Monty Tayloe

A unanimous U.S. Supreme Court on Friday upheld a law requiring ByteDance to divest TikTok, citing Congress’ “well-supported national security concerns.”

The FCC’s bureau-level rejections of four content-based legal challenges against network-owned TV stations Thursday could complicate future agency moves against broadcasters over their reporting but won’t prevent it, attorneys and free speech advocates told us. When he becomes chair next week, Commissioner Brendan Carr could quickly reverse the Media Bureau and Enforcement Bureau decisions rejecting challenges against ABC-, Fox-, NBC- and CBS- owned stations. However, doing so could require the agency to defend upending decades of precedent, broadcaster and public interest attorneys told us. The decisions “draw a bright line at a moment when clarity about government interference with the free press is needed more than ever,” said Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel in a release Thursday. “The FCC should not be the President’s speech police.”

The NAB’s ATSC 3.0 task force, The Future of TV Initiative (see 2408300030), is expected to produce a final report “soon” members said, but broadcasters told us much of the impetus behind the effort has faded due to the coming leadership change at the FCC. Commissioner Brendan Carr, the agency's chairman-designate, is seen as more favorable to the 3.0 transition, broadcasters said. The task force first met in June 2023, and members said it would issue a final report in fall 2024. “It is a daunting effort to put that report together in a way that everyone can sign off on the language,” said Robert Folliard, a task force member and Gray Media senior vice president-government relations and distribution. “We expect the report to come out very soon,” an NAB spokesperson said.

Petitions denying Skydance Media's proposed $8 billion purchase of Paramount Global lack standing, call for conditions that would violate the First Amendment, and also raise concerns that are outside FCC jurisdiction, said Paramount and Skydance in an opposition filing posted Thursday in docket 24-275.

Consumer groups representing the blind support NAB’s request for FCC clarification of its audible crawl rule, according to comments filed in docket 12-107 by last week’s deadline. The FCC has continuously waived the rule for nearly a decade because compliance isn’t technologically feasible, according to broadcasters. Last week, the FCC granted its latest, a six-month retroactive waiver (see 2412200055). “To the extent that information provided in an accessible text crawl is the same as the information provided by a nontextual graphic, we are tentatively supportive of a minor modification of the rule,” the American Foundation for the Blind and the American Council of the Blind said in a joint filing. In addition, any FCC effort to enforce the audible crawl waiver would be “legally suspect’ in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling overturning Chevron deference, Gray Local Media commented.

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr’s recent warning letter to Disney CEO Bob Iger (see 2412240021) appears politically motivated, could be read as a reversal of Carr’s past stances on sticking to the text of FCC rules and evokes the long-defunct fairness doctrine, according to former FCC commissioners, academics and attorneys we interviewed. President-elect Donald Trump has selected Carr to head the FCC.

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, the agency's incoming chair, has waded into ABC’s negotiations with its affiliate stations while analyst and former FCC-er Blair Levin has suggested a way the outgoing chair could complicate Carr's attempts to thwart broadcasters.

The FCC’s Communications Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council’s working groups are making progress toward providing the agency with reports on AI security concerns, ensuring access to 911 as networks evolve and offering recommendations for 6G security, said the group leads during Wednesday’s CSRIC meeting. The groups are on pace to deliver several reports in 2025 and 2026, with the first -- on AI, machine learning and the specific security concerns they bring to communications networks -- due in March. “We believe this is a complex task,” said working group co-Chair Vijay Gurbani, Vail Systems' chief data scientist.

The FCC should grant broadcasters a brief retroactive waiver of the agency’s audible crawl rules to allow them to adequately display emergency information until the agency decides on a longer-term solution, nearly every commenter said in docket 12-107 responding to a recent NAB petition (see 2411290007).

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr’s Nov. 13 letters to tech companies (see 2411150032) about their relationship with news website rating service NewsGuard are inaccurate and repeat false information, NewsGuard co-CEOs Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz said in a letter Friday to Carr, the agency's incoming chair. “We wish you had reached out to us before sending your letter because it relies on false reporting about us,” the co-CEOs wrote. Carr also relied on reporting from Newsmax, which has “misled” the commissioner in order to undermine the service’s credibility because it rates Newsmax poorly, NewsGuard's letter said. “An analogy would be a maker of unsafe cars objecting to its rating by Consumer Reports by making false claims about the magazine’s testing process,” NewsGuard said.