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While our monthly editions of FCC Enforcement Monitor have continued to grow in popularity over the past decade, I’m never quite sure if it is because readers rely on it to better understand the FCC’s Rules, or if it is more akin to going to the races to see who crashes. Every month, FCC Enforcement Monitor highlights some of the FCC’s recent enforcement actions, and the penalties imposed. Having edited every issue since it launched in 1999, I find it useful in spotting enforcement trends before our clients find out about those trends the hard way.

One of the trends that is increasingly apparent is the FCC’s hardening line on public inspection file violations. In fact, we just did a major update to our Client Advisory on public file compliance to help broadcast stations avoid that pitfall, and I’ll be in Austin this week at the Texas Association of Broadcasters/Society of Broadcast Engineers convention with Stephen Lee of the FCC’s Houston regional office discussing the public file rule and other FCC compliance issues.

One of the questions on the broadcast license renewal form requires applicants to certify that they have fully complied with the public file rule and that their files are complete. Once upon a time, a station that could not make that certification and was therefore required to disclose its file’s shortcomings to the FCC might well get an admonition from the FCC to do better in the future, combined with an acknowledgement that the applicant had at least voluntarily disclosed its infraction. Then the FCC began issuing $2000 fines for public inspection violations, which crept upward in the last license renewal cycle to $3000 and then to $4000. During this time, there was much consternation among broadcasters who had sought to comply with the rule, admitted to the FCC any shortcomings in their public file, and felt that they were being unfairly punished for being forthright with the FCC.

In 1997, the FCC established a base fine of $10,000 for public inspection file violations, but tended not to issue fines for the full $10,000 unless it was an egregious violation, such as a station that failed to keep a public file at all for some period of time. However, in the past decade, $10,000 has become the standard “go to” fine for even minor public file violations. In fact, the most recent FCC Enforcement Monitor details a recent case where the FCC chose to adjust its base fine upward and issue a $15,000 fine for a public inspection file violation.

Of equal interest in that same issue of FCC Enforcement Monitor is a case in which the FCC fined a student-run noncommercial station $10,000 for documents missing from the public file. In assessing the fine, the FCC made clear that the station’s “voluntary” disclosure of public file problems in its license renewal application no longer earns any sympathy from the FCC. The FCC stated that “although the Licensee has admitted to the violations, it did so only in the context of the question contained in its captioned license renewal application that compelled such disclosure.” When the station later asked that the fine be cancelled or reduced given its student-run and noncommercial nature, the FCC once again had no sympathy, and reaffirmed the $10,000 fine.

Since submitting a false certification on a federal form can lead to far worse penalties than a fine, broadcasters have but one option for avoiding a $10,000 (or worse) fine, and that is by making sure their stations’ public inspection files are above reproach. With the next license renewal cycle now upon us, broadcasters would be wise to ensure their public file is getting the attention it deserves. If that leaves us with no FCC public inspection file fines to discuss in a future issue of FCC Enforcement Monitor, I’ll be happy with that result.

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8/10/2011

This Advisory is designed to help commercial and noncommercial radio and television stations comply with the FCC’s public inspection file rules. See 47 C.F.R. §§ 73.3526 and 73.3527. This Advisory tracks the public access, content, retention and organizational requirements of those regulations. Previous editions of this Advisory are obsolete, and should not be relied upon.

As of the date of this Advisory, the FCC is considering petitions for reconsideration of two new, but not yet effective, regulations that will have an impact on public inspection files maintained by television broadcast stations. One will require every full-power and Class A television station with a website to post a duplicate set of virtually the entire contents of their current “paper-based” public inspection file on their website. The second will require such television stations, on a quarterly basis, to complete a new report entitled “Standardized Television Disclosure Form” using new FCC Form 355, file that report with the FCC, place a copy of the completed report in the station’s public inspection file, and post the report on the station’s website, if it has one. As mentioned, neither of these two new requirements is legally effective at this time. It should be noted that representatives of the broadcast industry have challenged both requirements, and it is not possible to predict the outcome of those challenges. Accordingly, stations should evaluate what steps they may need to take to come into compliance with these new regulations at a later date. We intend to update this Advisory if and when either of those two requirements goes into effect.

Public Access to the Public Inspection File
The FCC requires every applicant, permittee, and licensee of a full-power AM, FM, and TV station or of a Class A TV station to maintain a local public inspection file. The purpose of this file, according to the Commission, is “to make information to which the public already has a right more readily available, so that the public will be encouraged to play a more active part in a dialogue with broadcast licensees.” Because the public file rules are part of the FCC’s commitment to responsive broadcasting, the importance of broadcaster compliance with these rules cannot be overemphasized. (continued…)

A PDF version of this entire article can be found at Special Advisory for Commercial and Noncommercial Broadcasters: Meeting the Radio and Television Public Inspection File Requirements.

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Pillsbury’s communications lawyers have published FCC Enforcement Monitor monthly since 1999 to inform our clients of notable FCC enforcement actions against FCC license holders and others. This month’s issue includes:

  • FCC Increases Fine to $25,000 for Main Studio and Public File Violations
  • FCC Reaffirms $10,000 Public File Violation Against Student-Run Noncommercial FM Station

FCC Fines Texas Broadcaster $25,000 for Repeated Failure to Maintain Full-Time Personnel and to Make Available a Complete Public Inspection File

According to a recent Notice of Apparent Liability (“NAL”), the FCC proposed two fines totaling $25,000 against a Texas broadcaster for violations of Section 73.1125 (the “Main Studio Rule”) and Section 73.3526 (the “Public Inspection File Rule”) of the Commission’s Rules. The violations were discovered during three separate site visits over a two week period by an agent from the Enforcement Bureau’s Houston Field Office.

The Main Studio Rule establishes the requirements for a station’s main studio, including minimum staffing levels. The FCC requires that licensees maintain a “meaningful management and staff presence” at a station’s main studio. Based on a 1991 decision, the FCC defines “meaningful” as having at least one management level employee and one staff level employee generally present “during normal business hours.” The base forfeiture for violations of Section 73.1125 is $7,000. The Public Inspection File Rule requires broadcasters to maintain, and make available, certain material in their public inspection file, including a station’s current authorization, a current copy of the Public and Broadcasting manual, and a list of programs (“issues-programs list”) broadcast during each quarter of the license term that evidences the station’s most significant treatment of community issues. The base forfeiture for violations of Section 73.3526 is $10,000.

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If you have an LPTV station operating on a channel higher than 51, you have until September 1 of this year to file an application to change to digital operation on channel 51 or below. Failure to file an application by that deadline means the station’s authority to operate will terminate on December 31 of this year, which is the deadline announced late today by the FCC for ending all LPTV operations on channels 52-69.

By establishing this rapid deadline for moving LPTV stations out of channels 52-69, the FCC is seeking to clear the way for the immediate use of that spectrum by wireless operators and public safety systems. Stations that are unable to locate a workable channel below channel 52 and get a modification application on file in the next six weeks will have to shutter their operations by the end of this year.

In the order released today, the FCC also established a hard date of September 1, 2015 for all analog LPTV broadcasting to cease, regardless of channel. The FCC stated that setting the date some four years in advance will allow low power operators ample time to plan for the transition and prepare for the impact of the National Broadband Plan on spectrum availability.

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By: Scott R. Flick and Christine A. Reilly

The next Quarterly Issues/Programs List (“Quarterly List”) must be placed in stations’ local public inspection files by July 10, 2011, reflecting information for the months of April, May and June, 2011.

Content of the Quarterly List

The FCC requires each broadcast station to air a reasonable amount of programming responsive to significant community needs, issues, and problems as determined by the station. The FCC gives each station the discretion to determine which issues facing the community served by the station are the most significant and how best to respond to them in the station’s overall programming.

To demonstrate a station’s compliance with this public interest obligation, the FCC requires a station to maintain, and place in the public inspection file, a Quarterly List reflecting the “station’s most significant programming treatment of community issues during the preceding three month period.” By its use of the term “most significant,” the FCC has noted that stations are not required to list all responsive programming, but only that programming which provided the most significant treatment of the issues identified.

Given the fact that program logs are no longer officially mandated by the Commission, the Quarterly Lists may be the most important evidence of a station’s compliance with its public service obligations. The lists also provide important support for the certification of Class A TV station compliance that is discussed below and which must be produced by Class A TV applicants and licensees.

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Pillsbury’s communications lawyers have published FCC Enforcement Monitor monthly since 1999 to inform our clients of notable FCC enforcement actions against FCC license holders and others. This month’s issue includes:

  • FCC Fines FM Broadcaster an Extra $5,000 For Inaction
  • Inaccurate Tower Ownership Information Ends in $3,000 Fine

Failure to Heed an FCC Warning Regarding Public Inspection File Violations Results in $15,000 Fine
Following a routine inspection in April 2010, the Enforcement Bureau’s Pennsylvania Field Office issued a Letter of Inquiry (“LOI”) regarding the contents of a Pennsylvania FM station’s public inspection file. According to a recently released Notice of Apparent Liability (“NAL”), all of the station’s issues/programs lists for the current license term, a total of 15 quarters, were unaccounted for in the station’s public inspection file at the time of the inspection. Section 73.3526(e)(12) of the FCC’s Rules requires broadcasters to place in their public inspection file each quarter a list of programs that have provided the station’s most significant treatment of community issues. The base forfeiture for violations of Section 73.3526 is $10,000.

In its response to the LOI, the FM broadcaster admitted that the quarterly issues/programs lists were unavailable on the day of the inspection. The FM broadcaster indicated that it was evident “a person or persons had gone through the file and that some of the items had been removed” and was “committed” to bringing the station’s public inspection file into compliance.

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As I wrote in April, the FCC decided after much delay to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to review a pair of lower court rulings seriously challenging the FCC’s prohibition on indecent programming that airs before 10pm. Today the Supreme Court announced that it has agreed to hear the matter, setting up what could be the most important broadcast content case in decades.

The lower court decisions being challenged by the FCC involve the unintentional airing of isolated expletives on Fox during live awards programs, and an episode of NYPD Blue on ABC that showed a woman’s buttocks (the FCC-approved term for that part of the anatomy). That the underlying facts of these cases are so different (an accidental expletive on live TV versus scripted nudity in a dramatic program) increases the likelihood of a relatively broad indecency decision by the Court, as opposed to a narrow finding that the FCC was or wasn’t justified in pursuing a particular case based on the facts of that case.

The Court could ultimately support the government’s general right to police indecency while finding fault with the FCC’s current interpretation of how that should be done. However, the elephant in the room is whether it still makes sense for the government to assert that broadcasters have lesser First Amendment rights than all other media. The implications of the Court finding that broadcasters, a major source of news and information for most Americans, have First Amendment rights equivalent to newspapers would create regulatory ripples far beyond indecency policy. For that reason, the Court will likely think long and hard before making such a sweeping pronouncement.

Still, it is increasingly true that most audiences in the U.S. have ceased to draw a distinction between, for example, broadcast channels and cable/satellite channels. As they flip through the growing number of programming channels on their flat screen TVs, or increasingly watch Internet content over those same TVs, the government’s case for regulating the content of a small number of those channels grows more tenuous. The Supreme Court will now tell us whether it has grown too tenuous to continue.

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As I wrote back in February, the federal government has decided to conduct the first-ever national test of the Emergency Alert System. Today, FEMA and the FCC announced that the test will occur on November 9, 2011, at 2pm Eastern Standard Time. On that date, the public will hear a message indicating “This is a test,” but FEMA and the FCC indicate that the entire test could last up to three and a half minutes.

Because the test is a presidential EAS test, it must be retransmitted by radio and television broadcasters, cable operators, satellite radio service providers, direct broadcast satellite service providers, and wireline video service providers. In the announcement, FEMA took pains to note that the test will not simply be a pass/fail exercise, but an opportunity to find out what is working and what isn’t, so that the system can be tweaked and improved.

It is likely that the national EAS test will become an annual event following this initial test. One issue that was not discussed in the announcement, however, is how the current September 30, 2011 deadline for EAS participants to install EAS equipment compatible with the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) could affect the test. The FCC had originally said that the intent of a national test was to assess the existing EAS operation, as opposed to testing the implementation and functionality of the new CAP-compliant EAS equipment soon to being purchased and installed by broadcast, cable, and satellite operators.

As the FCC just last week announced the commencement of a rulemaking to adopt rules and processes for the implementation of CAP, there is a growing feeling that the September 30, 2011 CAP implementation deadline may need to be extended in order to prevent a situation where EAS participants are required to immediately purchase and install new EAS equipment that may or may not comply with the CAP requirements ultimately adopted by the FCC. Whether intended or not, a national EAS test just six weeks after the CAP deadline will likely end up being more about the teething pains of CAP implementation than about how reliably the current EAS infrastructure functions.

As a result, preventing the national test from being sidelined by the inevitable implementation glitches of CAP may be the strongest reason yet for extending the CAP implementation deadline to a date beyond November 9, 2011. It will be good to know how the never-before-tested national EAS infrastructure functions before adding the additional complexities of CAP-compliant EAS equipment to it.

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The FCC today announced a freeze on the acceptance of any petitions for rulemaking seeking to change a station’s assigned channel in the Post-Transition Table of DTV Allotments. While application freezes were once relatively rare at the FCC, they became quite common as a planning mechanism during the years when the FCC was creating a new Table of Allotments to initiate and complete the transition to digital television.

Given the FCC’s announced intent to begin reclaiming broadcast television spectrum for wireless broadband as part of the National Broadband Plan, and to then repack the remaining television stations into a smaller chunk of spectrum, today’s announcement was not a surprise. The Commission’s brief announcement stated that the freeze is necessary to “permit the Commission to evaluate its reallocation and repacking proposals and their impact on the Post-Transition Table of DTV Allotments….”

The freeze will put a stop to the steady migration of stations from the VHF to the UHF band, where reception is generally better and the opportunities for successful mobile DTV operations greater. While not discussed in the FCC’s announcement, proponents of transferring broadcast spectrum to wireless broadband have no interest in VHF spectrum, so each station that moves from the VHF band to the UHF band makes the FCC’s efforts to clear UHF spectrum for broadband that much more difficult. The FCC noted in its announcement that since the lifting of the last freeze in 2008, it has processed nearly 100 television channel changes, and that it therefore believes most stations interested in making a channel change have had sufficient time to do so. The FCC indicated that it would continue to process channel change requests filed before the new freeze commenced.

And so it begins. While the prospects for legislation to implement the National Broadband Plan’s broadcast spectrum incentive auctions remain murky, the FCC does not need the blessing of Congress in order to commence the process of spectrum repacking. Now well over a year old, the National Broadband Plan remains mostly that–a plan. Today’s freeze marks one of the first concrete steps by the FCC to implement at least some aspects of that plan. Setting aside the issue of whom the ultimate winners and losers in the spectrum debate will be, the painful and expensive process of implementing a new Table of Allotments for digital television is still far too fresh a memory for many broadcasters to want to be subjected to a similar process now.

At least with the transition to digital, broadcasters could see the benefits of enduring the difficult process in order to be able to garner the benefits of high definition programming, multicasting, and datacasting. Unfortunately, for broadcasters not interested in selling spectrum in an incentive auction, repacking means all pain and no gain. The best case scenario for a television broadcaster in a repacking is just to survive the disruption and distraction without losing signal coverage of viewers and cable headends. That doesn’t leave broadcasters with much light at the end of the tunnel to guide them through the difficult days ahead.

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Pillsbury’s communications lawyers have published FCC Enforcement Monitor monthly since 1999 to inform our clients of notable FCC enforcement actions against FCC license holders and others. This month’s issue includes:

  • FCC Fines FM Broadcaster for Excessive Power and RF Radiation Levels
  • Forfeiture More Than Triples After Consent Decree Default

Missing Fence Yields $10,000 Fine for Utah FM Broadcaster
During a routine inspection in April 2010, Denver field agents cited a Utah FM broadcaster for excess radio frequency radiation (“RFR”) exposure and failure to operate the station as authorized by the FCC. The citations resulted in a combined $14,000 fine.

According to the Notice of Apparent Liability (“NAL”), the station and its antenna tower were located at the top of a hill easily accessible by foot and all terrain vehicles. The station and tower were enclosed by a chain link fence, but access from the base of the hill to the station’s fence was unobstructed. The field agents visited the station on two separate occasions and determined that the station was exceeding permitted RFR exposure levels, with actual RFR ranging from 165 to 315% of the legally acceptable levels at distances between 12 and 28 feet outside the chain link fence. At the time of the inspection, Denver field agents did not observe any posted RFR warning signs on or near the site. Failure to maintain acceptable levels of public RFR exposure is a direct violation of Section 1.1310 of the FCC’s Rules, which mandates that broadcasters comply with the RFR exposure limits established by the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements as outlined in the tables provided in the FCC’s Rules.

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