The FCC’s top telecom priorities include the components of Chairman Brendan Carr’s “Build America Agenda,” stabilizing USF and deregulation, agency Chief of Staff Scott Delacourt said. NTIA Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary Adam Cassady said finishing BEAD "is job one," but other tasks include space policy revisions and identifying spectrum for commercialization. The two spoke Monday at Technology Policy Institute’s annual Aspen Forum.
TV broadcasters are positioning for a wave of deals in anticipation of changes to FCC limits on broadcast ownership, according to broadcasters, media brokers and recent announcements from station groups. Sinclair Broadcast announced in a release Monday that it's evaluating “all value-enhancing opportunities,” and Nexstar and Tegna are reportedly negotiating a possible deal. The rumors are likely an indication of pent-up demand but could also be aimed at mollifying shareholders, said broadcasters and media brokers.
The current administration's position on race- and gender-based governmental affirmative action obligations makes it unlikely that there will be future filings of the biennial ownership reports from broadcasters, Wilkinson Barker broadcast lawyer David Oxenford wrote Friday. The reports were instituted in large part to obtain race and gender information about broadcast ownership, as the data could potentially be used for FCC affirmative action considerations, Oxenford noted. In late July, the Media Bureau waived the requirement to file those reports for 18 months; they were to be due Dec. 1 (see 2507300070). Oxenford said the FCC's "Delete" proceeding has teed up a variety of other routine required filings from broadcasters that could be axed, such as the annual children's TV reports and the annual equal employment opportunity public inspection file reports.
Broadcasters called for the FCC to save their industry by immediately eliminating the national TV ownership cap in comments filed in docket 17-318 by Monday’s deadline. Meanwhile, MVPD groups, labor unions, public interest groups and conservative entities Newsmax and the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) disputed the FCC’s authority to alter the cap and said doing so would hurt localism, retransmission consent rates and journalism.
Ending the collection of biennial ownership data through Form 323 would eliminate virtually the only source of information about broadcast-ownership diversity, several civil rights and public interest groups told us. The FCC Media Bureau on Tuesday announced an 18-month pause on collecting Form 323 and seemed to indicate that the requirement to submit the data will be permanently deleted (see 2507300070). Halting Form 323 collection would be “yet another structural policy decision to brush civil rights under the rug, to obscure discrimination in the broadcast industry,” said Free Press co-CEO Jessica Gonzalez in an email. “It's a shameful and brazen dereliction of the FCC's duty to serve all Americans.”
The FCC's 2022 quadrennial review will be "inspired" by the 8th U.S. Court of Appeals decision on the 2018 QR (see 2507230063), said FCC Chairman Brendan Carr in a news conference Thursday. Carr pointed to the court's analysis of statutory language as informing the FCC's review. The 8th Circuit ruled that the language requiring FCC quadrennial reviews allows the agency only to loosen rules that are no longer in the public interest, not expand existing rules. The decision's elimination of the top-four prohibition means the agency's QR inquiry can be narrower, he said. The agency "obviously has to move forward with the quad," Carr said.
The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the FCC’s top-four prohibition and its extension to low-power TV stations and multicast streams but upheld the agency’s other broadcast ownership rules in a unanimous three-judge decision Wednesday on the 2018 quadrennial review.
The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the FCC’s top-four prohibition and its extension to low power TV stations and multicast streams but upheld the agency’s other broadcast ownership rules in a unanimous opinion Wednesday on the 2018 quadrennial review. Petitioners Zimmer Radio, Nexstar, NAB, Beasley Media and Tri-State Communications challenged the order in October. In weighing whether to retain broadcast ownership rules, “the FCC properly considered all three of its public interest goals—competition, localism, and viewpoint diversity,” said the opinion. “In sum, Petitioners have not shown that the Commission’s decision was not reasoned or reasonable.” However, the agency’s justifications for retaining the Top Four prohibition were “counter to the evidence before the agency,” the opinion said. The court also vacated the FCC’s extension of the top four prohibition to multicast channels and LPTV, and ruled that Congress didn’t intend for the agency to use the quadrennial review process to tighten regulations. The court will wait 90 days before issuing the mandate in the case to give the FCC an opportunity to provide “adequate evidence to support any of its articulated justifications for retaining the rule. If the FCC fails to do so, upon further order the mandate will issue,” the opinion said.
The FCC should “move expeditiously” to relax broadcast ownership and require a mandatory transition to ATSC 3.0, said NAB CEO Curtis LeGeyt in a meeting Monday with FCC Commissioner Olivia Trusty, according to an ex parte filing posted Thursday in docket 17-318. “Each day that passes without reform further disadvantages broadcasters -- and ultimately the American public -- in a land of unconstrained non-broadcast media giants,” the filing said. Recent objections to NAB’s push for an ATSC 3.0 transition timeline and tuner mandate are “disingenuous and blatantly anticompetitive” and come from “certain players in the ecosystem that are clearly threatened by a competitive free video service available to consumers throughout the nation.” Local broadcasters “are striving to secure a future that is free, local, innovative, and resilient,” the filing said. “But doing so requires timely, forward-looking action from the Commission.”
The FCC requiring a mandatory ATSC 3.0 transition would “emulate Soviet-era politicos” and amount to “blatant market meddling" for “dubious benefits,” wrote former FCC Commissioner and Free State Foundation Adjunct Senior Fellow Michael O’Rielly in a post Wednesday. O’Rielly compared broadcaster plans to generate revenue from their spectrum using ATSC 3.0 datacasting to “side hustles" and to “allowing mailmen to use U.S. postal trucks to deliver Christmas trees.” Even if a 3.0 datacasting business materializes, “remember that the government would be allowing broadcasters to leverage the spectrum that they use to offer these services for private gain and far afield from providing broadcast services to the public. Is this the best use of a scarce resource?” O’Rielly asked.