parte letter filed Thursday MMTC said the system is the only choice. “After almost two decades of consideration, no one has offered a better alternative,” said MMTC President Robert Branson.
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The agency’s “ongoing effort to strengthen emergency communications” included “discussion of voluntary mutual aid arrangements among broadcasters such as the one broadcasters engaged in during Hurricane Florence in 2018,” said an FCC spokesperson. In 2018, Cumulus, Dick Broadcasting and the Spanish Broadcasting System worked together to test the designated hitter system in an arrangement requested by MMTC and the League of United Latin American Citizens. The FCC Public Safety Bureau was also involved. “We will continue to explore ways to improve communications during disasters and have nothing to announce at this time,” the spokesperson said. The current designated hitter proposal also came up during a recent NAB ex parte meeting (see 2203040072).
Though previous proposals involved actual emergency alerts, industry officials said the agency is looking at translating emergency information, which is usually transmitted over news broadcasts rather than the emergency alert system. That was also the information transmitted during the 2018 test. Then, Spanish-speaking residents of two Florida media markets received “life-saving information about health care issues, shelters, how to find missing persons, health care issues, and avoiding injury.” The program would be focused on English-language broadcasters hosting foreign language stations that lose the ability to broadcast during a disaster, said an NAB ex parte filing. MMTC has previously advocated for a broader designated hitter program that would provide multilingual alerting in areas that don't have sufficient foreign language stations. The measures the FCC is believed to be considering would be more narrow.
NAB called the proposal “unrealistic” and said the FCC “should first try to help any potentially at-risk non-English radio stations improve their own resiliency” by encouraging them to keep generators and fuel on hand. “Suggesting that radio stations that serve non-English-speaking populations lack the resiliency and equipment to continue operating in an emergency is speculative, inaccurate and reflects a lack of empathy,” said Branson in the MMTC filing. Focusing on station resiliency doesn’t address markets that don’t have foreign language stations, MMTC said.
Shifting the burden of providing multilingual emergency information to broadcasters is “passing the buck,” said Pat Roberts, president of the Florida Association of Broadcasters and the Florida State Emergency Communications Committee chair, in an interview. “This is a government issue, they should have a system in place.” MMTC lost against the FCC in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 2017 after challenging the agency on its delayed action to provide multilingual alerts (see 1710170036. The majority opinion in that case, authored by now-U.S.Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, urged the agency to act “expeditiously” on multilingual alerts. “At some point, the FCC must fish or cut bait on this question,” Kavanaugh wrote.
Listeners in an emergency tuning into a local station expecting to hear English-language disaster updates and instead hearing a stream of information in a foreign language could create confusion or at least cause a listener to change the channel, said Digital Alert Systems Vice President Ed Czarnecki in an interview. That could “create chaos,” said Roberts. Listeners would become accustomed to the system with time, said Branson. “Bite-sized messages in another language” would “become a routine component of emergency responses,” said the MMTC filing.
A voluntary program, or one wherein the FCC simply acts as a broker between interested stations, would be preferable to a mandatory designated hitter system but could still raise concerns, Czarnecki said. If the system includes TV stations, the foreign language information would likely have to be captioned to meet accessibility requirements, or the agency would possibly need to issue a waiver. Broadcasters already have a long history of helping other stations when one goes down in a disaster, Czarnecki said. “The proposal ignores the long tradition of broadcasters banding together to help a station in need restore operations during an emergency,” said NAB.