FCC Form 395B

Subscribe to FCC Form 395B

It is time for our update on the coming month’s regulatory dates and deadlines to which broadcasters should be paying attention – and the deadline that probably is most important to all commercial broadcasters is not yet known.  That, of course, is the deadline for the payment of annual regulatory fees – which must be made before the federal government’s October 1 start of the new fiscal year.  We expect an announcement of the final decision on the amount of those fees for various broadcasters, and the deadlines for payment, in the next few days.  Keep on the alert for that announcement.

A second big date for all commercial broadcasters is September 6, when the lowest unit rate period for political candidate advertising – the “political window” – opens for the November 5 general election.  During this 60-day period prior to the general election, legally qualified candidates buying advertising on a broadcast station get the lowest rate for a spot that is then running on the station within the same class of advertising time and in the same daypart (see our article here on the basics of computing LUR).  Candidates also get the benefit of all volume discounts without having to buy in volume – i.e., the candidate gets the same rate for buying one spot as the station’s most favored advertiser gets for buying hundreds of spots of the same class.  For a deeper dive on how to prepare for the November general election, see our post, here, which also includes a link to our comprehensive Political Broadcasting Guide. Continue Reading September 2024 Regulatory Dates for Broadcasters – FCC Regulatory Fees, LUC Window for the General Election, Comment Deadlines on AI in Political Advertising and More

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

  • The National Religious Broadcasters, American Family Association, and the Texas Association of Broadcasters jointly requested that the FCC stay the
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Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the longstanding Chevron doctrine, which required courts to defer to expert regulatory agencies, like the FCC, when interpreting ambiguous statutes, unless the agency acted unreasonably.  Since the decision, we have seen all sorts of TV pundits predicting the end of “the administrative state” (presumably meaning the end of the many rules passed by administrative agencies like the FCC).  In the broadcast space, we’ve heard many suggest that this might mean that the broadcast ownership rules (most recently upheld by the FCC in their December decision on the 2018 Quadrennial Review) would soon be a thing of the past.  As we wrote several months ago, when this case was argued before the Supreme Court, we think that many of these predictions are overblown.  While certainly last week’s decision gives challengers to agency decisions more ammunition to use in bringing such challenges, and likely will cause the federal courts to be flooded with more challenges generally, the decision will not end the authority of administrative agencies to adopt rules affecting businesses, nor will it bring about any immediate change in rules adopted by the FCC on complex issues affecting broadcasters, like the local radio and television ownership rules. 

First, we need to look at what the Chevron doctrine was all about.  Chevron did not deal with the power of agencies themselves to make rules, but instead it dealt with the relatively narrow question of the standards that courts should use in evaluating challenges to those rules.  Under Chevron, if an agency’s rules relied on an interpretation of arguably ambiguous Congressional legislation, the courts would defer to the agency’s interpretation of the law if that interpretation was a plausible one.  In other words, under Chevron, the agency’s interpretation of the law would stand if there was a reasonable argument that the law meant what the agency said that it did, even if a reviewing court thought that there was a better reading of the law.  So, the doctrine dealt only with issues that arose when there were arguably ambiguous statutes being interpreted by an agency like the FCC.Continue Reading Supreme Court Rejects the Chevron Doctrine – What Does it Mean for Broadcasters Regulated By the FCC? 

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

  • The FCC adopted a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking proposing extensive revisions to its Class A TV, LPTV, and TV translator
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Here are some of the regulatory developments of significance to broadcasters from the past week, with links to where you can go to find more information as to how these actions may affect your operations.

  • The FTC announced that it will hold a 45-minute webinar on May 14 at 11:00 a.m. ET to provide an
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Here are some of the regulatory developments of significance to broadcasters from this past week, with links to where you can go to find more information as to how these actions may affect your operations.

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

  • 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? 

On February 22, the FCC released an Order reinstating the requirement for radio and television broadcasters, commercial and noncommercial, to annually file an FCC Form 395-B.  All station employment groups with 5 or more full-time employees would need to classify all station employees, both full-time and part-time, by race or ethnicity and gender, as well as by the type of job they perform at the station (see the most current version of the form here).  The form, which will be amended to allow employees to be classified as “non-binary” as well as male and female, will likely need approval of the Office of Management and Budget under the Paperwork Reduction Act before broadcasters will be required to comply.  The Form would be filed by September 30 of each year after the effective date, reporting on the employment profile of the station in a pay period in July, August, or September (the same pay period to be used each year).

The Form is not new, though its use has been on hold for over 20 years.  A version of this form had been used by the FCC in the 1980s and 1990s, but its use was put on hold in 1998 as the result of court decisions finding unconstitutional the FCC’s use of this information to impose additional regulatory burdens on broadcasters whose employment profile did not reflect the demographics of its service area.  The court’s concern was that these additional regulatory actions forced broadcasters to make hiring decisions based on race or gender, a form of prohibited discrimination. Continue Reading Reinstating FCC Form 395-B Reporting on the Race and Gender of Broadcast Employees – What the Action Means for Broadcasters

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

  • The FCC adopted an Order that will reinstate FCC Form 395-B, which requires broadcasters to annually report their employees’ race
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