Here are some of the regulatory developments of significance to broadcasters from the last week, with links to where you can go to find more information as to how these actions may affect your operations.

  • In anticipation of this week’s deadline for payment of annual regulatory fees – 11:59 pm, Eastern Daylight Time on Friday, September 24, 2021 – the FCC’s Media Bureau released a guide to computing the fees due for broadcast stations (Media Bureau Fee Filing Guide) and made available a fee lookup webpage. A separate Fact Sheet on who is regularly exempt from paying these fees (including noncommercial stations and those payors with total obligations of $1000 or less) was also released this week.  Read our summary of all of the FCC notices on the procedures and requirements for paying these fees on our Broadcast Law Blog, here.
  • The FCC released a draft rulemaking that asks, among other things, whether broadcast stations should be required to report their operational status to the Disaster Information Reporting System (DIRS) when it is activated during an emergency. That reporting is currently voluntary.  If the rulemaking is adopted by the FCC, it would ask about the burden that mandatory reporting would place on stations in the middle of an emergency and whether the burden would impede coverage by the station of the emergency, whether the FCC has the legal authority to require reporting, and the penalties that could be tied to a failure to report.  The draft will be considered at the FCC’s September 30 regular monthly open meeting.  (Draft Notice of Proposed Rulemaking)
  • NAB and two other media trade groups are trying to delay the effective date of the FCC’s new rules which require the on-air identification of programs supported by foreign governments (and require research by broadcasters as to whether any buyer of program time is a representative of a foreign government), while the groups pursue a review of the rules in federal court. The groups argue that they are likely to win in court, so implementation of the rules before the court acts would be premature and unnecessarily costly for stations.  We mention the foreign government sponsorship identification rules in one of our weekly updates, here and the court case, here. (Petition for Stay)
  • A New York federal district court judge issued a permanent injunction blocking Locast from any further operation of its service which had retransmitted on the internet the programming from over-the-air television stations without consent of the stations. The same federal judge two weeks ago ruled that Locast’s operation violated federal copyright law.  We noted that decision, here.
  • About a hundred organizations wrote Acting FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel urging the FCC to formally examine what is claimed to be the agency’s history of systemic racism in its policies and licensing. The letter calls on the FCC to “investigate its own history of anti-Black racism in the policies it has adopted” and to “identify reparative actions it will take to redress the structural racism that exists in our media system due to those FCC policies.” (Letter)  This letter comes as some of these issues may be considered in in comments due September 30 on the FCC’s rulemaking on whether to bring back the FCC Form 395, reporting on the racial and gender breakdown of each broadcast station’s workforce, and in the October 1 reply comments on the FCC’s inquiry into potential changes to its multiple ownership rules, including changes to the radio ownership rules, changes opposed by several organizations because of the alleged impact that changes would have on minority ownership (see our blog article here about the FCC inquiry on the ownership rules).