Last week’s post about the Federal Communications Commission’s backhanded ruling on the legitimacy of Workers Independent News has left a lot of folks scratching their heads—but, as one legal scholar-colleague told me yesterday, "the more I think about it, the angrier I get."
That’s because the FCC’s offhanded beef with Workers Independent News is not just some bureaucratic flick..it’s a bona-fide, no-shit free speech issue, in that the FCC has made a historically unprecedented determination about just what is and is not journalism, and it’s leading to a censorship of sorts on WIN itself. Continue reading “Workers Independent News v. FCC: Down the Rabbit Hole”
Category: Media Policy
The FCC as News Police: Right Hand, Meet Left Hand
Republican FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai is feeling his oats. After conducting a calculated and ideologically-driven campaign against a proposed FCC study of the practices and processes of journalism, the agency capitulated, killing the idea entirely. Pai reveled in his accomplishment: "In our country, the government does not tell the people what information they need. Instead, news outlets and the American public decide that for themselves."
Yet the FCC is in fact defining what news is, and it did so just last month—before Pai went on the warpath about the FCC as "newsroom police." Continue reading “The FCC as News Police: Right Hand, Meet Left Hand”
Abusing the Bully Pulpit
It’s common for members of the Federal Communications Commission to use their positions as bully pulpits for favored causes. For example, Frieda Hennock (the agency’s first female Commissioner) pressed for an expansion of noncommercial broadcasting in the United States. Former Chairman Mark Fowler spoke loudly and often from the bully pulpit, decrying the regulation of media more broadly and precipitating the wildly neoliberal paradigm that has captured contemporary regulation.
More recently, Chairman William Kennard spoke out against media consolidation by advocating for the creation of the LPFM radio service, while Commissioner Mignon Clyburn spearheaded a drive to drastically reduce the rates for making calls from prisons, among many other initiatives during her stint as interim Chair.
But sometimes the bully pulpit provides a way to dissent from agency practices, the idea being that public scrutiny may pressure some change from within. Former Commissioners Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein were famous for touring the country and holding public hearings to learn what actual Americans thought about the state of their media environment. Continue reading “Abusing the Bully Pulpit”
Canada Considers Adopting HD Radio
iBiquity Digital Corporation’s recent claim that HD Radio is on the way to becoming the North American digital radio standard actually has some merit. More than enough, in fact, that it’s surprising that the company didn’t announce how far along things are in Canada: as part of a wide-ranging proceeding on rules revisions to the radio sector, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is now soliciting formal comment on the notion of adopting HD Radio.
In 2006, the CRTC announced that it was prepared to reconsider its adoption of the Eureka 147 DAB standard as Canada’s digital radio platform. Since then, broadcasters have abandoned it and the CRTC is phasing out DAB licenses.
In 2012, iBiquity made approaches to several broadcasters in Canada about becoming test-beds for HD technology. Three stations in the Toronto area accepted the call. CING-FM, an adult-contemporary station owned by Corus Entertainment—Canada’s fourth-largest commercial broadcaster—has been the primary platform for technical tests, including datacasting experiments. The other two stations, CFMS-FM and CJSA-FM, are classified as "ethnic" stations, which basically means the majority of their programming isn’t in English. Canadian Multicultural Radio, the owner of CJSA, announced just last week that it will soon roll out FM-HD multichannel programming in Tamil, Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi. Continue reading “Canada Considers Adopting HD Radio”
Radio's Digital Dilemma: Published!
Today, Radio’s Digital Dilemma: Broadcasting in the Twenty-First Century was formally unleashed upon the world.
As I’ve said before, for the most part it’s a work that chronicles an important constitutive moment in the history of U.S. radio broadcasting, and holds lessons about how our system of contemporary media policymaking works (or doesn’t) more broadly. I approached it more like an act of muckraking, in the purest sense of the term, than anything else. Continue reading “Radio's Digital Dilemma: Published!”
Congress Tries Intimidating FCC to Drop Information Needs Study
Last month, the Federal Communications Commission announced it was preparing to conduct a test of its protocol for a "multi-market study on critical information needs" in Columbia, South Carolina. The study proposal suggests a two-pronged approach: the first is a "media market census" which will look at broadcast, newspaper, and online news content in sample markets around the country. The second prong is a "community ecology study" in which surveys will be conducted to "measure community members’ actual and perceived critical information needs." This will be coupled with "in-depth neighborhood interviews" involving actual citizens.
With studies like these, the devil is in the details. There’s no clear definition of what "critical information needs" actually are, and while the proposal plans to focus on these needs from the perspective of "vulnerable/disadvantaged populations," these are also not clearly defined. Sample-size is also key: this particular study will look at six media markets—two large, two medium, and two small—and we still don’t know what other five markets will be involved. Continue reading “Congress Tries Intimidating FCC to Drop Information Needs Study”
Radio's Digital Dilemma On the Road
Been a busy month so far: I started out in San Francisco at the Union for Democratic Communications annual conference, where I got to give a preview of my new book and its gory details. It was well-received, especially among policy scholars who hunger for some good old-fashioned muckraking.
Then I was in Australia last week for the Community Broadcasting Association of Australia’s annual conference. I was the Saturday keynote, and compared to Australia’s digital transition, the U.S. looks positively retarded. The talk itself was recorded, but no word on when it will be online. Continue reading “Radio's Digital Dilemma On the Road”
AM Revitalization Initiative Unleashed: All Digital Transition On the Table
And sooner than expected: the FCC will soon open a comment window for 
a plethora of proposals to assist beleaguered broadcasters. Paul Riismandel at Radio Survivor has a decent breakdown of the agency’s primary suggestions, and also notes that there’s "nothing on the all-digital question." If only this were true.
Just because the all-digital idea is not sharply delineated in the FCC’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking doesn’t mean the agency’s not interested in it. Policy studies necessitate close reading. For example, the agency notes its permissiveness with all-digital AM-HD experimentation as one of several "discrete changes" it’s made over the years "designed to further enhance the AM service" (p. 5). Continue reading “AM Revitalization Initiative Unleashed: All Digital Transition On the Table”
Firming the Foundation for an All-Digital AM Mandate
The quiet collection of "evidence" on which to justify an all-digital HD Radio mandate for AM stations continues.
After some stealth experimentation on a CBS station in Charlotte, North Carolina late last year, there’s word of two other AM stations in the state conducting all-digital broadcast-tests this summer. The guinea pigs were WBT, a 50,000-watt station owned by Greater Media (also in Charlotte) and WNCT, a 50,000-watt (day)/10,000-watt (night) Beasley Broadcast-owned AM station in Greenville.
WBT secured experimental authorization from the FCC to conduct these tests just two weeks before they took place; WNCT also asked for fast-track authority less than a month before its all-digital broadcasts. Continue reading “Firming the Foundation for an All-Digital AM Mandate”
Government Shutdown: Data Held Hostage
As a radical faction of the Republican Party holds the federal government hostage, many of its gears have ground to a halt. In the 21st century, this also apparently means the disappearance of government information online.
The Federal Communications Commission announced Tuesday morning that all of its electronic databases and filing systems are offline until the agency’s funding is restored. On the meatspace tip, just 38 of the agency’s 1,754 employees are on the job, basically minding the store and limited to "duties that are immediately necessary for the safety of life or the protection of property."
Now, disabling access to online systems that do the business of the agency is logical to a point. Why collect applications or other necessary documentation that nobody can process? But the blackout of databases that effectively serve as public archives of public information is just petty. Continue reading “Government Shutdown: Data Held Hostage”