FCC Reviewing Captioning Waiver Requests
The FCC is reviewing submissions from broadcasters whose captioning waivers were rescinded in October (CD Oct 6 p5) due to a flawed process for granting the waivers years ago, an agency official said. The FCC has sent notices to the nearly 300 entities whose exemptions were reversed, although a few are still being tracked down and may not exist anymore.
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The new rules state more specifically what broadcasters must demonstrate -- including economic hardship -- in order to receive a waiver. “Many of them continue to be deficient in what they provide so we probably are going to be sending out letters on what they missed,” the official said. “They may be very worthy of an exemption but our rules require that they at least have made an effort to work through the distributor. A mere attestation without any documentation or real explanation of why they can’t do this is just not going to cut it.”
The previous backlog of hundreds of old waiver requests still exists, dating back to 2006 or 2007, when the FCC began to rewrite the rules, the agency official said. “We've been working our way through this with limited resources. We are going to be sending out a second wave of letters” in early 2012, the official said. Some of those requests may be stale by now.
Advocates for noncommercial programmers have urged the FCC to bear in mind the expense associated with captioning. “The FCC’s decision was a good faith attempt to correct a closed captioning exemption process gone awry. However, now the commission needs to view the newest raft of exemption petitions with an eye toward the real financial burdens that TV broadcasters are experiencing, particularly the smaller ones,” said Craig Parshall, senior vice president and general counsel for the National Religious Broadcasters. While some TV stations have successfully implemented closed captioning, others are struggling with the significant costs associated. In one case, a programmer may have to close down a program aimed at viewers with a different disability because of the rules, Parshall said.
Representatives of hearing-impaired consumers wrote in support of the new FCC procedures, in a Dec. 1 filing submitted by the Institute for Public Representation on behalf of Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing. “We're generally supportive of the commission’s interpretation,” said Blake Reid, staff attorney for the institute. “Our hope is that the commission’s rules are going to maximize the amount of captioning that shows up and improve the accessibility.” Reid noted that a new study from Johns Hopkins University estimated that there are 48 million deaf and hard of hearing Americans. “We're really hopeful that what the FCC is doing here will improve accessibility of video programming for those folks,” he said.