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President-elect Trump this week selected sitting FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr to be the new Chairman of the FCC starting on Inauguration Day, January 20.  As a sitting Commissioner, Carr can become permanent Chair immediately – no Senate confirmation is necessary.  Current FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel announced that, as is traditional, she will not only step down from her position as Chair on January 20 and will also leave the Commission on that date – leaving one empty seat on the FCC to be filled by the new President (to permanently fill that vacancy,  Senate confirmation is needed).  Until that third Republican seat is filled, Chairman Carr will be operating with a Commission split 2-2 on party lines, suggesting that initially any major Commission actions will need to be ones that are bipartisan.  However, when Commissioner Carr becomes Chair, he can appoint the heads of the Bureaus and Divisions at the FCC that do most of the routine processing of applications and issuing most of the day-to-day interpretations of policy.  As Carr has been at the FCC since 2012 and has served as a Commissioner since 2017, one would assume that he already has in mind people to fill these positions – and thus his team should be able to hit the ground running.  What policies should broadcasters and those in the broader media world be looking for from a Carr administration at the FCC?

Immediately after the election, we wrote this article about several of the specific FCC issues where we anticipated that a Republican administration would move forward with policies different than those that have been pursued by the current administration.  Since his nomination, we have seen nothing that would suggest that the issues that we highlighted earlier in the month will not be on the Carr agenda.  In our last article, we noted that the FCC could be expected to take a different tact on the reinstatement of FCC Form 395-B, the EEO form that would require broadcasters to break down their employees by employment position and report on the gender, race, and ethnicity of the employees in each employment category.  In one of his first tweets on X after his nomination was announced, Carr said that the FCC would no longer be prioritizing “DEI” (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) efforts – seemingly confirming, among other things, that a reversal of the action on the Form 395-B could be in the works (which could easily be done, as there are pending Petitions for Reconsideration of the reinstatement along with pending appeals in the courts).Continue Reading Brendan Carr to Become Next FCC Chair – What is Next for Regulation Affecting Broadcasters? 

  • The FCC’s Media Bureau released a Public Notice announcing the opening of a filing window for construction permits for new
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  • The FCC announced that it has corrected its CORES database which had overstated the regulatory fees to be paid by
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  • Congress passed, and the President signed, a continuing resolution to extend funding for the Federal government, including the FCC, averting
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When you have been representing broadcasters in Washington for as long as I have, you see cycles in regulation of the industry.  I was reminded of how long the FCC has been on a deregulatory cycle in reading today’s Washington Post obituary of former Democratic FCC Chair Charlie Ferris, who headed the FCC many decades ago when I interned there and when I later started to work in private practice representing broadcasters.  One line in the Post article in particular stood out – where Ferris was said to have “argued that unless regulations were ‘improving the market,’ they ‘were nothing but a nuisance.’”  Since the administration of Chairman Ferris, the FCC has generally moved forward to implement that philosophy of eliminating unnecessary regulation, with only occasional consideration given to the reinstatement of certain regulations (efforts that were often unsuccessful).  With the spate of recent rulings from the FCC, one questions whether the direction that Chairman Ferris pointed the FCC is now being slowed or reversed at a time when the market may well be crying out for an increase in the speed of that deregulation.

The obituary itself quoted one media observer as suggesting that the deregulatory direction in which Ferris took the FCC might not have been entirely successful, based on a persistent lack of minority ownership of broadcast properties, and “’a shortage of local, professional, accountable reporting’ in many communities.”  But are those failings ones that are attributable to the deregulatory trends of the FCC, or greater marketplace forces that have strained not just broadcasting but all traditional media?  In reading the media headlines in the last few weeks, one can’t help but conclude that the latter is more likely the cause, and that another quote from Chairman Ferris cited in the article has never been more appropriate, as he warned broadcasters: “If you cannot compete with new technologies, you will be overcome by them.”  As we’ve argued in this blog before (see for instance our article here reflecting on the warnings of another former Chairman, Ajit Pai), given the slew of new technologies available to consumers, imposing new rules on a broadcast industry flooded with new competition for audience and revenues simply does not make sense.Continue Reading Just Because the FCC Can Regulate Broadcasting, Should It? 

Last week, when the NFL playoffs and upcoming Super Bowl had everyone thinking football, Congress held a hearing on how streaming media has affected sports and other video programming rights.  We noted that hearing in our weekly update this weekend.  As we said in our update, the hearing touched on all the video media issues of the day – sports rights, retransmission consent, the changing balance between pay TV (cable and satellite) versus streaming, and similar issues (the House staff memo outlining the issues to be discussed at the hearing can be viewed here, and a video of the hearing can be viewed here).  During the discussion, there were even some questions about whether there needed to be some local access mandates for some forms of programming – whether that be sports or, probably more importantly, access to emergency information.  In some sense, that discussion provided some faint echoes of the debate over mandates to preserve AM radio in the car (see our articles here and here).  The discussion, and a review of recent articles on accessing sports events without pay TV that omit any discussion of over-the-air television, makes clear that everyone in the industry needs to do more to emphasize the role that over-the-air television plays in the media landscape before those faint echoes of the AM debate become pronounced.

While the hearing touched how some local television stations have been able to acquire some sports rights from failing regional sports networks and expand the viewership for those games, the role of local television broadcasting was overshadowed by the discussion of the rights issues and streaming video.  Yet the role of local media, including local television, is one that pervades many of the regulatory debates ongoing at the FCC.  The FCC and NAB are cooperating with other industry stakeholders in exploring the role of over-the-air television in connection with the roll out of the new ATSC 3.0 “Next Gen” television transmission standard.  The health of local television, and whether local ownership restrictions should be lessened to ensure that television can better compete from digital media that is directly affecting both the audiences and advertising revenue of every station, was part of the debate over the Quadrennial Review decision released by the FCC in December, and this issue is likely to be debated in any appeal that may follow from that decision.  Local over-the-air television also is under consideration in many other pending FCC proceedings, including possible review of the main studio rules, priority processing of applications proposing local programming, emergency communications issues, and many other topics under consideration at the FCC. Continue Reading Sports Rights, the Super Bowl, and the Perception of Local Over-the-Air TV

  • The FCC announced the circulation for Commissioner review and approval of two decisions of interest to broadcasters, signifying that we
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