Gridlock at the FCC

GRIDLOCK AT THE FCC
[SOURCE: Broadcasting&Cable, AUTHOR: Elizabeth Jensen and John Eggerton]
Thanks to partisan deadlock in a divided commission, the growing volume of broadcast-indecency complaints, and a protocol that allows only the chairman to set agendas, the FCC is contending with significant gridlock on a number of issues. “Increasingly, you hear it,” says Gloria Tristani, a former FCC commissioner and president of the Benton Foundation. “Many proceedings are stalled, from all over the spectrum of things that the FCC regulates.” The delays have left major media companies and small broadcasters alike unable to plan long-term as long as ownership rules are unsettled or license renewals are snagged by indecency complaints. But with the Senate threatening to pass a massive telecom bill on a host of issues -- from cable franchising to Internet commerce -- that will require FCC action, the backup could become far worse. For its part, the FCC denies that there is any logjam, noting that media issues are only part of its purview and pointing to several telephony-oversight actions that have been taken. Former-Commissioner Tristani concedes that occasional backlogs are “a fact of life at the FCC” when the commission is focused on a single issue, like indecency or phone company slamming, which preoccupied the commission during her tenure, from 1997 to 2001. But she calls it “a disgrace” that the commission is six months past due in responding to recommendations submitted by the FCC's Consumer Advisory Committee (CAC). On May 18, 14 of the committee's 55 members (including Tristani's Benton Foundation) complained in a letter to Chairman Martin that the CAC had yet to receive an acknowledgement of the recommendations it had made in November regarding public-interest obligations of digital broadcasters. “What is the point of having a federal advisory committee if you are going to ignore them?” Tristani asks, adding that it is “very lamentable that legitimate consumer concerns are not being addressed.” The FCC declined to comment on why it has failed to respond to the CAC, but Commissioner Michael Copps agrees that action is needed. “When we ask people to devote their energies and talents to an advisory committee,” he says, “the least the commission can do is pay heed to the recommendations they develop.”
http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/CA6338738?display=Feature

* See CAC letter at http://www.benton.org/index.php?q=node/2436