Reconstituted FCC Diversity Committee Sought by McDowell
The FCC should waste no time in reinvigorating its diversity committee, especially since an appeals court recently sent back to the agency rules on the subject, Commissioner Robert McDowell said Thursday. Last month’s remand of a diversity order and media ownership rules from 2008 by the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia shows why it’s timely for the Committee on Diversity for Communications in the Digital Age to become active once again, McDowell said. And “I think we have had some needless delays there of months or of a year” in getting the 3rd Circuit’s ruling, because the commission had sought to put Prometheus Radio Project v. FCC on hold, he told a Minority Media and Telecom Council conference. He had opposed that stay.
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McDowell said he hopes to hear FCC Chief of Staff Eddie Lazarus, when he speaks to the MMTC event on Friday, detail plans for rejuvenating the diversity panel. “Hopefully he will have a pleasant message for us,” McDowell said. With the 3rd Circuit ruling, “now is a good time” to name new members to the committee, he said. McDowell noted that the panel has been reconstituted.
Shortly after McDowell finished speaking, three more studies for the current media ownership rule review were released by in the FCC’s daily digest. That had been expected (CD July 18 p8), and leaves three more studies to be released. After that research is finished, agency officials have said they expect the commission to release a rulemaking notice on the media ownership review, which Congress mandated for 2010. A Media Bureau spokeswoman declined to comment on McDowell’s remarks.
"Now is a good time” to reconstitute the diversity committee, with the 3rd Circuit ruling, McDowell said. He wants it “back to work as soon as possible.” Ex-commissioner Henry Rivera, a communications lawyer at Wiley Rein who heads the committee, said “that would be good.” McDowell called Rivera, who moderated the panel where McDowell spoke, “a general without an army. ... So, now we need to populate it."
The committee hasn’t met since it was reconstituted in January, and the agency is reviewing the many nominations for members, an FCC official told us. Before people can be appointed to the body, they need to be vetted by the FCC Office of General Counsel, the official noted. Dec. 2 was the last meeting of the diversity committee, and the next month it was rechartered for two years, according to documents accessible on the panel’s website (http://xrl.us/bk2q7d). The FCC chairman appoints the members, the committee will meet twice a year and has an annual budget of $150,000, its charter said.
McDowell said he hopes the media ownership rulemaking will be completed in a timely manner. A notice of inquiry into the current quadrennial review is a “foundation,” and “we need to move to a notice of proposed rulemaking,” he added. “I hope that will be as fast as populating the diversity committee.” It took a year and a half between the release in 2006 of the rulemaking notice on the previous review and its completion, McDowell noted. If it takes that long to finish the current proceeding, it would be finished “right in the middle of an election cycle,” he said. That doesn’t bother him, but he said “it might strike some others” as bad timing.
With eight studies complete, the FCC will seek “formal comment” on all 11 of them via a rulemaking notice, said a commission public notice on Thursday. “All comments on the studies should be submitted to the Commission for consideration at that time. We are releasing the studies earlier, in order to provide parties additional time to review the results and the underlying data.” The new research, at http://xrl.us/bkz6ju, is a study on local media ownership and quality, on local information programming and the structure of TV markets, and broadcast ownership rules and “innovation.”