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NAB: FCC's Fails to Justify Media Ownership Order
RADIO ONLINE | Friday, August 26, 2016 |
In a letter filed with the FCC, NAB is accusing the Commission of taking a purposeful "head in the sand" approach to its required quadrennial examination of the media ownership rules. The letter follows a freedom of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by the trade group seeking materials considered by the FCC during the proceeding. The NAB wrote that the resulting collection of thirteen documents received on August 16 was "underwhelming."
NAB wrote, "as the Third Circuit Court of Appeals noted earlier this summer, the broadcast ownership rules 'lay the groundwork for how the broadcast industry operates and have major implications for television, radio and newspaper organizations.' Yet even incorporating the few documents the Commission excluded for licensing reasons -- the attached set of documents demonstrates that the Commission's decision to maintain and even tighten broadcast ownership restrictions has been driven by reasons that have nothing to do with a serious examination of data."
With the exception of the Knight Foundation study on increasing consumption of news on mobile phones -- which actually supports broadcasters' arguments that they are no longer gatekeepers to information -- NAB proclaimed that the records are "devoid of useful data. There is zero examination, for example, of the decline of the print newspaper industry; no record about how the Internet has helped democratize the flow of information; and nothing else that suggests the Commission performed the kind of rigorous inquiry that Congress mandated."
Instead, NAB says, the records include information that was already publicly available, including several that can best be described as "odds and ends." They contain, for example, the entire Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2016 (which, among other things, blocked the Commission's retroactive ban on joint sales agreements), two documents that serve only to prove the existence of the CW Television Network, publicly-available correspondence between several senators and FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, and, perhaps most peculiar of all, the Commission's "informal timeline" for consideration of merger applications-even as the rules continue to prohibit mergers.
"While the Commission will no doubt argue that the existing record provided enough information on which to base its decision to maintain its analog-era rules, these records expose a particularly lackluster and ultimately arbitrary and capricious effort by the FCC to seek out and consider other information that would show unequivocally how marketplace changes have nullified the need for the rules, at least in their current form," NAB wrote.
The letter concluded, "Ultimately, these records provide further evidence that the Commission's decision to maintain the existing broadcast ownership restrictions, including the wildly outdated printed newspaper crossownership ban, is arbitrary and capricious, and continues to be contrary to law."
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