FCC

When the pending spectrum auction and subsequent channel repack take place, the two reserved channels that today’s broadcasters use for wireless microphones are at risk of going away. Major broadcast groups have asked the FCC to preserve them.

Retrans is no longer a nice, ancillary revenue stream; it is vital. Without it, local television is essentially a low-growth or no-growth business. What’s more, government could step in at any time to undermine stations’ retrans rights. And that’s why every station — not just the ones embroiled in the fight of the moment with cable and satellite operators — must stand united.

It’s still a vague threat, but FCC Acting Chairwoman Mignon Clyburn told reporters today that she’s “ready to consider appropriate action” if CBS and Time Warner Cable don’t settle the week-long contract dispute that has left millions of TWC subscribers unable to watch CBS and Showtime.

Regulators in Washington probably won’t heed Time Warner Cable’s call for help in a dispute that has blocked CBS shows from more than 3 million subscribers in New York, Los Angeles and Dallas. TWC, in a letter to the FCC released Aug. 5, asked the agency for “prompt action” to alter the rules to address “coercive” tactics by CBS. But FCC Acting Chairwoman Mignon Clyburn has said the agency lacks the authority to intervene, and rewriting rules for settling such disputes would take too long to end the current disruption, according to Paul Gallant, Washington-based managing director at Guggenheim Securities.

Sinclair-owned WBFF, Baltimore’s Fox affiliate, wants the signal from WTTG, Washington’s Fox O&O, out of Maryland’s Anne Arundel, Howard and Harford counties and has petitioned the FCC over the matter. Now Laura Neuman, Anne Arundel county executive, wants WTTG’s signal to stay, at least in her county, and has asked the commission to deny WBFF’s request.

Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), who recently won John F. Kerry’s Senate seat, on Tuesday asked the FCC to step in and restart retrans negotiations between the broadcast network and the cable MSO. “I believe the public interest would be best served if carriage is restored by the parties at the earliest possible time so that consumers are not long caught in the middle,” he said.

August brings a host of license renewal obligations, along with EEO public file obligations in a number of states, as well as noncommercial Biennial Ownership Report filings in several states. We also expect that the FCC will notify stations of the date for the payment of their regulatory fees (which will either be due late this month or early next).

President Obama has nominated Michael P. O’Rielly, an adviser to Senate Minority Whip John Cornyn, to fill a Republican vacancy on the FCC. O’Rielly’s nomination comes two days after the Senate Commerce Committee approved Tom Wheeler’s nomination as FCC chairman. But Republicans warned that Wheeler would not gain a Senate floor vote until his nomination was paired with a GOP nominee for the agency.

The string of TV deals capped this week by the announcement of a sale by Allbritton Communications puts pressure on the Federal Communications Commission to keep its eye on the broadcast industry even as the agency is going through its own makeover. Taken together, the deals signal a reshaping of the broadcast business as it consolidates into larger station groups that provide more leverage as they buy programming and sell it to pay-TV operators. As the industry shifts, the FCC has been slow to act with its media ownership rules in flux.

The House commerce committee Wednesday sent to the floor a no-brainer of a law that will allow the FCC to consolidate eight reports into one biennial communications marketplace report. It also gets rid of the anual telegraph report (yes, it’s still on the books!), a report that dates back to 1934.

The Senate Commerce Committee on Tuesday approved the nomination of Tom Wheeler as the next chairman of the FCC, although questions remain as to how quickly his selection will gain a floor vote. Sen. Jay Rockefeller, chairman of the Commerce Committee, urged members to approve the nomination, but said it would be left up to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to work out when it would get a vote of the Senate.

The FCC’s Incentive Auction Task Force recently released a number of materials relating to TVStudy, the software that FCC engineers devised to assist them in the modeling and analysis necessary to repack the TV spectrum. Unfortunately, the materials are a bit, um, technical in nature, so unless you’re well-versed in a lot of sophisticated engineering stuff you’re likely to have a hard time understanding what’s what. No problem. Mike Rhodes, P.E., of the engineering firm of Cavell, Mertz and Associates, has come to the rescue.

In joint comments, Free Press, Common Cause, the Institute for Public Representation, the National Hispanic Media Coalition, the Office of Communication of the United Church of Christ Inc., NABET-CWA and The Newspaper Guild-CWA say the FCC should deny the proposed sale because it violates the commission’s newspaper-broadcast crossownership rule or the television duopoly rule.

The American Cable Association, Time Warner Cable and DirecTV are objecting to a part of Gannett’s proposed $2.2 billion acquisition of Belo Corp.’s TV stations, saying that the deal threatens to drive up retransmission fees and risk even more station blackouts in negotiation standoffs.

When the House Communications Subcommittee convenes today to learn more about the FCC’s planned incentive auction, no representative of the low-power television indusry will be heard. That’s wrong. “It is the only group that has nothing to gain and everything to lose, especially if the repack is as aggressive as some would like it to be.”

The technical information includes a description of how to “pre-calculate which stations could be assigned to which channels in the repacking process” following the upcoming spectrum incentive auction.

President Barack Obama nominated Tom Wheeler as FCC chairman months ago, but the White House still hasn’t named a GOP candidate for the FCC’s other open slot. With Republicans still insisting both nominees move together, the Senate very likely doesn’t have enough time to confirm two commissioners before its August break.

The deadline for reply comments on the FCC’s Indecency policy have been extended. These replies had been due on July 18. But a request from CBI, a collegiate broadcasters organization, asked for more time given the extensive initial comments filed in the proceeding and the fact that college broadcasters have difficulties in responding to issues over summer school holidays. On Friday, the commission issued a Public Notice extending the deadline for these reply comments to Aug. 2.

The Writers Guild of America East has blasted News Corp. over its recent closure of New Jersey-based WWOR’s news division, alleging the move violates FCC rules. Seven news writers, all WGA East members, were dismissed July 3 as a result of the closure.

The fight over the FCC’s future returned to Congress on Thursday — along with the animosity that marked past battles, especially over its ability to extract the net neutrality-like concessions it won in approving the Comcast-NBCUniversal merger.

Criticism about the decision by Fox-owned WWOR Secaucus, N.J. (New York), to replace its nightly newscast with Chasing New Jersey continued Tuesday with calls for the FCC to revoke the station’s license. In a letter to FCC Acting Chairwoman Mignon Clyburn, Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez asked for a “prompt and thorough” review of News Corp.’s application to renew its license and a ruling about “misrepresentations by WWOR” that were first investigated by the FCC in 2011. Menendez’s criticism came a day after U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone also called on the FCC to not renew the station’s license.

In ex parte comments with the commission, the group enouraged the agency to hold hearings on various aspects of the incentive auction such as its impact on diverse communities, and detailed the consequences of the three-month-old freeze on broadcast TV station modification applications.

Led by Morality in Media, 70 organizations sent a letter to U.S. Senators urging them to oppose the nomination of Tom Wheeler to be FCC chairman if he will not agree to enforce the commission’s rules against indecency.

The FCC has received 15,850 complaints about loud TV commercials since new regulations went into effect in December of last year. The rules require broadcast, cable and satellite television providers to keep the average volume of commercials at the same level as the programming containing them. The FCC’s complaints run through June 5.

FCC Chair Mignon Clyburn showed during the agency’s monthly meeting Thursday that she isn’t just going to be a bench-warmer for nominee Tom Wheeler. With Wheeler’s Senate confirmation perhaps weeks — if not months — away, Clyburn presided over a full agenda in her first meeting, which included an update on the FCC’s progress in holding the all-important auction of wireless spectrum.

Has it really been almost a year since the online public inspection file took effect for TV licensees? Sure enough, Aug. 2, 2012 was the Big Date last year; since the initial flurry of public file-related activities, things seemed to have settled into a routine. But now the commission — keeping a commitment it made back in April 2012 — has asked for comments on how the political file component of the online public file system has affected the 240 or so stations that have been subject to that particular requirement. The responses the FCC gets could determine whether any changes should be made to the requirement before it takes effect for other stations.

We now know what the per-subscriber fee for cable systems lacking retransmission agreements with local broadcast stations is, and it isn’t “free.” FCC rules requires cable systems to have a written retransmission agreement in place before retransmitting the signal of a station that elected retransmission consent status. On Tuesday, the FCC upped the ante, proposing a fine of $2.25 million for TV Max Inc. and related parties for retransmitting six local TV stations to 245 multiple dwelling unit buildings in Houston without a retransmission agreement.

Partisan divides and procedural delays in the Senate could leave the FCC stranded with only three members and delay the confirmation of its new chairman for months — a threat to the agency’s work on spectrum policy and other high-profile initiatives. President Obama’s pick to lead the agency, Tom Wheeler, appears to enjoy early, broad support, but his political fate rests in the hands of a still-unnamed Republican nominee for the FCC’s final, open slot.

The watchdog group says the network’s filing is an attempt to “re-litigate the Supreme Court cases that it lost, rather than addressing the proposal by the FCC to focus only on ‘egregious’ instances of indecency.”

As other broadcasters urged the FCC to ease up on indecency regulations, Fox urged it to quit regulating broadcast indecency altogether. “Fox urges the commission to conclude it is legally required and logically bound to cease attempting broadcast indecency limits once and for all,” Fox Entertainment Group and Fox Television Holdings said in a filing Wednesday. “Time and technology have moved inexorably forward, but the commission’s untenable effort to define indecent content through a hodgepodge of inconsistent and uneven rulings remain stuck in a bygone era.”

Tom Wheeler, former head of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, is expected to be the next chairman of the FCC. Wheeler faced a confirmation hearing Tuesday and Timothy Karr of Free Press says there are a few questions he should answer before being confirmed, including:

• Will you protect Internet Freedom?
• Will you provide more choices for Internet users?

Disclosure of funding of political advertising has become a hot topic in Congress. And Republican Senator Ted Cruz made sure that FCC Chairman nominee Tom Wheeler knew that his fellow GOP members want the FCC to keep its hands off any attempts at imposing disclosure requirements on such ads.”This is the one issue that has in my opinion the potential to derail your nomination,” he said.

FCC Chairman nominee Tom Wheeler says he thinks that “it is possible to call upon our better angels with some leadership” to help clean up programming.

It looks like the FCC’s long-delayed multiple ownership proceeding won’t be decided this summer. The commission has asked for public comment on the report submitted by the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council addressing the likely impact on minority ownership of broadcast stations of allowing more media crossownership.

The Arizona senator touts his proposed Television Consumer Freedom Act in the missive.

Chairman John D. (Jay) Rockefeller on Tuesday announced that the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee will hold a hearing on the nomination of Thomas Wheeler to be FCC chairman. The hearing will start at 2:30 p.m., June 18, in room 253 of the Russell Senate Office Building in Washington. The hearing will be webcast live via the Senate Commerce Committee website. Refresh the Commerce Committee homepage 10 minutes prior to the scheduled start time to automatically begin streaming the webcast.

The deadline for comments on the FCC’s indecency rules was extended until June 19, confirmed in a notice published in the Federal Register this past week. Given this extension, it is worth reviewing what the FCC proposed to do in this proceeding, as there is a significant amount of misinformation circulating in certain publications and in rumors floating around the Internet about the scope of the proceeding and the FCC’s intent in launching its inquiry.

Broadcasters say yes and urge the commission to delay it until there are adequate safeguards for broadcasters and consumers. On the other hand, FCC Senior Adviser Rebecca Hanson says the commission is acting methodically and responsibly.

The current round of station consolidation has produced six more Big Four affiliate duopolies and one Big Four triopoly (Syracuse, N.Y.) that give broadcasters undue leverage in retrans negotiations with cable operators and ultimately drive up cable subscriber fees, says the American Cable Association.

The FCC prohibits the airing of Emergency Alert System codes and tones unless there is an actual emergency or EAS test. Last Thursday, however, life became more complicated for broadcasters when stations began receiving a PSA from the Federal Emergency Management Agency seeking to educate the public about the Emergency Alert System using the EAS tone to get that message across. Station operators were understandably confused and began to decline to run the spots. The FCC moved quickly (and quietly) to break from its prior approach, and on Friday released a decision granting an unprecedented one-year waiver of Section 11.45, permitting FEMA spots to use the EAS tone.