NAB, Defending SSAs, Asks FCC to Reject ‘Blatant Attempts’ to Link Retrans, Ownership

Don’t let multichannel video programming distributors use the FCC’s review of media ownership rules to “import retransmission consent issues” about MVPDs’ deals to carry TV stations, the NAB said. The association defended shared services agreements, which let separately owned TV stations in the same market share news and other services, against continued MVPD criticism of SSAs as letting broadcasters abuse retrans rules. “Recent filings by representatives of the MVPD industry were blatant attempts to use ownership rules to skew retransmission consent negotiations in their favor,” the NAB said. Cable, DBS and telco-TV companies had visited the eighth floor several times in recent weeks (CD Nov 22 p8) to try to get the quadrennial ownership review to further tackle the issue of SSAs.

The agency should “reject these suggestions to further complicate the already complex analysis of broadcast ownership rules, particularly since there are no similarly limiting rules imposed on the MVPD industry,” NAB said. The association reported on executives’ meetings with Chief Bill Lake and others in the Media Bureau and with aides to Commissioners Mignon Clyburn and Robert McDowell. Filings were posted Wednesday in docket 09-182 (http://xrl.us/bmjyca). A draft rulemaking notice from the bureau on the quadrennial ownership review asks about SSAs (CD Nov 15 p5). MVPDs want the notice to ask specifically about pay-TV concerns, something FCC officials have said is under consideration.

The American TV Alliance, whose members include almost all major MVPDs, has led the lobbying for that industry. “NAB can run, but it can’t hide,” said a spokesman for the alliance of pay-TV companies, cable programmers and nonprofits seeking changes to retrans rules. The issue of SSAs and local marketing agreements “raised by ATVA members and others go directly to the heart of the media ownership review,” he continued. “It is more than appropriate for the FCC to examine the question of whether broadcasters are violating either the letter or the spirit of the rules, and doing so in a way that harms the public."

NAB said content and TV asset sharing deals improve news. Nonprofit foes of TV station mergers and acquisitions say SSAs hurt the quality of news, because there are fewer reporters in a given market to cover it (CD Nov 29 p8). They too continue to lobby the FCC for the quadrennial review not to loosen other ownership rules.

"Some stations are dependent upon SSAs in order to achieve efficiencies that allow them to provide more and better services to the public -- services the stations could not otherwise offer,” the NAB said. Broadcasters “commonly owned or operated through a joint agreement such as a local marketing agreement or SSA are more likely to offer local news, public affairs or current affairs programming,” the association said. It said it lacks data showing what just SSAs do, but that they do offer public interest benefits. A recent study, filed by NAB this summer in the retrans rulemaking (http://xrl.us/bmjye9), said SSAs and other joint TV-station deals let broadcasters that often are in small markets “reduce their fixed costs and continue to operate where it would otherwise be uneconomic to do so,” the association said this week.

Free Press meanwhile continued to make its case (CD Nov 29 p18) against letting newspapers and radio or TV stations be commonly owned in the same market, as the rulemaking notice proposes to allow waivers for in large cities in certain cases. Reports that the rulemaking proposes to reintroduce “a relaxed newspaper broadcast cross ownership rule” would bring back “a policy unsupported by the record in this docket,” the foe of media M&A reported a staffer told Zac Katz, chief counsel to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. Free Press noted (http://xrl.us/bmjyfo) that such a standard would be “substantially similar to the rule adopted along a party-line vote by the [Republican-led] FCC in 2007, but then vacated by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in July.”