WASHINGTON—The National Association of Broadcasters has filed a massive document with the Federal Communications Commission detailing rules that it would like the agency to delete or revise, with the complete abolition of national and local broadcast ownership rules topping its wish-list.
Earlier this year, the FCC has opened a docket called “Delete, Delete, Delete” seeking comments on rules that need to be eliminated as part of a larger deregulatory push. The action has prompted a massive response from industry organizations, non-profits and individuals, with over 880 comments filed by 3 pm on Monday April 14. It is currently the most active FCC docket on the agency’s site.
In the filing the NAB continued its full court press for eliminating national and local broadcast ownership rules. It repeated many familiar arguments against the rules, asserting that the antiquated limits no longer reflect the realities of the media landscape and make it impossible for broadcasters to effectively compete against more lightly regulated tech, social media and streaming companies.
It also reiterated arguments previously made by the NAB to sunset ATSC 1.0 broadcasts and reduce or modify regulations that might slow the transition to NextGen TV/ATSC 3.0.
Last week the FCC opened a separate docket seeing comments on the NAB’s NextGen TV filing that will examine its proposals and others.
“If there was ever a proceeding tailor-made for broadcasters, this is it,” the NAB wrote. “Due to history – broadcast stations were the first regulated entities placed under the FCC’s purview – and a general lack of will, to date, the Commission has consistently failed to modernize, let alone delete, delete, delete, the myriad antiquated and ineffective rules that apply only to the nation’s free, over-the-air broadcasters. Simply because the Commission has jurisdiction over many aspects of broadcasting but not over the nation’s Big Tech and streaming giants, the Commission has traditionally donned blinders and addressed nearly every purported communications-related public concern by regulating broadcasters alone. This is a major policy failure that NAB1 has long urged the FCC to correct."
“But now, with Delete, Delete, Delete, the Commission has an historic opportunity to correct course, bring rationality to its regulatory regime, and make television and radio broadcasting stronger and more competitive with unregulated national and global companies that gobble up content and advertising dollars, while ignoring the needs of local communities,” the filing said. “To be successful in this critical endeavor, however, the FCC’s first step must be eliminating the national TV ownership rule and local TV rules and adopting NAB’s comprehensive proposal for local radio ownership modernization.”
Other major requests included:
- The commission should eliminate or at the very least minimize reporting obligations that impose extraordinary paperwork burdens on broadcasters while generating little-to-no benefit to the public. As part of that FCC should minimize the burden of the online public file and public file requirements; eliminate the FCC’s expanded foreign sponsorship identification rules; eliminate the eliminate the biennial ownership report requirement; drop antiquated requirements that compel broadcasters to announce renewals or transfers of broadcast licenses
- The NAB also argued that the EEO rule is ripe for reexamination and should be substantially “cut back.” In addition, it argued that the FCC should eliminate the EEO audit process, eliminate Form 395-B filing requirements and eliminate other EEO compliance burdens.
- The filing argued that the FCC to eliminate outdated Children’s programming rules, which the NAB argued are unconstitutional and unnecessary given changes in the marketplace.
- Following up on another recent NAB filing, the group also urged the FCC to permit software-based EAS operations. As part of its EAS requests, the NAB also urged the FCC to terminate consideration of certain unnecessary EAS proposals and said the rule governing “False EAS Alerts is “overly broad and ambiguous."
- The filing also addressed what the NAB called “certain unnecessarily burdensome accessibility requirements." The NAB requested that its proposal to update the Audible Crawl Rule should be promptly granted by the FCC. It also argued that the requirement to publish a station employee’s contact information to receive closed captioning complaints is unnecessarily burdensome.
- In addition, the NAB argued that FCC should eliminate rules that are duplicative of other laws or otherwise are obsolete. Those include eliminating the contest rule, which the NAB said is duplicative of other laws that protect the public from deceptive contests and the FCC should eliminate technical definitions that no longer are used or relied upon in the rule.
The NAB also urged the FCC to get rid of its “News Distortion Policy” which the agency has recently been using to hold up the Paramount/Skydance merger and to investigate TV stations accused of “news distortion” relating to their coverage of Donald Trump during the campaign. The parent companies of those stations were subsequently sued by Donald Trump.
“As NAB recently explained in another proceeding, the news distortion policy does not pass legal and constitutional muster for several reasons,” the filing stated. “First, the policy is not based on any explicit statutory mandate and therefore it is questionable whether the FCC has authority to enforce it. Second, the policy is contrary to the public interest and the First Amendment. The news distortion policy impermissibly chills speech and discourages coverage of important public issues. It also places the Commission into the intrusive and constitutionally suspect role of scrutinizing program content and the editorial choices of broadcasters.”
More on those "news distortion" investigations by the FCC can be found here, here and here.
The full NAB filing can be found here.
