Kidvid Order Expected 3-2 Party-line Vote, Largely Unchanged from Draft
The draft kidvid order is expected to be approved on a 3-2 party line split at Wednesday’s commissioners’ meeting, and will be little changed from the draft version released last month, FCC and broadcast industry officials said in interviews Tuesday. No substantive edits had been made to the item Tuesday afternoon, FCC officials told us. Commissioner Mike O’Rielly published an opinion column in The Hill Tuesday touting the order as “a reasoned and balanced compromise,” adding to the perception that last minute changes to most aspects of the order are unlikely. “It appears that the decision is a fait accompli,” said Parents Television Council President Tim Winter in an interview Tuesday. PTC has opposed the FCC’s kidvid proposals.
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If any changes are made to the item, they’re likely to be responsive to a request from Gray Television last week to eliminate a provision requiring broadcasters to send info on children’s content to program guides, a broadcast attorney told us. Even that change is seen as unlikely, broadcast and FCC officials told us. The agency may need to keep the provisions on program guides and other sections of the order that focus on informing parents in to make the order less vulnerable to legal appeal, a broadcast attorney told us . O’Rielly’s office said last week that the item was carefully balanced and thus difficult to alter (see 1907030034).
The draft order makes substantially less changes to kidvid rules than were proposed in the NPRM, the broadcast attorney said. No single group got everything they wanted, the attorney said. “Nearly all sides can claim some measure of victory, especially the children,” said O’Rielly in the column. “Isn’t this supposed to be about them anyway?” The order “sucks less than it did a year ago, but it’s still not good,” said Winter. The order is “a step backwards for children,” he said. The FCC didn’t comment.
The draft order would allow broadcasters to air one of their three hours of required kidvid content a week on a multicast channel, and also allow for non-regularly scheduled programming and sub-30 minute shows to satisfy a portion of the requirements. Broadcasters had sought to be allowed to air all required children’s programming on multicast channels. Attorneys told us the additional flexibility will relieve the burden the rules put on broadcasters, but opponents have said the changes will make it more difficult for parents dependent on broadcast to locate educational and informative (E/I) content. “Free over-the-air only households are precisely those viewers with access to multicasting channels; in other words, this population is not affected one bit by the reforms,” O’Rielly said.
The order will also shift reporting requirements from quarterly to annual, and eliminate rules that noncommercial stations display the (E/I) symbol on kidvid content. Broadcast attorneys pointed to the retention of the (E/I) requirement for commercial stations and the expansion of the time frame for kidvid content to 6 a.m. instead of the originally proposed 5 a.m. as further signs that the order is an effort at compromise. Children’s advocates have said that the order is one sided. “As we see it, broadcasters are getting all of the benefits, and children -- especially low-income children -- will be harmed,” said Georgetown University Institute for Public Representation co-Director Angela Campbell in an email.
The item also includes an FNPRM seeking comment on allowing broadcasters to satisfy kidvid obligations through ”special efforts to produce or support Core Programming aired on other stations in their markets,” the order said. Opponents have described the FNPRM as raising a possible loophole to the kidvid requirements, but O’Rielly said it starts a process already contained in the law to let commercial broadcasters fund public broadcasters’ kidvid content. “Critics and powerful special interests insist that any changes to the status quo will harm consumers,” O’Rielly said. “But their arguments fall flat when we look at the facts.”