Wheeler Pulls Media Ownership Draft Order from Circulation

Draft media ownership rules circulated 13 months ago were yanked from circulation recently by FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, said agency, industry and public interest officials in interviews Friday. The draft order first circulated by then-Chairman Julius Genachowski and thought to have been largely unchanged when now-Commissioner Mignon Clyburn was acting chairwoman would have ended some cross-ownership bans, which cheered some broadcasters and daily newspaper owners and upset some groups critical of media mergers and acquisitions. The rules, to TV stations’ chagrin, would have made it harder for them to enter into joint sharing arrangements that JSA foes say evade media ownership limits (CD Nov 15/12 p1).

Career staff of the Media Bureau are thought to be at work now on some new media ownership item, said officials outside the FCC who oppose media M&A and those who support it. Some said they think the staff may be looking toward 2014, when the Telecom Act requires a new quadrennial media ownership order to be approved. The 2010 quadrennial review, which the draft circulated by Genachowski addressed, never formally ended. Also apparently getting attention from the bureau is how to address what some see as a lack of data on how common ownership of a station and daily paper in the same market would affect minority groups and women, said a broadcast lawyer.

Wheeler recently yanked the draft 2010 quadrennial review at about the same time he also pulled from circulation several other lower-impact drafts that had been awaiting a commissioner vote when he joined the agency, said a commission official. Amid the “civil rights community’s long-standing concerns with media concentration,” Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights Executive Vice President Nancy Zirkin thanked Wheeler for pulling the draft quadrennial review order, recounted a filing (http://bit.ly/18HdWB3) posted to docket 09-182 Thursday. The filing was on public interest groups’ meeting with Wheeler and aides overseeing media and other issues. (See separate report below in this issue.) An FCC spokesman declined to comment for this story.

Wheeler may combine the 2010 and 2014 quadrennial reviews into one order, said some broadcast officials who back media M&A. They said the bureau may be starting work on that. The bureau may use the extra time to address so-called sidecar deals in which TV station owners avoid limits on how many stations one company can own in a market by having others own outlets which they in part operate, said some industry and public interest officials. The bureau questioning (CD Dec 12 p5) Sinclair on such ownership in a deal where it’s buying Allbritton Communications’ TV stations may signal such a bureau interest more generally, and/or Wheeler’s, some said.

"Given the time limitations that the new chairman is facing, I've always thought that the likelihood was that they would start a 2014 quadrennial review and then roll the 2010 [review] into it,” said Wiley Rein broadcast and newspaper lawyer Richard Wiley. That’s because Wheeler was confirmed by the Senate “so late in the year,” said the Republican who was FCC chairman in the 1970s. He said his clients back cross-ownership deregulation. Genachowski’s draft would have ended a ban on common holdings of same-market dailies and a radio station, end a limit on cross-ownership of a TV and radio station and allowed waivers for common TV station with daily newspaper interests in top-20 markets.

Some at the FCC have called the decision to pull the draft an attempt to give the issue a fresh look, said agency, industry and public-interest officials Friday. “This was just the Wheeler folks saying to us we're going to take the opportunity to look at that again,” said media consultant and lawyer Cheryl Leanza, who made the ex parte filing on the public-interest groups’ meeting with the chairman. That “makes sense, because he is coming in” to the FCC, said Leanza. Some were “encouraged that he was going to take a fresh look at it” and “there is no sense on my part that they have drawn any strong conclusions” about how to proceed, said Leanza of the FCC.

The FCC is “way past the deadline” of Dec. 31, 2010 for a quadrennial review from that year, “but obviously nobody is mourning the loss of that item,” said Policy Counsel Matt Wood of Free Press, which also sent representatives to the meeting with Wheeler. “The broadcasters didn’t like the attribution for JSAs.” The draft “was kind of unloved by people on both sides for different reasons,” he said. “That didn’t give it a lot to recommend it to the new team when they came in.”