FCC members and Media Bureau staff are considering seeking comment on waivers of media ownership rules for foreign investments in broadcast companies and for those who've overcome economic and other types of non-racial or gender disadvantages, agency and industry officials told us this week. They expressed varying degrees of hope whether incorporating such proposals into separate rulemaking proceedings might be part of a wider-ranging compromise among commissioners to resolve a deadlock. The officials said it will be hard to end a split (CD Jan 28 p7) between the two Republicans who support broadcast/daily newspaper cross ownership and the two regular Democratic members who don’t generally support such deregulation without first studying barriers to entry faced by minorities and women.

A partisan split among the four regular FCC members on media ownership rules (CD Jan 18 p1), which may be so intractable it can’t be resolved with the unanimity Chairman Julius Genachowski seeks, could be partly addressed by using a Minority Media and Telecommunications Council proposal as the basis for a compromise, commission officials said. They said some at the commission are considering parts of MMTC’s proposal last week as a potential pathway to a compromise on how much to deregulate ownership. A much bigger determinant in the outcome of draft rules first circulated Nov. 14 remains what revisions if any Genachowski makes to the Media Bureau order, agency and industry officials said.

The waiver request that’s believed to be the basis for a draft order on public files that the FCC Media Bureau staff have been working on is for KTBS-TV Shreveport, La., said industry and agency officials. The request seeks forbearance so TV stations need not post in their online public files materials from past license renewal cycles. The draft hasn’t circulated for a vote or been approved on delegated authority, industry and agency officials said. Some industry lawyers said work on the draft appeared finished or nearly finished, but approval was held up.

NAB wants a delay in its appeal of FCC rules requiring that public files go online. The association’s Friday request for the appeals court hearing the case to hold NAB v. FCC in abeyance could give the agency more time to work out a middle ground between broadcasters that opposed the order and nonprofits that back such disclosure, public interest lawyers told us. They didn’t contest the association’s motion to hold case No. 12-1225 in abeyance. The filing is separate from NAB’s efforts to get commission staff to eliminate some requirements that years-old documents now in paper form in TV stations’ studios must go online starting next month, industry officials said. They said the Media Bureau had been working on such efforts, but not yet ruled.

Differences have emerged between the FCC commissioners that partly follow party lines about whether they'll likely approve deregulation of media ownership in an order that goes further than the Democrats want and falls short of what the Republicans sought, said agency and industry officials Thursday. They said that with Chairman Julius Genachowski in recent days seeking a vote on draft rules he first circulated Nov. 14 (CD Nov 15 p1), without changes to the 2010 quadrennial review draft, one or both other Democratic FCC members may vote no and one or both Republicans could approve with some concerns. Genachowski sought feedback this month on the draft rules, something he didn’t do much before the Media Bureau order circulated, agency officials said.

The FCC in recent months reduced by at least two-thirds pending indecency complaints. That was via career staffers’ continuing effort to cut a backlog of objections from TV viewers and radio listeners by dismissing older cases as commissioners made no policy decisions, agency and industry officials said. They said cases with an expired five-year statute of limitations and those made for late-night and very early-morning shows not subject to indecency rules were among those dismissed by Enforcement Bureau staff. They also appear to be dismissing some complaints that might have been held beyond the statute of limitations by voluntary agreements with licensees, yet not actionable because the brief instances of cursing or nudity aired before the commission said in 2004 that such fleeting indecency could result in fines, industry officials said.

All groups other than Asian Americans increased the number of full-power TV stations they owned over a four-year period through 2011. Our review of analyses of FCC broadcast ownership data by nonprofits opposed to media consolidation also showed African Americans were the only demographic to see ownership declines in all other types of broadcast outlets, except for low-power TV. Calculations of data from the agency’s most recent biennial ownership forms, in some instances comparing statistics companies gave the FCC to earlier figures from nonprofits’ own efforts, show all groups other than whites owned a disproportionately low share of all types of radio and TV stations.

Some at the FCC are considering whether to allow waivers of media ownership rules for some types of arrangements that are barred under draft rules involving TV stations, agency and industry officials said. They said in interviews that some Media Bureau staff members are considering a waiver process for joint sales agreements where a TV station brokers ads for another outlet in the market, when spots on the second station in the JSA exceed 15 percent of that broadcaster’s commercials. A draft order ending the 2010 quadrennial media ownership review would require the attribution of such JSAs to the station doing the brokering within two years (CD Nov 15 p1). That would mean many of the JSAs would need to be renegotiated so the arrangements don’t violate ownership rules, reducing their cost savings, said executives at companies that own brokering stations. There are more than 100 stations in JSAs (CD Nov 29 p5).

Letting radio and TV stations list contest rules online, instead of requiring on-air disclosure, was backed by all comments to the FCC in RM-11684 (http://xrl.us/bn7heu). Owners of a few thousand stations and their associations and programmers agreed with a request by Entercom to revisit 1976 rules, just as with early-filed comments (CD Dec 20 p20). Although unanimous industry support had been expected (CD Jan 27 p7), it spurred optimism by the lawyer who made the request that the agency will move to change the rules.

Amazon delayed captioning several dozen terrestrial TV shows once they became available to view online for an average of a few days, research by seven groups representing the hearing-impaired said they found. An FCC complaint seeks the maximum fine, a commission injunction requiring the rules be followed and per-day forfeitures for future violations by the video service. Those groups, in a non-random survey of major video programming distributors, found most other VPDs met FCC Internet Protocol captioning rules (CD Jan 17 p3). There was an overall 82 percent compliance rate for non-live programs, which VPDs and some other companies were required by the FCC to caption starting Sept. 30, when it aired after then.