With growing calls for the Biden Administration to offer its nomination of an individual to serve as the official Chairman of the FCC, the NAB has filed comments with the Commission as part of its latest quadrennial review of broadcast ownership rules by staying the course on its quest to further deregulate the radio industry.
Given the chatter around D.C. over who would take over for Jessica Rosenworcel, the NAB’s words could easily fall on deaf ears.
In its comments, the NAB — the leading advocate and lobbying group for the nation’s commercial broadcast radio and TV companies — once again states that the current media ownership rules “are detrimental to competition, localism and diversity.”
That could be a hard pill to swallow for Rosenworcel and fellow Democrat Geoffrey Starks, as Democrats and liberals assert that a diversity of voices — a.k.a. less consolidation — has value.
And, with Gigi Sohn‘s name being tossed around Washington like a hot potato as a likely Biden nominee for FCC Chairman, any chance of further deregulation would be erased until at least January 2025, should a Republican win the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
Sohn was a member of the senior staff at the FCC under the reign of former Chairman Tom Wheeler. She is best-known as a “net neutrality” advocate, and as the co-founder of Public Knowledge, the public interest group devoted to “choice in the digital marketplace.” Sohn is also a former director of the Media Access Project.
Should Sohn take over for Rosenworcel, the successor to retiring NAB President/CEO Gordon Smith, Curtis LeGeyt, could have his hands full immediately upon taking on the group’s top position. Top legal counsel Rick Kaplan‘s job could be that much more difficult at the Commission, as eyes would turn toward Capitol Hill with a better chance of pushing legislation forward in the House and Senate than through a Democratic-controlled Commission.
LOCALISM IMPEDED
As the NAB views the current rules, “The regulatory framework governing ownership of broadcast radio and television stations harms broadcasters’ ability to compete in the marketplace, impedes localism and fails to promote diversity in ownership,” it argues.
Yet, fewer owners is the goal of the NAB, as it doubles down on its calls to allow one company to own as many AM radio stations in a market it chooses to have and, more controversially, says a company can own all of the FM radio stations in a market ranked No. 75 or lower by Nielsen Audio. The NAB also says a single entity should be able to own up to 8 FM stations in markets 1-75, with the opportunity to own two more through successful participation in the FCC’s incubator program.
Already, diversity in ownership has all but been eliminated in markets such as Corning-Elmira, N.Y., ranked No. 225 by Nielsen Audio. In just four years, the Kristin Cantrell-led Seven Mountains Media not only entered the market, but captured nearly every commercially licensed radio station, squelching competition. The result: less ownership diversity.
Media brokers and attorneys who spoke with RBR+TVBR on the condition of anonymity all believe Seven Mountain’s Twin Tiers radio dominance is a strong example of what should happen in other markets. Why? FMs don’t compete against FMs anymore — they compete against unregulated digital media companies such as Alphabet Inc., parent of Google and YouTube; Facebook; TikTok; and other local digital platforms.
While that’s the case for ad dollars, media consumption may be a different matter. That said, Spotify is a digital platform competitor to local radio. So is Sirius XM, which is unregulated and provides Howard Stern a platform to swear as much as he pleases.
In the NAB’s 2018 Quadrennial Review of the FCC Ownership Rules comments, a 111-page tome with several appendices filed Thursday (9/2) by Kaplan and the NAB’s legal team, the organization makes it known that in earlier submissions, the NAB “presented a compelling case for reforming the local radio and TV rules in light of profound competitive changes in the media and advertising markets.” Today, it argues, “Marketplace changes over the past two years have only made the need for updated rules more urgent.”
As such, the Commission “must now fulfill Congress’s deregulatory mandate in Section 202(h) and its even longer-standing goal of promoting a competitively viable broadcast service capable of effectively serving local communities in all-sized markets. As NAB has demonstrated yet again, the retention of asymmetric, analog-era restrictions on broadcast stations alone – especially in a marketplace increasingly dominated by the giant digital platforms – will disserve the FCC’s goals of competition and localism and will not promote successful new entry into the broadcast industry.”
Among the other assertions from the NAB is the belief that local radio and television stations “operate under media ownership restrictions that date back decades to the analog era.” Thus, they fail to account for marketplace changes.
These outdated media ownership rules, which no longer enable broadcasters to viably operate in a competitive market or effectively serve the public interest, are in more urgent need of reform than ever, the NAB said. These words could have easily been written by Nathan Simington, the newest FCC Commissioner and heir to the radio deregulatory sword crafted by former Republican Commissioner Mike O’Rielly.
Simington will be appearing in an exclusive Keynote Address to Hispanic Radio Conference attendees on September 23 in Miami.
While radio industry deregulation is the focal point of the NAB’s comments, it also took a moment to address television industry deregulation. In the NAB’s view, the Commission can no longer retain per se restrictions that ban combinations among top-four rated TV stations, regardless of their audience or advertising shares, and that prevent ownership of more than two stations in all markets, regardless of their competitive positions.
THE MINOT DILEMMA
Even if Sohn’s nomination is just another Inside the Beltway rumor, a FCC formally led by Jessica Rosenworcel would also likely politely decline to move forward with any of the NAB’s deregulatory suggestions.
A key reason why dates to January 18, 2002.
That’s the date a train disaster impacted Minot, South Dakota. And, thanks to the absence of a locally based studio operation, there was a failure in bringing pertinent emergency communication to the community for which it is licensed to serve.
This “failure” was discussed at length by Rosenworcel in October 2017, when the GOP-led Commission under Ajit Pai voted 3-2 to eliminate its Main Studio Rule. It put an end to a regulation crafted — as Commissioner Brendan Carr noted in his comments — just months before the start of World War II.
The main studio rule’s disappearance today allows every AM radio, FM radio, and television broadcast station to rely on modern communication — something the three Republicans voting in the affirmative stressed. As the public can access information via broadcasters’ online public file, and stations and community members can interact directly through e-mail, social media, and the telephone, “the Commission found that requiring broadcasters to maintain a main studio is outdated and unnecessarily burdensome.”
Commissioners Mignon Clyburn and Rosenworcel vociferously disagreed with that conclusion. Speaking of the Minot matter, Rosenworcel said, “Local radio failed the Minot community that night.” She noted that all Minot stations — namely those owned by iHeartMedia predecessor Clear Channel — were airing “canned music and DJ banter piped in from somewhere far, far away. It was content that was anything but what residents needed to know.”
Fast-forward to September 2017, and a similar lack of emergency information was seen at the height of Hurricane Harvey’s devastating flooding along the Texas Gulf Coast — in particular in Beaumont, Tex. According to Rosenworcel, all stations in the market were in automation at the peak of the storm’s midnight impact on the city. The stations, she said, “were oblivious to the trouble in the very community they purported to serve.”
Then, there’s the wee hours of Thursday, in the nation’s biggest market, New York. With an unprecedented state of emergency in effect and historic flooding that led to 43 deaths and nearly trapping New York Yankees octogenarian radio play-by-play man John Sterling in his car while driving in New Jersey, none of the market’s local broadcast television stations offered live news coverage until their regularly scheduled morning newscasts. According to one industry observer who spoke with RBR+TVBR, “the weather girl on Spectrum’s [NY1] was on loop, with just one happy smiling face doing regular forecasts.”
Central Park saw 3.1 inches of rain in one hour; the September total average is 3.6 inches of rain. Newark Liberty International Airport closed; the Major Deegan Expressway through the Bronx became a deep river.
On WABC-7, a rerun of Live with Kelly and Ryan was airing.
