National Hispanic Media Coalition

The National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC) and Free Press filled joint comments with the Federal Communications Commission calling on the agency to increase efforts to help Puerto Rico fully recover from Hurricanes Irma and Maria, which devastated the island’s communication infrastructure.

The National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC) is prepared to seek judicial review of the Federal Communications Commission’s Network Neutrality repeal to ensure that Latinos and other marginalized communities continue to have access to an open Internet.

The National Hispanic Media Coalition filed a letter on November 20, 2017 to submit an analysis of open internet consumer complaints and related documents produced in response to its FOIA requests. The report is entitled “Consumer Perspectives on Barriers to Accessing the Open Internet,” was commissioned by NHMC and is based solely on the consumer complaints and related documents that have been released by the Federal Communications Commission to date.

The National Hispanic Media Coalition filed an Application for Review (AFR) to the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC), Office of the General Counsel (OGC) seeking review of the letter dated September 14, 2017 stating that the FCC was producing its “final production of documents” in response to NHMC’s FOIA requests filed in early May 2017.

The National Hispanic Media Coalition, Color of Change, NAACP and the Benton Foundation are among the organizations concerned about proposed changes to the Lifeline program, which is on the docket for the Federal Communications Commission’s upcoming open meeting. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai -- who has long called for reforms to deter waste, fraud and abuse in Lifeline -- is seeking a vote at the agency’s Nov. 16 meeting on a major overhaul of the program, which subsidizes phone and broadband service for the poor.

The National Hispanic Media Coalition announced that former Commissioner Gloria Tristani of the Federal Communications Commission will be joining NHMC as the new Special Policy Advisor. In this role, Tristani will further NHMC’s work to bridge the digital divide and advocate for responsible media that is inclusive of Latino voices.

Tristani comes to NHMC from Spiegel & McDiarmid LLP, where she represented the interests of clients including noncommercial radio stations, public, educational and governmental access channels, local and municipal governments, rural electric cooperatives and non-profit groups. She also served as president of the Benton Foundation, where she educated policy-makers, academics and public interest advocates on communications policy. As an FCC Commissioner from 1997 to 2001, Tristani sought to accelerate broadband deployment to rural and other underserved areas; was an advocate for the “E-Rate” program, which provides discounted Internet access to schools and libraries; and supported the FCC’s Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) rules and policies to enhance minority and women ownership in the communications industry.

This is exactly the time that the public is looking to build trust with the media, fostering a productive dialogue that supports accurate coverage representative of diverse voices, and we are disappointed that the first FCC vote of 2017 deprives Americans of meaningful information about the scope of their community’s feedback. In allowing stations to eliminate the only publicly accessible means to understand how audiences across the country are responding to commercial broadcast coverage, the FCC does a tremendous disservice to all who seek to support journalism that fulfills the public interest obligation it holds.

We are very concerned that continuing the current practice of putting letters and emails from the public in a file has been deemed too burdensome a task in the face of the urgent need for media accountability. Contrary to arguments submitted by FCC commissioners and industry representatives, the use of social media to find or report issues is not an adequate replacement for viewing the full breadth of input to commercial broadcast stations that are often mailed or emailed. This insufficient reply is especially more concerning when a full third of Americans–disproportionately Latinos and other people of color, lower-income and rural Americans–lack home broadband to submit feedback or view the extent of concerns submitted by their neighbors online.