Fox and Cablevision are to describe how they've met a statutory obligation to negotiate in good faith during their retransmission consent dispute, FCC Media Bureau Chief William Lake wrote them Friday. He asked Chase Carey, President of Fox parent company News Corp., and Cablevision CEO James Dolan to explain how each is satisfying the “important statutory obligation” to conduct good-faith negotiations. Also asked: “If you are aware of any conduct by the other side that you believe violates the good faith requirement, please so indicate and provide supporting evidence.” The responses are due at the close of business Monday. Cablevision welcomed the letter. Fox declined to comment.

A federal appeals court rejected an effort to revive a class-action lawsuit against wireless carriers and cellphone makers that had been thrown out on grounds it was preempted by FCC regulations. The case in the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, Farina v. Cellco, had bounced around the courts since April 2001. The 4th Circuit in Richmond, Va., had reached a similar decision two years ago.

Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., said he plans to introduce a bill to end taxpayer funding of public broadcasting. The action comes on the heels of NPR’s firing Senior News Analyst Juan Williams over comments he made about Muslims in an O'Reilly Factor appearance Monday. Williams’ comments “were inconsistent with our editorial standards and practices,” NPR said Wednesday. The incident “shows that NPR is not concerned about providing the listening public with honest debate of today’s issues, but rather with promoting a one-sided liberal agenda,” DeMint said Friday.

Three dozen nonprofits asked the FCC to resume collecting the numbers of minorities and women employed at each broadcaster, after a lapse of most of the past decade. They said late Thursday it’s far past time for the commission to require radio and TV stations to fill out Form 395-B yearly and for the FCC to disclose publicly each broadcaster’s information. Those requesting the commission action include the Communications Workers of America, Common Cause, Free Press, the New America Foundation and Public Knowledge. Broadcasters have asked that the data be kept private and submitted to a third party, not the FCC, a position that some still support, said nonprofit and industry officials.

Verizon reported net income of $881 million in Q3, down from $1.18 billion a year earlier. The results included 25 cents per share in non-operational charges, including a noncash charge related to pension settlements. Verizon Wireless added 997,000 net new customers --compared with 1.3 million a year earlier -- bringing its total to 93.2 million.

T-Mobile USA is looking to provide “a whole range of different pricing options” for its data services, Chief Technology Officer Neville Ray said in an interview at the carrier’s technology showcase in Washington last week. The company is “aggressively” looking at postpaid and prepaid plans to make data service affordable, he said. Many U.S. consumers don’t want to pay $30 or $40 for data plans, he said. Several major carriers have cut minimum data charges and analysts have expected T-Mobile USA to follow suit.

A House subcommittee chairman won’t be diverted from pursuing behavioral-ad legislation by the start of a multimillion-dollar self-regulation effort by a united front of industry groups including the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the Direct Marketing Association and the Better Business Bureaus, a congressional staffer said. The announcement this month of the Advertising Option Icon program for online education about cookies and access to an opt-out mechanism is “not going to slow us down” in pursuing passage of the Best Practices Act (HR-5777), Tim Robinson, counsel to the Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection, told us last week.

NEW ORLEANS -- Eager to extend their industry’s video reach to all IP-enabled consumer display devices, cable technologists are now openly discussing how they will make the big transition to all-IPTV. However, they're not yet sure how much bandwidth, time and effort will be required to carry out that transition. Speaking at the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers show last week, speakers from Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox Communications, Cisco Systems and SCTE said cable operators will soon begin the long-awaited IPTV migration by simulcasting their linear channels via an IP overlay. They differed somewhat over the number of bonded channels that cable operators will need to get the transition underway.

The U.S. wireless industry will run into a spectrum deficit as early as 2013, the FCC said in a white paper released Thursday at its Spectrum Summit. Chairman Julius Genachowski opened the summit, as expected (CD Oct. 21 p1), warning of the coming shortfall.

NTIA is recommending reallocating 115 MHz of spectrum in two bands for mobile broadband over the next five years as part of its plan for making 500 MHz of spectrum available for broadband over the next 10 years, NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling said Thursday. Only 15 MHz of the spectrum recommended by the agency is below 2.5 GHz, the spectrum most sought by carriers.