Public Interest Obligations/Localism

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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? 

With the election over, broadcasters and their Washington representatives are now trying to decipher what the next administration will have in store at the FCC and other government agencies that regulate the media.  Already, the DC press is speculating about who will assume what positions in the government agencies that make these decisions.  While those speculations will go on for weeks, we thought that we would look at some of the issues pending before the FCC affecting broadcasters that could be affected by a change in administration.

There are two issues presently before the courts where the current Republican Commissioners dissented from the decisions which led to the current appeals. The FCC’s December 2023 ownership decision (see our summary here) is being appealed by both radio and television interests, arguing that the FCC did not properly relax the existing ownership rules in light of competition from digital media, as required by Congress when it established the requirement for Quadrennial Reviews to review the impact of competition and assess whether existing radio and TV ownership rules remain “necessary” in the public interest.  While briefs have already been filed in that case, it will be interesting to see how the new administration deals with the issues raised, as both sitting Republican Commissioners dissented, saying that the FCC should have considered digital competition in substantially relaxing those rules (see Carr dissent here and Simington Dissent here).  Even if the change in administration does not change the Commission’s position in court, the 2022 Quadrennial Review has already been started (see our article here), so a new administration already has an open proceeding to revisit those rules.Continue Reading How FCC Regulation of Broadcasters May Change in a New Administration  – Looking at the Pending Issues

  • The National Association of Broadcasters denounced recent threats to revoke broadcast station licenses for political reasons, stating: “The threat from
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  • The FCC’s Enforcement Bureau released its second EEO audit notice for 2024.  Audited stations and their station employment units (commonly
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  • The FCC’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau announced that the deadline for EAS Participants to file their annual Emergency
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October is, on paper, another busy month of regulatory deadlines for broadcasters.  But there is again the looming possibility of a federal government shutdown beginning October 1 if Congress fails to fund the government for the coming year (or pass a “continuing resolution” to allow government agencies to function at their current levels).  While as of today there are reports of a plan to extend funding through December, until a continuing resolution is passed, the threat remains.  If a shutdown does occur, the FCC, the FTC, and the Copyright Office may have to pause their operations which may result in some of the regulatory deadlines discussed below being delayed.  However, in some cases agencies have leftover funding to keep them functioning for a few extra days.  Stay tuned to see if any of the dates below have to be rescheduled. [Update – 9/26/2024, 9:00 AM – a continuing resolution extending government funding through December 20 was passed late yesterday by both the House and the Senate averting, for now, the shutdown about which we were concerned. Thus, the deadlines listed below are in effect as scheduled]

Assuming this recurring issue is resolved, let’s look at some of the October dates and deadlines, starting with the routine dates of importance to broadcasters. October 1 is the deadline for radio and television station employment units in Alaska, American Samoa, Florida, Guam, Hawaii, Iowa, Missouri, Northern Mariana Islands, Oregon, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Washington with five or more full-time employees to upload their Annual EEO Public File Report to their stations’ Online Public Inspection Files.  A station employment unit is a station or cluster of commonly controlled stations serving the same general geographic area having at least one common employee.  For employment units with five or more full-time employees, the annual report covers hiring and employment outreach activities for the prior year.  A link to the uploaded report must also be included on the home page of each station’s website, if the station has a website.  Be timely getting these reports into your station’s OPIF, as even a single late report can lead to FCC fines (see our article here about a recent $26,000 fine for a single late EEO report).Continue Reading October 2024 Regulatory Dates for Broadcasters – Quarterly Issues Programs Lists, Annual EEO Public File Reports, ETRS Form One, Comment Deadlines, and More

  • The FCC announced that it has corrected its CORES database which had overstated the regulatory fees to be paid by
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Our recent posts have been obsessed with the FCC’s regulatory fees and the issues with the CORES fee filing system miscomputing the fees for many radio stations (an issue that seemingly has now been resolved so that payments can be made by the September 26 deadline).  In doing so, we have minimized our coverage of some of the other interesting decisions and regulatory activity from the FCC and other agencies that affect broadcasters.  One of those actions involved the proposal of a now-silent AM station to move from the small Alabama community of  Bay Minette, Alabama to another small Alabama community, Spanish Fork.  The Commission issued a letter saying that they could not grant the application as the proposal would move the station from a rural area to a community within an urbanized area – the Fairhope-Daphne urbanized area.  The FCC found that this move would violate the FCC’s rural radio policy unless a showing could be made that there were public interest reasons to rebut the application of the policy in this case.  The letter gave the applicant 30 days to attempt to rebut the presumption against the move.   

The rural radio policy was adopted more than a decade ago to, in theory, preserve program diversity in rural areas by restricting the move of radio stations into more urbanized areas through community of license changes.  The policy restricts rural stations from changing their city of license to a location from which the station could place a principal city contour over 50% of any urbanized area (see our articles here and here for more details on this policy).  As the proposed move in the Alabama case would allow the AM to cover more than 50% of the Fairhope-Daphne urbanized area with its proposed new 2 mv/m contour, the change would be prohibited unless a special showing can be made overcoming the presumption against such moves, even though the move would allow the AM station to cover over 250,000 more people than it currently does.  The Commission notes that it also disfavors removing a second local service (a service licensed to a particular community) from a community of over 7,500 people.  As Bay Minette has over 7,500 people, and the town has only one other existing radio station, the move of the AM station would also run afoul of this policy.  These presumptions are very difficult, if not impossible, to overcome absent some showing that the FCC’s technical analysis is incorrect. Continue Reading FCC Applies Rural Radio Policy to Block Move of Silent AM Station to New City of License – Do We Still Need a Rural Radio Policy?