Articles Posted in Low Power & Class A Television

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March 2012

This Broadcast Station EEO Advisory is directed to radio and television stations licensed to communities in Delaware, Indiana, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Texas, and highlights the upcoming deadlines for compliance with the FCC’s EEO Rule.

Introduction

April 1, 2012 is the deadline for broadcast stations licensed to communities in Delaware, Indiana, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Texas to place their Annual EEO Public File Report in their public inspection files and post the report on stations’ websites.

Under the FCC’s EEO Rule, all radio and television station employment units (“SEUs”), regardless of staff size, must afford equal opportunity to all qualified persons and practice nondiscrimination in employment.

In addition, those SEUs with five or more full-time employees (“Nonexempt SEUs”) must also comply with the FCC’s three-prong outreach requirements. Specifically, all Nonexempt SEUs must (i) broadly and inclusively disseminate information about every full-time job opening except in exigent circumstances, (ii) send notifications of full-time job vacancies to referral organizations that have requested such notification, and (iii) earn a certain minimum number of EEO credits, based on participation in various non-vacancy-specific outreach initiatives (“Menu Options”) suggested by the FCC, during each of the two-year segments (four segments total) that comprise a station’s eight-year license term. These Menu Option initiatives include, for example, sponsoring job fairs, attending job fairs, and having an internship program.

Nonexempt SEUs must prepare and place their Annual EEO Public File Report in the public inspection files and on the websites of all stations comprising the SEU (if they have a website) by the anniversary date of the filing deadline for that station’s FCC license renewal application. The Annual EEO Public File Report summarizes the SEU’s EEO activities during the previous 12 months, and the licensee must maintain adequate records to document those activities. Stations must also submit the two most recent Annual EEO Public File Reports at the midpoint of their license terms and with their license renewal applications.

Exempt SEUs – those with fewer than 5 full time employees – do not have to prepare or file Annual or Mid-Term EEO Reports.

For a detailed description of the EEO rule and practical assistance in preparing a compliance plan, broadcasters should consult “Making It Work: A Broadcaster’s Guide to the FCC’s Equal Employment Opportunity Rules and Policies” published by the Communications Practice Group. This publication is available at: https://www.pillsburylaw.com/siteFiles/Publications/CommunicationsAdvisoryMay2011.pdf.

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March 2012

The next Quarterly Issues/Programs List (“Quarterly List”) must be placed in stations’ local inspection files by April 10, 2012, reflecting information for the months of January, February, and March 2012.

Content of the Quarterly List

The FCC requires each broadcast station to air a reasonable amount of programming responsive to significant community needs, issues, and problems as determined by the station. The FCC gives each station the discretion to determine which issues facing the community served by the station are the most significant and how best to respond to them in the station’s overall programming.

To demonstrate a station’s compliance with this public interest obligation, the FCC requires a station to maintain and place in the public inspection file a Quarterly List reflecting the “station’s most significant programming treatment of community issues during the preceding three month period.” By its use of the term “most significant,” the FCC has noted that stations are not required to list all responsive programming, but only that programming which provided the most significant treatment of the issues identified. Article continues . . .

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This morning the FCC released copies of 16 Orders to Show Cause sent to licensees of low power TV stations that have Class A status. Class A status protects such stations from being displaced by modifications to full-power stations and, with the recent enactment of the spectrum auction legislation, qualifies them to participate in the auction (for a share of the auction revenues) while protecting them from being spectrum repacked out of existence as part of the auction preparations.

Each of the Orders is surprisingly similar, noting that the FCC sent letters to the licensee in March and August of last year asking why it had not been regularly filing its FCC Form 398 Children’s Television Reports with the Commission. The Orders note that the licensees failed to respond to either of the FCC letters, and that the FCC is therefore demanding they now tell the FCC if there is any reason why it should not relieve them of their Class A status, making them regular LPTV licensees with attendant secondary status.

It is possible that these are just the beginning of a tidal wave of FCC orders aimed at thinning the ranks of Class A stations. First, given that these stations were told they had not filed all of their Children’s Television Reports and they then failed to respond to the FCC, these are the “easy” cases for the FCC, since it can assert that the licensee effectively defaulted by not responding. Presumably, for each licensee that did not respond at all, there were several that did respond to explain why their Children’s Television Reports might not be showing up in the FCC’s database. These cases will have more individualized facts, requiring the Media Bureau to write more detailed and diverse responses. Drafting those types of responses will take FCC staff more time than this largely cookie-cutter first batch, and that is why there likely will be more Show Cause Orders being sent to Class A stations in the not too distant future.

Beyond proving once again that “you don’t tug on Superman’s cape, you don’t spit into the wind, you don’t pull the mask off that old Lone Ranger, and you don’t fail to respond to an FCC letter” (Jim Croce as channeled by a communications lawyer), the Orders are a bit surprising since the FCC had previously taken the position that, like full-power TV stations, the penalty for a Class A station failing to comply with a rule is typically a fine, not the loss of Class A status. While the licensees that failed to respond to the FCC letters in March and August certainly did themselves no favors, it is likely that loss of Class A status is going to be the FCC’s favored enforcement tool going forward.

Why? Well, as I explain in a post coming out later this week on the new spectrum auction law, unlike Class A stations, LPTV stations were given no protections under the auction statute, leaving them at risk of being displaced into oblivion, with no right to participate in spectrum auction proceeds and no right to reimbursement for the cost of moving to a new channel during the repacking process (assuming a channel is available).

However, because the statute gives Class A stations rights similar to full-power TV stations, every Class A station the FCC can now eliminate increases the amount of spectrum the FCC can recover for an auction, reduces the amount of spectrum the FCC must leave available for broadcasters in the repacking process, and increases the potential profitability of the auction for the government (since it can just displace LPTV stations rather than compensate them as Class A stations).

That the FCC seems to now be moving quickly to cull LPTV stations from the Class A herd just a week after Congress cleared the way for a spectrum auction is likely no coincidence. Instead, these Orders represent the first of many actions the FCC is likely to take to simplify the repacking process while reducing the costs inherent in conducting an auction for vacated broadcast spectrum. For the FCC, LPTV stations and “former” Class A stations are the low-hanging fruit in conducting a successful spectrum auction. The question for other television licensees is how much further up the tree the FCC is going to climb to make more spectrum available for an auction at minimal cost to the government.

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Around this time last year, I wrote about developments to watch for in 2011 in a piece entitled “A Look Ahead at 2011 Reveals an Interesting Year for Retrans, Renewals, and Indecency“. Fortunately for me, 2011 didn’t disappoint (at least in that regard), with indecency now sitting before the U.S. Supreme Court (oral arguments coming next week), the flurry of retrans negotiations at the end of 2011 bringing a fundamental change in the nature of retrans negotiations that I hope to write about soon, and license renewals being a hot button issue for radio broadcasters in 2011 that will expand to television broadcasters in 2012.

This year, I’ve decided to expand my predictions to include well over 50 events that will affect broadcasters across the country in 2012, and to even go so far as to predict the exact dates on which each of these events will occur in 2012. So with that introduction, I present our 2012 Broadcasters’ Calendar, chock full of useful information for broadcasters and those who work with them. No need to guess at FCC and other government deadlines anymore (which turns out to be a very bad way to achieve regulatory compliance), since you can now tell at a glance what deadlines are coming up for stations in your state and broadcast service.

Using the latest in aerospace materials and technology, and innovatively organized by date, the 2012 Broadcasters’ Calendar is new and improved over our 2011 Broadcasters’ Calendar, principally because it covers events coming up in 2012, as opposed to events that already happened last year (which, again, turns out to be not as useful in a calendar).

So if you are a broadcaster, please join me in greeting 2012 with confidence in your upcoming regulatory obligations, and the warm feeling that comes from knowing that (one more prediction!) 2012 will be a monster year for political advertising buys (see 2012 Broadcasters’ Calendar – Nov. 6 – U.S. General Election).

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At its October Open Meeting, the FCC announced that it was moving ahead on two proposals to “standardize” and “enhance” television stations’ public reporting regarding the programming they air, and their business and operational practices. The first of those items to be released related to the Online Public Inspection File, which we report on in detail here and here. The Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking in that proceeding has already been published in the Federal Register and the first round of comments in that proceeding are due on December 22, 2011.

The second item, which deals with the new disclosure form to replace television stations’ current Quarterly Issues Programs Lists and the FCC’s prior failed attempt to standardize and enhance station disclosures on FCC Form 355, has now appeared in the Federal Register. We discuss this proposed form in detail here. The publication of this item establishes the deadline for comments on the new form, which are due on January 17, 2012, with Reply Comments due on January 30, 2012.

The FCC has moved swiftly in getting these items published, thereby commencing the public input process on these proposals, and has indicated that they are a high priority at the Commission. Broadcasters’ best opportunity to influence how these proposals take shape is now. As a result, stations should review the proposed form and our analysis of both it and the related Online Public File to understand the impact these new requirements could have on their operations.

We previously noted that the proposed form is highly duplicative of portions of the Online Public File proposal. Regardless of what information is collected, having to disclose it twice, in two different formats, is a burden on broadcasters that the FCC appears to have not acknowledged. In addition, the new form being put forth by the FCC for comment, far from merely standardizing the way programming information is disclosed, could well end up standardizing what programming is actually aired, intruding on licensee programming discretion.

Broadcasters that fail to participate in these proceedings do so at their own peril, as the resulting regulatory requirements could well be the proverbial lump of coal that TV broadcasters find in their stocking this year.

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The FCC has announced the comment and reply comment deadlines for its recently-announced Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (FNPRM), which proposes to replace nearly all of a television station’s paper public inspection file with a more expansive online file hosted by the FCC. Comments are due at the FCC by December 22, 2011, with Reply Comments due by January 6, 2012. In addition, the public can also submit comments to the Office of Management and Budget regarding the proposal’s impact under the Paperwork Reduction Act by January 23, 2012.

This is an important proceeding as it involves far more than simply moving public files online. The goal of this proceeding, and the separate proceeding also commenced recently to replace television station Quarterly Issues Programs Lists with a new form (which we discussed here) is to create fully searchable databases of uniform information about broadcast stations and their programming that researchers, advocates and policy makers can cite in support of a particular regulatory theory, proposal, or complaint. Beyond the burden on TV stations in populating this database, broadcasters are justifiably leery of the long term impact on licensee discretion.

Historically, there has been a strong correlation between the FCC gathering information on the amount of programming being aired of a particular type, and demanding that more (or sometimes less) of it be aired in the future. Based upon this history, broadcasters can be forgiven if they feel a First Amendment chill down their collective spine when the FCC seeks more information about their programming decisions, and worse yet, declares that such information should be instantly available to anyone with an Internet connection.

As we have seen in the indecency context where the FCC has been buried by email complaints, some against stations that never actually aired the program at issue but which were incorrectly reported on the Internet as having aired it, making station information available by Internet risks drowning out the voices of local viewers and listeners with the shrill cries of distant agitators.

More to the point, given the power of the FCC over broadcasters’ license renewals, and the stress and expense of defending against even baseless complaints at the FCC, the path of least resistance for a broadcaster is to succumb to the pressure and program in a way that makes the government happy. The government may try to exert this pressure subtly (usually not), but like water passing over a stone, it inexorably wears the broadcaster down. The details of the FNPRM provide an indication of how much regulatory water the FCC is proposing to send broadcasters’ way.

In adopting these proposals as mere disclosure requirements, the FCC can implicitly denote what it considers to be a suspect program or practice without having to adopt a rule specifically prohibiting that particular program/practice and facing judicial scrutiny of the prohibition. Taken together, the online public file and program reporting proposals appear to be an exercise in “regulation by raised eyebrow,” with the modern twist of enlisting the Internet community to crowdsource station monitoring and complaints to ensure adequate pressure on broadcasters to get with the program.

Broadcasters as a whole recognize, and are dedicated to, meeting the needs of their local community. The FNPRM’s suggestion that they should also meet the needs of the global Internet community merely distracts from that fundamental mission. The reason public inspection files are so rarely visited by the public is that local viewers and listeners are already very knowledgeable about their local stations’ service to their community. All they have to do is turn on their TV or radio to find out more. They have traditionally shown little need for, or interest in, the public file.

Contributing to that disinterest is the anachronistic nature of the file itself. For example, what is the utility of a contour map to the average viewer/listener when TV stations are carried throughout the DMA by cable, satellite, translators and boosters, and radio stations are streamed throughout their market and beyond? While a good case could be made for scaling back the public file rule, the FNPRM’s effort to sprint in the opposite direction is difficult to fathom, particularly given how strained station resources already are in the current economy.

All television broadcasters (and frankly, radio broadcasters with an eye to the future) should carefully consider how the changes proposed in the FNPRM would affect their ability to function and serve their communities, and ensure that they let the FCC know just what that impact would be.

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All commercial and noncommercial educational digital television broadcast station licensees and permittees must file FCC Form 317 by December 1, 2011.

The FCC requires all digital television stations, including all commercial and noncommercial educational full power television stations, digital low power television stations, digital translator television stations, and digital Class A television stations, to submit FCC Form 317 each year. The report details whether stations provided ancillary or supplemental services at any time during the twelve-month period ending on the preceding September 30. It is important to note that the FCC Form 317 must be submitted regardless of whether stations offered any such services. FCC Form 317 must be filed electronically, absent a waiver, and is due on December 1, 2011.

Ancillary or supplementary services are all services provided on the portion of a station’s digital spectrum that is not necessary to provide the required single free, over-the-air signal to viewers. Any video broadcast service that is provided with no direct charge to viewers is exempt. According to the FCC, examples of services that are considered ancillary or supplementary include, but are not limited to, “computer software distribution, data transmissions, teletext, interactive materials, aural messages, paging services, audio signals, subscription video, and the like.”

If a station provided ancillary or supplementary services during the 12-month time period ending on September 30, 2011, it must pay the FCC 5% of the gross revenues derived from the provision of those services. This payment can be forwarded to the FCC’s lockbox at the U.S. Bank in St. Louis, Missouri and must be accompanied by FCC Form 159, the Remittance Advice. Alternatively, the fee can be paid electronically using a credit card on the FCC’s website. The fee amount must also be submitted by the December 1, 2011 due date.

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As promised at its last Open Meeting, the FCC has released a Notice of Inquiry focused on replacing television stations’ Quarterly Issues/Programs Lists with an online, standardized and searchable programming disclosure form. The effort seeks, depending on your point of view, to reform or to reinstate the failed FCC Form 355 that the FCC adopted in 2007, but which never went into use because of numerous legal challenges attacking the form’s onerous reporting requirements and overt programming mandates.

While the FCC claims that it is starting anew, as opposed to merely revising the old Form 355, it is not starting from scratch. Instead, the FCC punts on crafting a new form and asks whether the form that the Public Interest, Public Airwaves Coalition (“PIPAC”) has presented to the FCC will do the trick. That form would collect information regarding a television station’s programming in the following categories:

  • Local News: “programming that is locally produced and reports on issues about, or pertaining to, a licensee’s community of license”;
  • Local Civic/Governmental Affairs: “broadcasts of interviews with or statements by elected or appointed officials and relevant policy experts on issues of importance to the community, government meetings, legislative sessions, conferences featuring elected officials, and substantive discussions of civic issues of interest to local communities or groups”;
  • Local Electoral Affairs: “candidate-centered discourse focusing on the local, state and United States Congressional races for offices to be elected by a constituency within the licensee’s broadcast area”;
  • Closed Captioning and Video Description: whether programming reported on the form is captioned and what type of captioning is used, as well as ALL programming that is not captioned and the basis for its exemption; and
  • Emergency Accessibility Complaints: the number of complaints a station receives during the reporting period that its emergency programming is not accessible to those with disabilities.

The FCC asks for comment on a wide range of issues relating to these categories, such as whether broadcasters should report on individual segments within programs or only on entire programs, what constitutes a segment, and whether any additional categories should be added. The FCC also asks “what is an issue?,” which of course goes to the very heart of a licensee’s First Amendment discretion to determine what qualifies as suitable programming for its audience. It was the government’s concern about stepping on broadcasters’ First Amendment rights in the first place that led to the adoption of the more flexible Quarterly Issues/Programs List the FCC now seeks to replace.

As a replacement for the Quarterly Issues/Programs List, PIPAC is urging the FCC to randomly select dates during each quarter, and then require broadcasters to compile information regarding the programming aired in the above categories on those dates. As a practical matter, however, this would encourage broadcasters to focus their resources on small and numerous news stories over major investigative efforts, since a station that airs fewer but more complex and thoroughly investigated news stories runs the risk of getting no FCC credit if such stories don’t happen to fall on one of the “sample” days chosen by the FCC.

With respect to local election coverage, PIPAC proposes that broadcasters report all such programming aired during the lowest unit rate window (45 days before a primary and 60 days before a general election). Alternatively, the FCC asks whether it should use a composite week or two actual weeks as the appropriate reporting period and how it should give notice to broadcasters of its random selections. One proposal — that the FCC notify broadcasters within a day or two of the date it randomly chooses — would have the FCC perpetually announcing dates for which broadcasters must preserve information about election programming aired.

Despite the FCC proposing that the online disclosure form be kept as part of a television station’s new online public inspection file, the PIPAC form requests a great deal of information that would be entirely duplicative of that public file. This includes having a link to the online public inspection file (in which the reporting form would be found in the first place), as well as links to the station’s most recent ownership report and children’s television programming report (each of which the FCC has proposed to include as part of the online public file), station contact information (which the FCC has already proposed be kept as part of the online public file), information about whether reported programs aired as part of a local marketing or other agreement or required sponsorship identification information (which information is already included in the online public file proposal), as well as such basic information as whether the station is commercial or noncommercial, the DMA in which it is located, and its network affiliation.

PIPAC created its form before the FCC released the proposal for a new online public file, and it is readily apparent that the PIPAC form is in many ways redundant with the FCC’s proposal. Oddly, however, the FCC seems to be considering the PIPAC form as a complement to an online public file, rather than as merely a duplicative addition to that file. As we noted earlier, there is a worrisome undercurrent in these proceedings that the FCC’s focus is on facilitating the efforts of distant policy advocates and academicians to hold a broadcaster “accountable” for its programming choices rather than on ensuring that stations serve the needs of their local audiences.

Organizations that have to be told online what a station’s affiliation or television market is, or whether it operates commercially or noncommercially, obviously are in a poor position to know the needs and interests of that station’s local community, much less whether the station is meeting those needs and interests. Instead, these proposed requirements seem aimed at merely providing a mechanism for pressuring stations to air more of a particular type of programming favored by the government or by a distant advocacy group. As Commissioner McDowell pointed out today in his concurring statement, it appears that stations’ local communities will benefit little from these proposed new requirements.

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In 2009, the FCC adopted an Order which expanded the types of commercial broadcast licensees required to file ownership reports on FCC Form 323 biennially. The FCC also established November 1 (of odd-numbered years) as the single national ownership report filing date for all commercial broadcast stations. As a result, all commercial full-power AM, FM, TV, and Class A and LPTV stations, as well as entities with attributable interests in those stations, were due to file their next biennial ownership reports on November 1 of this year. However, the Media Bureau issued an Order yesterday which moves the November 1, 2011 filing deadline to December 1, 2011. The FCC indicates that despite the change in filing date, the ownership reports should still include a snapshot of station ownership as it existed on October 1, 2011.

Keep in mind that the ownership report filing requirement does not apply to TV translators, FM translators, or low power FM stations. The FCC’s action also does not affect noncommercial stations, which continue to file their biennial reports on FCC Form 323-E by a filing deadline determined based upon the state in which they are licensed (rather than a single national date).

According to the FCC, the filing date was moved because “some licensees and parent entities of multiple stations may be required to file numerous forms and the extra
time is intended to permit adequate time to prepare such filings.” Despite providing the extra time, the FCC is still encouraging parties to prepare and file their ownership reports as soon as possible.

Having provided the extra filing time, the FCC will not be too pleased with broadcasters that fail to meet this new deadline. Broadcasters should therefore accept the FCC’s advice and try to avoid last minute ownership filings, which increase the likelihood of technical and other problems that can interfere with a successful filing.

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The FCC this morning announced a “temporary” freeze on the filing and processing of applications for full power and low power television stations on Channel 51. The freeze was announced in response to a petition filed in March by CTIA – the Wireless Association and the Rural Cellular Association asking the FCC to take steps to “prevent further interference caused by TV broadcast stations on channel 51” to wireless broadband services in the Lower 700 MHz A Block. More specifically, the petition urged the FCC to “(1) revise its rules to prohibit future licensing of TV broadcast stations on channel 51, (2) implement freezes, effective immediately, on the acceptance, processing and grant of applications for new or modified broadcast facilities seeking to operate on channel 51, and (3) accelerate clearance of channel 51 where incumbent channel 51 broadcasters reach voluntary agreements to relocate to an alternate channel.”

What is odd about the FCC’s announcement, however, is that freezes are normally implemented to “lock down” the engineering database to permit the FCC to analyze various engineering solutions using a stable database. For example, during the DTV transition, the FCC issued numerous freezes as it attempted to engineer a DTV channel plan that would allow each full power station both a digital and an analog channel to operate during the transition. That task would have been much harder if the database had kept changing during that time.

Here, however, the FCC is not freezing Channel 51 applications to give it time to resolve a Channel 51 engineering issue. Instead, it is freezing Channel 51 applications to ostensibly give it time to determine whether to freeze Channel 51 applications. That is a novel use for a freeze, and seems to prejudge the ultimate question of whether the FCC should grant the underlying petition.

Of particular interest is the fact that today’s notice goes farther than just a freeze, as it “(1) announces a general freeze, effectively [sic] immediately, on the filing of new applications on channel 51 and the processing of pending applications on channel 51; (2) lifts the existing freeze as applied to, and will accept, petitions for rulemaking filed by full power television stations seeking to relocate from channel 51 pursuant to a voluntary relocation agreement; and (3) opens a 60-day window for parties with pending low power television station applications on channel 51 to amend their applications to request a voluntary channel assignment.”

Typically, when the FCC issues a freeze, it is only on the filing of new applications. As a matter of fairness, the FCC will normally process applications already on file when a freeze is announced since such an applicant has already expended its resources to file an application that was fully grantable before the freeze was announced. That makes this freeze unusual, as it freezes even pending applications, and in doing so, pretty much “temporarily” grants the wireless industry’s petition.

That last aspect is particularly odd. In contrast to a freeze designed to “lock in” the current engineering situation while options are assessed, the freeze notice does the opposite, specifically encouraging Channel 51 applicants and licensees to amend their applications and modify their facilities to change the current Channel 51 engineering terrain. In other words, it is a freeze that is not designed to lock in the current situation, but to actively change the current situation.

If it wasn’t already clear where the FCC is heading, establishing a 60-day “window” for low power applicants to clear off of Channel 51 in response to only a “temporary” freeze would make no sense if the FCC didn’t intend the freeze to be permanent. A low power station that fails to file a displacement application during those 60 days could well be deprived of a subsequent opportunity to amend when the FCC adopts a permanent Channel 51 freeze. Otherwise, there would be no point in limiting such applications to a 60-day window. In that regard, the assertion in the freeze notice that the FCC’s action is purely procedural and therefore “not subject to the notice and comment and effective date requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act” will be of little comfort to the low power applicant who waits to see what “permanent” action the FCC takes in this proceeding.

While the freeze does leave the FCC staff some wiggle room to grant waivers for modification applications by existing Channel 51 stations where necessary to maintain service to the public (thank you Media Bureau!), it is apparent that the FCC has decided to begin winding down use of Channel 51, even though the wireless entities that bid on the adjacent spectrum knew that they were subject to interference from Channel 51 stations when they bought it.

Broadcasters not affected by this freeze should derive little comfort from that fact. The FCC has made clear its desire to recover 120 MHz of contiguous broadcast spectrum, which means that all channels higher than 30 would disappear. This Channel 51 freeze merely establishes the template for those future FCC actions, and soon the bell could be tolling for far more than just Channel 51.