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Graham Brock, Inc. |
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Broadcast Technical Consultants |
| Vol. XI, No. 7 |
R. Stuart Graham, Jr. |
| July 2004 |
Jefferson G. Brock |
| Late last month, the United States Court of Appeals
for the Third Circuit, issued its decision on the
Commission’s ownership rules which were to have taken
effect in June 2003. The Court remanded some of the
rules back to the FCC for further analysis and
justification, but did find that the Commission
satisfactorily made its case for the removal of the
newspaper/broadcast cross ownership rules and the use of
Arbitron data for radio ownership studies. They did
note, however, that the Commission failed to justify the
number of outlets a single owner could have in a
particular market. They also kept in place a stay
preventing the Commission from using the revised rules.
Therefore, the older contour overlap method for radio
studies is still in place, as is the number of stations
which can be owned in a particular “market”. There has
been no indication what the FCC will do with respect to
this decision; they can appeal and/or consider
refinements and changes to the rules they attempted to
put in place. Stay tuned !!! |
| Non-Commercial Settlement Window
Announced |
| The FCC has announced that it will allow certain
groups with pending mutually exclusive applications
for new non-commercial stations, one last
opportunity to settle the matter, or develop an
engineering solution, before the Commission uses the
recently upheld non-commercial comparative criteria
to select a prospective permittee. The FCC is also
waiving, for the duration of this window, their
limits on reimbursable amounts and allowing
applicants within a mutually exclusive group to make
minor amendments to their applications that will
remove the conflicts. This option may allow
applicants to relocate up or down three channels to
remove the impact to one or more applications. A
list of the applications that may take advantage of
this settlement opportunity can be found on the
Commission’s Media Bureau, Audio Division web page,
www.fcc.gov. Settlements of all mutually exclusive
applications in a group must be made in order for
the Commission to consider them. The window for
submitting settlements closes on August 13th. |
| Recording Station Programming |
| The FCC has issued a Notice of Proposed Rule
Making in which it suggests that broadcast
stations may be required to record all
programming between 6 AM and 10 PM, and retain
the recordings for 60 or 90 days. This proposal
is to increase the effectiveness of the
Commission’s enforcement of restrictions on
obscene, indecent and profane broadcast
programing. In many complaints the Commission
receives, the complaining party does not have to
submit a recording of the programming in
question. This proposal would theoretically
allow the broadcaster to go back to the date in
question and re-listen to the portion of the
program in dispute. The Notice was released July
8th, and comments will be due no later than July
30th, 2004 (reply comments by August 30th,
2004). |
| The Auctions are Coming
And Soon ! |
| The auction for 290 FM allotments is
scheduled to begin on November 3, 2004. In
advance of the actual auction, the FCC will
open a window from July 22, 2004, through
August 6, 2004 for the submission of FCC
Form 175. Parties wishing to participate in
the auction, for any or all of the channels,
must make their intentions clear on the
form. There is no filing fee associated with
the submission of this form, and interested
parties are allowed to specify coordinates
for a new site for the channel (or channels)
they seek to acquire. Bidders must submit
deposits for the channel (or channels) by
September 24. Failure to meet the deadlines
will prevent a party from participating in
November. Between July 22 and August 6, the
Commission will not accept applications for
minor changes of either commercial or
non-commercial FM facilities. This is to
insure no applications are filed which may
conflict with any of the 290 channels or
preferred sites submitted with the 175
applications. Following this short “freeze”,
the databases will be updated to reflect
sites of preference for the auction process.
Minor change applications for existing
stations may then be filed. |
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