Media General attorneys met separately Dec. 22 with aides to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, Commissioner Mignon Clyburn, and Media Bureau Chief Bill Lake to discuss FCC cross-ownership rules and broadcast spectrum plans, ex parte filings show. To Lake, George Mahoney, Media General’s vice president and general counsel, talked up the company’s Mobile DTV deployments in two markets, and its “interest in seeing that any spectrum modifications that the FCC may consider in the future do not interfere with its ability to continue to deliver its high quality local programming on a traditional, over-the-air basis and via Mobile Digital Television” a filing said.
Notable CROSS rulings
The FCC again delayed for 90 days a deadline for a group of media companies that own stations and newspapers to file requests for waivers from the agency’s cross-ownership rules, a Media Bureau order said. The new deadline is April 4.
The Commerce Department proposed adoption of fair information practice principles amounting to a “Privacy Bill of Rights” for online consumers, setting up a privacy policy office in the department, and reviewing the Electronic Communications Privacy Act in light of cloud computing, it announced Thursday.
Tribune to transfer radio and TV licenses and for waivers of cross-ownership rules banning common ownership of broadcasters and daily newspapers in a market (CD Sept 9 p4).
A disconnect remains between what the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said in Comcast v. FCC and what the “headlines” said the court had decided, commission General Counsel Austin Schlick said at a Federalist Society conference. He also questioned whether Congress will be able to approve “technical” rules for the Internet or whether they would better be left to the FCC. Schlick’s remarks Saturday could be significant, since commission Chairman Julius Genachowski is reportedly weighing whether to push for net neutrality rules without reclassification of broadband as a Title II service (CD Nov 22 p1).
CEO Eric Schmidt said Google’s wireless net neutrality stance has been badly misunderstood, and company policies have drawn lines in the sand against some tracking and personal identification practices. Google opposes discriminatory practices in wireless as well as wired broadband, he said late Monday at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. The company’s August outline proposal with Verizon for federal legislation didn’t change that, Schmidt said.
The FCC will set a precedent however it decides a complaint that a new cartoon on a Viacom channel violates children’s media rules because it’s based on characters used elsewhere to advertise athletic shoes, supporters and critics of the show agreed in interviews and recent filings. Those seeking commission approval of a petition for declaratory ruling on the show Zevo-3, which began airing Oct. 11 on the Nicktoons channel, believe that granting the request (CD Oct 26 p5) would prevent any further shows from being based entirely on characters that sell goods in other media venues. Opponents of the petition said its approval would not only stop future shows but also limit current ones.
A proposal by FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell for broadcasters to come up with their own standards on indecency has drawn some early interest from the TV industry but no pledges of the dialogue sought. FCC enforcement of its own indecency rules is restricted by a recent appeals court loss. The plan floated at the NAB radio show (CD Oct 1 p1) by McDowell, a Republican, hasn’t led to serious talks between the commission and industry, and neither side appears to have made an entreaty to the other to begin a conversation, commission and industry officials said. Some broadcasters are skeptical of McDowell’s plan -- which drew some support from one former FCC chairman even as another said it’s unworkable -- while others may be interested, executives and government officials said.
There’s “enormous precedential value” to how the FCC decides on Tribune’s request to transfer to a new owner waivers of rules limiting common ownership of daily newspapers and radio or TV stations in the same market (CD Sept 9 p4), opponents to the company’s pending application said. The agency’s “central policy favoring the gradual breakup of newspaper-broadcast cross-ownerships” hasn’t changed under new waiver rules, representatives of opponents said in a filing posted Monday in docket 10-104. “Comity with Tribune’s bankruptcy proceedings does not require the sale of Tribune’s media properties in their current cross-owned state.” Representatives of the Communications Workers of America, Media Alliance and others met with Chief Bill Lake and other Media Bureau front office officials to make their point.
The FCC is unlikely to act on Tribune’s request to transfer radio and TV licenses and waivers of cross-ownership rules banning common ownership of broadcasters and daily newspapers in the same market until pending bankruptcy issues are resolved, agency and industry officials predicted. Work by career commission staffers reviewing the deal for the company to emerge from Chapter 11 appears to have been slowed down because senior creditors of the company that were set to take control of it have abandoned that deal, they said. The officials said the regulator may be reviewing some elements of Tribune’s long-form application -- put out for public comment in May -- that aren’t directly affected by disagreement over bankruptcy emergence by creditors.