Groups opposed to broadcast/newspaper cross-ownership visited the FCC late last...

Groups opposed to broadcast/newspaper cross-ownership visited the FCC late last week. One foe of consolidation met with Chairman Julius Genachowski to tell him about possible ways a forthcoming order could deal with unfinished studies on barriers to entry for minorities, which some public interest groups have said should be completed before new rules are released. No vote on the media ownership rules that have been circulating since Nov. 14 or resolution of commissioner deadlock on how to proceed (CD Feb 1 p3) seems imminent, an agency official told us. The National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters now wants any quadrennial review order to “include a commitment to complete all studies needed to meet the Supreme Court’s Adarand strict scrutiny standard for implementation of race-conscious policies in the promotion of minority ownership in the broadcast industry,” NABOB said in a filing posted to docket 09-182 Friday (http://bit.ly/UoaYig). The order should say what studies the commission now is relying on and which ones need completing, NABOB Executive Director Jim Winston told Genachowski, Chief of Staff Zac Katz, Genachowski aide Elizabeth Andrion and Media Bureau Chief Bill Lake. Winston also said the agency should state it'll “allocate the necessary resources needed to complete the studies” and “spell out the timetable for completion.” The group told Andrion last month that ownership rules shouldn’t be relaxed without “developing a record” on the impact on minorities and women, since doing so wouldn’t comply with the appeals court ruling that sent the last quadrennial review back to the agency (http://bit.ly/XTEcDB). NABOB, which still opposes deregulation, meant the new filing to show how if the FCC proceeded anyway it could address some of the group’s concerns, Winston told us. A bureau representative had no comment for this report. Other groups also opposed to media consolidation still want the agency to study the impact of deals on women and people of color before acting on deregulation, they told Andrion, Katz, Lake, FCC General Counsel Sean Lev and Office of Communications Business Opportunities Director Thomas Reed. “The situation” of media ownership among those demographics “is in crisis and we cannot afford to lose any others,” said an ex parte filing (http://bit.ly/12RPD4m). “The Commission has evidence on the record that would, at a minimum, enable it to conclude that it should keep the existing ownership rules pursuant to the legal standard in the quadrennial review provision if it cannot obtain the diversity of ownership data it needs” now, said officials at groups that belong of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. They included the American Civil Liberties Union, Communications Workers of America, National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC), National Organization for Women, National Urban League and United Church of Christ. Some of those same groups said bureau officials agreed the bureau will give public notice of waivers for cross-ownership of a TV station and daily newspaper in the same market, as occurred for Tribune. Lake told the nonprofits that the agency wants “to retain the general prohibition on newspaper-TV cross ownership and merely sought to provide for greater clarity and certainty” with “a rebuttable presumption in favor of waivers in top twenty markets where: (1) the requesting party is not in the top four broadcasters within that market; and (2) at least eight separate voices will remain after the waiver is granted,” said a filing from Georgetown University’s Institute for Public Representation (http://bit.ly/12MsmMB). Bureau staff said they don’t “expect to base waiver decisions on program promises, but rather to assess the impact of the proposed merger on the local media ecosystem,” the filing recounted. The church, Free Press and NHMC proposed the agency require a station that got a temporary cross-ownership waiver to file a license renewal application at least four months before the waiver expired. They also sought “escalating forfeitures in situations where stations with expired waivers failed to come into compliance.”