Institute for Public Representation Lambastes FCC Order Non-Publication

Angela Campbell and Andrew Schwartzman of the Georgetown University Law’s Institute for Public Representation are accusing the Federal Communications Commission of violating the Freedom of Information Act by not publishing an order involving a request for waiver of the FCC's newspaper/broadcast crossownership rule.

Campbell and Schwartzman claim that the FCC's Media Bureau did not make the Nov. 26, 2014 opinion public until after the institute found out about it from one for the affected licensees and got a copy from FCC staff, and even then it was posted in such a way that it would only come up through a search of one of the four affected licensees. They wrote that the failure to publish offends "the basic principle of administrative law that an agency should publish its substantive decisions so that stakeholders have equal access to the agency’s precedents."