The Senate could take up spectrum in an omnibus bill this year if the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction fails to reach a deal including spectrum, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said at a public safety press conference Tuesday. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., and other lawmakers said they would support that approach. Schumer and other members of Congress urged the super committee to include D-block reallocation in its recommendations.

ST. LOUIS -- Instead of taking the FCC to court, state regulators and consumer advocates should focus on working together with the FCC on implementing the Universal Service Fund revamp, FCC Commissioner Michael Copps said at NARUC’s annual meeting Tuesday. The FCC, which took many of the Federal/State USF Joint Board’s recommendations as it works to finalize the order, seeks to strengthen the federal/state partnership going forward, he said. Meanwhile, the outgoing commissioner said he plans to continue to advocate for media reform even after leaving the FCC.

GENEVA -- The World Meteorological Association secretariat has expanded a username and password system introduced to limit access to a small number of working documents in a steering group on spectrum coordination to include nearly all relevant documents at meetings since, according to interviews with participants and a comparison of the organization’s website, restricted documents we obtained and public information. The organization also appears to be hosting ITU documents on the WMO website without obtaining permission.

Public broadcasting lost more than $202 million in state funding since 2008, including $85 million in 2010 alone, a Free Press study said. The loss could restrict stations’ ability to produce local content and force some rural stations to close, Free Press said. In 24 states, funding was reduced each year over the past four years, it said. “Each year the cuts are compounded because they're against a brand new baseline and that baseline keeps dropping,” said Josh Stearns, associate program director. The key message conveyed through the report is “as anyone considers federal funding cuts, they have to be clear with what’s happening with state funding because so many broadcasters are doing more with less."

The FCC may eventually revisit a four-decade-old-rule barring multichannel video programming distributors from carrying games that are blacked out by sports leagues on TV stations in markets where the games haven’t sold out. The commission doesn’t seem poised to act right away on a Friday petition from several nonprofit entities and some groups saying they represent fans. Because the petition is styled as a way to cut outdated mandates out of FCC regulations, the commission may eventually start a proceeding on sports blackout rules. MVPDs and TV stations haven’t backed the petition yet, in part because they're scared of the leverage the leagues have over them in giving them rights to carry the games, said members of a coalition of five groups that filed the petition (http://xrl.us/bmimyk).

With the Thanksgiving deadline fast approaching for the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, observers are growing skeptical that the super committee will meet its goal of finding $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction. Democrats and Republicans on the special committee seem to agree spectrum auctions should be included, but they continue to disagree on larger, unrelated issues, Hill and industry officials said. Auctions could still make the cut in a smaller package to mitigate an automatic, across-the-board budget cut in January 2013 known as a sequester, telecom industry lobbyists said.

The facts underpinning the Supreme Court’s rationale for allowing regulation of broadcast speech have withered in the 33 years since the court’s landmark FCC v. Pacifica Foundation ruling, a coalition of public interest groups said in a brief filed with the court last week. The Center for Democracy and Technology, Cato Institute, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge and Tech Freedom were among several parties to file amicus briefs arguing the court should uphold a lower court’s ruling in Fox v. FCC that tossed out the commission’s indecency rules.

GENEVA -- A new chairman of the World Meteorological Organization steering group on radio spectrum coordination, plus improved funding, have not quelled concerns after the secretariat suggested substantive redactions to a January meeting report and the introduction of a username and password system that significantly reduces transparency in the U.N. agency. A group of about 30 countries raised concerns about the secretariat’s decision-making to boost the organization’s role in the international radio frequency process (CD May 23 p8).

The FCC asks about deals among multiple TV stations under separate ownership in the same market, in a draft rulemaking notice. The Media Bureau draft NPRM that circulated Nov. 4 (CD Nov 7 p19) asks about shared services agreements and local marketing agreements. Such deals let multiple stations share news and other resources without having the commission consider them commonly owned, which would be barred in many instances. The NPRM asks about the impact of SSAs, LMAs and similar deals on the touchstone of FCC policy goals: Promoting localism, competition and diversity, according to agency officials.

ST. LOUIS -- State members of the USF Federal/State Joint Board, the Federal/State Jurisdictional Separation Joint Board and the Federal/State Joint Conference on Advanced Services were schedule to meet with the FCC officials attending the NARUC meeting in here late Monday, after our deadline, John Burke, chair of the NARUC telecom committee told us. The FCC attendees, including Commissioners Michael Copps, Mignon Clyburn, Wireline Bureau Chief Sharon Gillett and Deputy Bureau Chief Carol Mattey, were expected to talk about the timing of the release of the full universal service fund/intercarrier compensation order and an overview of what is in the order, Burke said.