Communications Workers of America calls for broadcaster sharing disclosures

The Communications Workers of America is calling for the Federal Communications Commission to require radio and TV broadcasters to publicly detail all sharing agreements that they have.

CWA said that broadcasters make deals to share the same news programming or give each other operational support “to evade the Commission’s local television ownership rules and its newspaper/broadcast cross-ownerships rules.”

The FCC should expand an order banning broadcasters from selling at least 15 percent of another’s advertisements to those other sharing arrangement, the union said. That would prevent companies from trying to skim profits by getting rid of employees and degrade “the quality and quantity of locally originated news and public affairs programming at the expense of quality journalism.”