Some TV Public Files Put Online by NAF, as FCC Works on Order
A couple dozen stations’ public files are now online, posted by a researcher for a nonprofit that seeks such disclosure. That’s before the FCC moves to make all TV broadcasters put most of the files now in studios on the commission’s website. After several years of on-again, off-again work, the New America Foundation is making public documents it copied at radio and TV stations in some of the U.S.’s largest markets and some smaller cities. The files are “geomapped” with stations’ locations, so visitors to the site (http://xrl.us/bmwmv5) can see if an outlet in their area has its file available, said Media Policy Fellow Tom Glaisyer of NAF’s Open Technology Initiative. “If the FCC adopts the rules they're considering, this is what it could look like."
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Broadcasters continue to say it would be too burdensome to put almost their entire public files on the FCC’s site, as a rulemaking notice proposed, and instead want to hold back some information on political ads. They'll have more time before the government requires it, because an order wasn’t ready for the March 21 commissioner meeting (CD March 1 p9). Posting files online in an ad hoc way “might provide leverage for people to urge the FCC to make this kind of public filing more available, and I can see why industry would not want that,” said Professor Steve Wildman of Michigan State University, who studies how well media serve their communities. “One, it’s going to be time-consuming and a lot of work, and two, you're not going to know how it’s going to be used, what will people read into it, what will legitimately be inferred."
Media Bureau staff keep working on drafting online public file rules, but the work didn’t wrap up in time for a draft order to circulate three weeks before this month’s meeting, agency and industry officials said Thursday. Some at the FCC had thought the order would be put to a vote at the meeting (CD Feb 22 p2). Apparently because it’s taking longer for staff to figure out what parts of the political ad file must go online, work on the item continues, agency and industry officials said. They still expect the order to be ready for a vote this or next month. A bureau spokeswoman declined to comment.
The bureau’s grappling with how to incorporate a February proposal from 11 companies that own more than 200 TV stations into eventual political ad file rules, agency and industry officials said. The stations asked the agency to scale back the rule so that the entire file, which lists each political ad bought at the lowest unit cost (LUC) wouldn’t need to go online, with information on how much each campaign spends in total for spots provided by broadcasters. Nonprofit groups including NAF say the broadcasters’ proposal isn’t enough, and industry overestimates the burden of putting the entire ad file on the Internet. Free Press measured the size of public files at all TV stations in Burlington, Vt., where the NAB said (http://xrl.us/bmwmuq) a single outlet’s public file was 19.5 inches in height, and found that each was much shorter. “Broadcasters may be mistakenly (and vastly) inflating the size of the political files they actually are required to maintain,” with files in the market at 7-12 inches wide, the nonprofit said in an ex parte filing posted Thursday in docket 00-168 (http://xrl.us/bmwmuh). An NAB spokesman had no comment.
The 11 companies want to post online everything that’s “important” to the public to be able to view without visiting a station’s main studio to see the entire political ad file, said President Paul Karpowicz of Meredith Local Media Group, which owns 12 TV stations and backed the plan. The companies are saying to the FCC “we understand where you are trying to get” with the rules “and can we make some suggestions and thoughts on ways to accomplish your goals and not be incredibly complicated and difficult to deal with,” he said. They're saying that “maybe this will solve everybody’s problems,” he said. Stations may not know until the day a political ad airs when it will run, which makes reporting to the FCC in real-time every LUC buy impractical, Karpowicz said. “When these political contracts go in, they are very fluid” because often spots don’t run when buyers seek, “so you're looking for make-goods” to air them during other time slots, he said. “The actual spots are kind of shifting around."
It’s expensive to copy the files at TV stations, which sometimes charge for that, said NAF’s Glaisyer, who visited the outlets and said they all were cooperative and answered his questions. “What we learned is at 25 cents a page, transparency has a cost, which is very different from a download from the FCC website of a PDF.” The NAF will continue “collecting public files on an opportunistic basis,” but mainly will wait until the FCC makes the information available and then put it on the group’s website, Glaisyer said. NAF’s site (http://xrl.us/bmwmwb) lists public files from stations in Washington including WRC, owned by Comcast’s NBCUniversal, WTTG, owned by News Corp.’s Fox, and WTOP(FM) and WDCA (MyNetworkTV). In Los Angeles, documents are available from stations including Disney’s KABC. Wilkes-Barre, Pa. is among the smaller markets covered.
The commission’s plan to improve public access to the TV stations’ files is running up against the reality of burdens industry would face, said General Counsel Craig Parshall of the National Religious Broadcasters group. “The commission is trying to make things easier,” but it “may be at a slight blindside to our concerns sometimes,” he said: “But that just gives us a reason to articulate” the concerns to the commission to make them known.