The Minority Media and Telecommunications Council no longer seeks an immediate vote on an FCC media ownership order that has deadlocked commissioners (CD Feb 19 p13). MMTC made a new proposal for steps to take before a vote on whether to deregulate newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership rules. The council last month sought a vote on the draft Media Bureau order before studies were complete on the rules’ effect on minority ownership (CD Jan 28 p7), saying if the research showed deregulation would harm people of color, the order could be reversed. Executive Director David Honig told us the council now wants the proceeding put on hold so a study the group will pay for on cross ownership’s effects on minority-owned stations can be done by a research firm.
Notable CROSS rulings
Georgia’s House Bill 282 is reigniting controversies and conversation on whether states should limit municipal broadband networks. Other states have debated and sometimes passed such laws in the past. The bill has attracted heavy media attention since it was introduced in early February, and last Friday FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski discouraged state legislators from passing such laws (CD Feb 19 p11). The bill proposes forbidding municipal networks if a region’s residents connect at speeds of 1.5 Mbps, a provision which has attracted intense opposition as well as support.
A new Communications Act would be a nice thing to have, but “it’s going to be very difficult to achieve,” former FCC Chairman Richard Wiley told a Hudson Institute event in a wide-ranging discussion Tuesday (http://bit.ly/Xj9V2P). Smaller pieces of legislation are more likely, although a “big new statute” would “make sense for the country,” he said. Siloed regulations don’t make sense anymore, he said: Broadcasters are regulated as public trustees; telcos as common carriers; and multichannel video programming distributors, cable and satellite are somewhere in between. “As we see in the marketplace today, all of them are providing functionally equivalent digital services,” Wiley said. He supported proposals to eliminate cross-ownership restrictions that prevent broadcasters from owning newspapers in the same market. “It would be great to have the journalistic tradition -- more news and local affairs -- available to radio stations,” he said. “People have come out of the woodwork” to say that lax cross-ownership rules are “going to end Western civilization as we know it,” he said. “I don’t think so. I think it would be very good.” Wiley criticized commission plans to crack down on joint sales agreements in TV as the agency has in radio. A draft order would attribute such ownership to the TV station doing the brokering, when it brokers more than 15 percent of another station’s ads (CD Nov 15 p1). That attribution is unfortunate, Wiley said, because those agreements help bring news into smaller markets where stations otherwise don’t have the independent financial ability to provide the news. Wiley’s law firm, Wiley Rein, represents some media companies supportive (http://bit.ly/15t0663) of ending the newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership ban (http://bit.ly/12J7Fpx). He lamented the “relatively low minority ownership of broadcast stations” in the country, pushing for “incubator programs” and tax deferment for minority ownership, that “could help minorities get started.” Wiley said the definition of MVPD -- and whether it applies to online providers -- is an important one that can’t be decided in a single complaint brought by Sky Angel. It’s such an important issue because so much programming is going to be delivered on the Internet, he said, pointing to Netflix outbidding the big networks for access to House of Cards. “It’s obvious there’s a new force out there,” Wiley said. “Over-the-top online programming and the carriage of programming is going to be increasingly important.”
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.”
President Barack Obama touted his executive order on cybersecurity during his State of the Union speech Tuesday as a step to “strengthen our cyberdefenses by increasing information sharing, and developing standards to protect our national security, our jobs, and our privacy,” and urged Congress to pass legislation to further the order’s goals. Enemies of the U.S. are “seeking the ability to sabotage our power grid, our financial institutions, and our air traffic control systems,” he said. “We cannot look back years from now and wonder why we did nothing in the face of real threats to our security and our economy."
An FCC waiver for a broadcaster that won the last two TV stations auctioned to change the community of license within Delaware of the one outlet the company hasn’t built out, “would serve the public interest,” said a Media Bureau rulemaking notice Wednesday. Waiving the agency’s freeze on such DTV channel changes wouldn’t require “additional technical changes,” said the notice seeking comment on Western Pacific Broadcast’s request to move WMDE from Seaford to Dover. Western Pacific also owns WACP Atlantic City, N.J., seeking guaranteed pay-TV system carriage in the Philadelphia area and, unlike WMDE, on air. An order (http://fcc.us/12AhUbb) also from the bureau’s Video Division denied the Broadcast Maximization Committee’s request to undo the 2010 allotment of Channel 5 in Delaware to Seaford. BMC wants that channel and channel 6 used for radio, not DTV. The section of the Communications Act the allotment was meant to address, that there be a commercial VHF station in every state, “poses a somewhat unique circumstance compared to other allocations,” said the order signed by Division Chief Barbara Kreisman. “To the extent that a proposed allocation of this sort is unusual, BMC does not identify any impropriety or legal barrier to the adoption of a new approach.” Western Pacific and PMCM, which unsuccessfully sought to move two western U.S. TV stations to Delaware and New Jersey so the commission would comport with that section of the act after the DTV transition, both are represented by the Fletcher Heald law firm. PMCM in December won a U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruling that reversed the agency’s denial of that cross-country community of license move (CD Dec 17 p4). BMC hasn’t decided whether to sue the FCC in an appeals court over the denial of its petition for reconsideration, said Mark Lipp of Wiley Rein, representing the council. Lawyers for PMCM and Western Pacific had no comment right away. Comments are due in 30 days after the rulemaking appears in the Federal Register, replies 15 days later, the notice said (http://fcc.us/X4rSkj).
The United Church of Christ cautioned against concluding that radio stations don’t augment the diversity of voices in a local market. If the FCC does so, it will “substantially undermine its ultimate goal of adopting rules that promote media ownership diversity for radio,” UCC said in an ex parte filing in dockets 09-182 and 07-294 about a teleconference with its attorney and Media Bureau Chief Bill Lake (http://bit.ly/VLwb7m). Significant studies, including several Future of Music Coalition studies, “provide evidence that radio stations do, in fact, offer a viewpoint regardless of whether they report original news.” UCC said there are no newspapers owned by people of color in the U.S. that are subject to the newspaper-broadcast cross ownership (NBCO) rule, and thus “it was unlikely that changes in the NBCO would result in improvements in the provision of news by owners of color through joint ownership.” Under the quadrennial review provision, the FCC “has the discretion to retain the ownership rules that promote diversity of viewpoint on radio,” it said.
Policy and proposed legislation to boost European network and information security were unveiled Thursday by EU officials. At the heart of the policy is the protection of fundamental rights on the Internet, said EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Catherine Ashton at a press briefing. The EU is determined to promote and defend its values online but also believes there should be norms of behavior among countries to protect against cyberattacks, she said. Hewlett-Packard and European telecom network operators cheered the initiative, but some of the proposals drew criticism from privacy advocates, an IT security firm and high-tech industries.
The United Church of Christ further urged the FCC to delay actions that loosen media cross-ownership restrictions until it conducts studies examining their impact on ownership diversity. UCC reiterated its concerns in an ex parte filing in dockets 09-182 and 07-294 (http://xrl.us/boffqc). The filing recounted a meeting between UCC and Media Bureau Chief Bill Lake and staff from the bureau. UCC said that repealing or relaxing the cross-ownership rules would have a detrimental impact “on the already low levels of radio station ownership by minorities and women.” It also expressed interest in the possibility of making the waiver process for newspaper/television cross-ownership restrictions more predictable and uniform, it said: It’s essential “that any modified waiver process grant the public adequate notice to exercise the right to comment on proposed waivers.” UCC also met with David Grimaldi, chief of staff for Commissioner Mignon Clyburn. UCC put its support behind the FCC’s “long-held common sense position that ownership diversity affects viewpoint diversity,” it said in another ex parte filing in the same dockets (http://xrl.us/boffsk).
The ongoing “Internet transformation” of video means the FCC should get from Congress the same authority to forbear from regulations as the agency now has for telecom issues, Commissioner Ajit Pai said. The 20-year-old Cable Act “is deterring progress, to the detriment of consumers,” he said Thursday at a luncheon of cable and telecom lawyers, lobbyists and executives also attended by commissioners Robert McDowell and Jessica Rosenworcel. Pai opposed, in a speech to the Media Institute event, a draft order’s making attributable for some TV station sharing agreements to the broadcaster contributing the resources, and said in a later interview that Democratic and Republican FCC members continue talking about ways to change the draft. Deadlock remains on the item, even as consideration of changes occurs, another agency official told us this week.