FCC Eyes Broadcaster Disclosure, Noncommercial Stations Raising Money in New Ways

The FCC is looking at changing some broadcast regulations, leading to less oversight of how noncommercial stations raise money and possible rules for all types of stations to make disclosures online, not just on paper. Chairman Julius Genachowski has asked the Media Bureau to work on those areas, he told an FCC hearing in Phoenix about a June report by commission staffer Steve Waldman on the future of the new and old media industry. Those were the two concrete steps the commission said it’s taking to deliver on the recommendations of the report (CD Oct 3 p6).

Backing has built for online disclosure of how broadcasters serve their communities, Genachowski said. Some groups “have come to support the basic framework” of that reporting, he said. “This will benefit American communities and the broadcasters who serve them.” Some of what Genachowski floated was backed by witnesses representing noncommercial, religious and for-profit broadcasters. Commissioner Robert McDowell told us he’s eager for the FCC to look at the those two proposals and others from the report, while Commissioner Mignon Clyburn said feedback from the event can inform how the agency implements the study. Commissioner Michael Copps, the only commissioner other than the chairman to attend, put aside much of his frustration over the report for not recommending more steps, advocating in Phoenix for the creation by 2012 of a nationwide online media literacy curriculum.

"I've asked the Media Bureau at the FCC to move ahead” to let religious and other nonprofit broadcasters raise money in more ways, Genachowski said. He has also asked the bureau to act on broadcaster disclosure: “Of course, the public file kept by broadcasters should be kept online, not in broadcaster filing cabinets.” It should be done in a “streamlined” way “to disclose key information” about how stations serve their areas, Genachowski said. He wasn’t more specific in his remarks about how the bureau would achieve the online disclosure and fundraising initiatives.

Copps and others at the event at Arizona State University sought more reporting from traditional and new media on current events. “There is still no new media model to fund the kind of journalism that your country needs to have,” Copps said. Teaching news literacy is an anecdote to the “dumbing down” of some public discourse, he said. “There are many innovative endeavors underway” but they're “scattered and uncoordinated, and we need to focus on bringing these together,” he continued. Copps said later he was glad to hear Genachowski say the agency is moving “ahead on streamlined disclosure.” A longtime supporter of media literacy and public broadcasting, he also sought “a rational, reasoned, calm discussion of public media” and not the current efforts by some in Congress to defund it.

Giving noncommercial stations more ways to fundraise is “an idea worthy of further examination,” said McDowell. Eliminating the enhanced TV-station disclosure filing, Form 355, adopted over his dissent by the FCC under then-Chairman Kevin Martin, should be done, McDowell said. He said the “overhaul” of leased access rules which Waldman’s report sought, along with the recommendation to end the localism proceeding, can also be done by the commission outside the ongoing media ownership review. “There are many terrific ideas teed up in the Waldman report, and we have a terrific opportunity in the context of our media ownership review to implement many of them,” McDowell said: “But at the same time we should go forward with elimination of the disclosure form” and take other steps now.

On the quadrennial review, “we should really finish developing a record, but go forward with an elimination of the newspaper broadcast cross-ownership ban, if the record indeed bears that out, which I hypothesize it will,” McDowell said. Of existing limits on common ownership of daily newspapers and radio or TV stations in a market, he envisions “certainly major reform, largely eliminating it” if not doing so completely: “Except perhaps in markets where there are no voices” from traditional media. Clyburn noted the FCC continues getting feedback about Waldman’s report, and that she feels the Phoenix event “will hopefully shed light on the areas that are most important to consumers.”

FCC rules on what noncommercial stations can and can’t do to raise money, such as letting them identify sponsors without advertising their products, are confusing to licensees, several witnesses said. “The lines get very blurry and very difficult, so I think it’s time to take a hard look” at them, said National Religious Broadcasters General Counsel Craig Parshall. CEO Laura Walker of New York Public Radio would “encourage the FCC to look at those guidelines to see how they can be clarified,” she said: “Because sometimes we are really confused” about the rules. Veteran TV-station lawyer Jon Blake of Covington & Burling noted that “different stations want different things” in terms of fundraising, “and it’s hard to reconcile the desire to not be too commercial, which many believe is a high priority, with the desire to liberalize” rules.

The seven broadcasting companies for which Blake testified support some online disclosure, he said. It generally “makes sense to us,” he said. He was speaking for Belo Corp., Gannett, the Washington Post Co.’s TV unit, Raycom Media and others. The agency should “avoid undue complexity and undue burden” in any new disclosure regulations, and “take into account the realities of broadcast station operations,” he said: News employees often keep up paperwork.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which disburses government money to public stations, ought to do more to ensure that recipients use the money as intended, said ASU Professor Len Downie. “Too many stations give their local news low priority among their limited resources and are moving too slowly to coordinate with other local media.” The CPB needs more flexibility, he said: “Perhaps it’s time for the CPB to add more stick to its carrots.” Free Press Policy Counsel Corie Wright worried whether the news arrangements between local websites and TV stations would lead the broadcasters to effectively outsource their news. Or, she said, the upstart websites “can fill in the gaps of broadcasters but also challenge them through competition to be better.”

Ex-Obama administration official Susan Crawford said the FCC needs to do “much more” to free up frequencies for unlicensed spectrum use. “It’s time to step up the commission’s efforts in this area” and “revitalize the social compact” for all people in the U.S. to get broadband, said Crawford, now at Yeshiva University’s law school. “It is not the commission’s job to optimize revenue” to the U.S. Treasury or for major telcos from reallocating spectrum, she said. Genachowski later said the FCC seeks spectrum legislation to give it enough flexibility to serve “all of these different needs,” and “of course we're advocating” for white spaces-type use.

Online information, “locked up in PDFs,” and other files that can’t be searched on the Internet hinder the spread of content, said Vice President Nicol Turner-Lee of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. Genachowski later responded that the government is making efforts to make more types of information searchable.

Waldman, leaving the FCC this week, will work at Columbia University “to continue working on these issues,” he said at the end of the two-and-a-half hour event. As the topic came up of more states having C-SPAN-like channels, a recommendation of his report, he noted that the cable industry declined the invitation to send anyone to testify. An NCTA spokesman declined to comment. Waldman hopes to “preserve the positives that are coming about because of technological change,” he said, while “filling in the gaps” where there’s not enough coverage.