LICENSE RENEWALS COULD GET TOUGHER, GIVEN RECENT FCC SIGNALS
Communications lawyers and public interest advocates said broadcasters could face increased scrutiny when applying for license renewals over the next couple of years. After years of relatively lax enforcement, there are several signs that broadcasters could face stricter enforcement, they said, including: (1) Creation of a Localism Task Force that grew largely from the FCC’s embattled media ownership rule. (2) Calls from members of Congress and Democratic commissioners to examine whether stations are violating public service requirements. (3) Recent record indecency fines against a radio broadcaster. (4) Dozens of fines for public file violations.
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“All of this leads to a justifiable conclusion that there is a growing will at the Commission for stricter enforcement and potential stricter localism requirements,” attorney Gregg Skall said. But it’s too early to be sure whether broadcast license renewals already are facing increased FCC scrutiny because the latest round of radio license renewals started only recently, Skall and others told us. “With respect to existing licenses, they're being renewed pretty quickly and without much difficulty,” he said: “But we're only at the beginning of the process. TV stations haven’t even been filed yet, so I expect we're going to find out more later on.”
Some public interest advocates said the networks’ push for the biggest relaxation of media ownership rules in 30 years had the unintended consequence of focusing greater scrutiny on localism issues. For months before and after the rules were announced June 2, the FCC received hundreds of thousands of comments, almost all in opposition. Even without stricter public service requirements, the attention is likely to prompt a flood of public complaints that stations seeking license renewals aren’t adequately serving the public interest, said Angela Campbell, dir. of Georgetown Law Center’s Institute for Public Representation: “Once people start looking, they might find they have legitimate complaints… In this age of deregulation, the Commission has a lot of discretion on the issue of public service, so it all goes back to whether there’s sufficient will to do something about it. I'm still not sure whether the will is really there, or if this localism initiative is just window dressing.”
Even if public complaints roll in, critics bent on challenging a station for its license have a much higher legal bar to clear, experts said. This is the first full series of license renewals under the 1996 Telecom Act, which repealed a previous rule allowing members of a community to submit a competing application for a station’s license. Critics must prove a station isn’t entitled to a renewal expectancy, and the FCC has to deny the application before others can file for the license.
Media Access Project Pres. Andrew Schwartzman said he often advised clients not to challenge a broadcaster’s license, not only because of the new procedures, but because the Commission recently had been “indifferent at best, and hostile at worst” to serious license renewal challenges. However, he said the grass-roots organization of traditionally disparate groups opposed to FCC Chmn. Powell’s media ownership rules left him expecting a rise in renewal challenges. “There are a lot of angry people out there,” Schwartzman said: “The intensity of concern about broadcaster performance is so great that everyone is viewing these things differently now, meaning people are interested in filing challenges notwithstanding the likelihood the Commission is going to throw them out during the first round and they are going to have to file their challenge in court.”
Attorney Richard Wiley said the 1996 statute wasn’t meant to quell public opposition, but rather to give stations greater investment stability. He didn’t agree that FCC enforcement had been lax: “I believe broadcasters generally serve the public interest, and think the Commission does and should give them flexibility on how best to serve the public interest… If there are individual broadcasters doing something wrong, that should be dealt with. But I don’t think regulators should approach relicensing from the prejudicial perspective that all broadcasters aren’t trying to fulfill their obligations.”
Wiley, an FCC commissioner and chmn. 1970-1977, said he had supported tougher public interest requirements and would again, but only if critics better identified shortcomings. He helped develop the 1970s ascertainment requirements on broadcasters. Those requirements and others, including the Fairness Doctrine, were spiked during the first wave of deregulation under Reagan-era FCC Chmn. Mark Fowler. “If critics are able to prove that problems exist, and that leads the Commission to explore taking new action, I think that’s good,” Wiley said.
NAB said there was no evidence broadcasters weren’t living up to public service obligations. A spokesman said it was difficult to predict the outcome of the FCC’s apparent new focus on broadcast license renewals: “We strongly believe that a return to burdensome ascertainment, public interest program quotas and greenmail would be a big mistake. More than 20 years ago, the FCC concluded the old regulatory framework was unnecessary, and there is no evidence to suggest the current system of local broadcasting is broken.”
An FCC Media Bureau official said only that the Commission and staff would abide by the letter of the law when considering license renewal applications. -- J.L. Laws