FCC Wraps Affiliation-Contract Review

The Federal Communications Commission Wednesday issued a declaratory ruling clarifying the do's and don'ts in affiliation contracts between networks and local TV stations -- officially ending a years-long review of those contracts. Those clarified rules of the road include the rights of stations to pre-empt shows they think are inappropriate and a prohibition on networks reserving space on station's digital channels for content they have not come up with yet. The FCC clarified that: affiliates retain ultimate control over programming, operations and critical decisions; contracts cannot allow the networks to hinder or prevent stations from rejecting programming they feel is "unsatisfactory, unsuitable or contrary to the public interest" or prevent them from pre-empting for "programming of greater local or national importance." That is not an unfettered right, the two sides agreed, but the dispositive factor cannot be the economics, and the right may not be limited to breaking news or any other specific category of programming. Stations must also be allowed to reject unsuitable programming even if they have not done so with a similar program in the past. That rejection should also not count against contractual limits on pre-emptions, although the FCC said such limits are fine for programming that does not fall under a "right-to-reject standard." That standard is ""unsatisfactory or unsuitable or contrary to the public interest," rather than, say, a network-series repeat the station wants to pre-empt for a local sports-team-preview show in which it gets to sell all of the ad time. The FCC said the networks should not be able to impose any penalties, money or otherwise, for rejected programming. The networks were also prohibited from "optioning" time on stations without having the programming in hand to fill it, including being prevented from requiring affiliates "to carry, at some unspecified future date, unspecified digital content that the network may, or many not, choose to offer."