The Past Two Weeks in Regulation for Broadcasters: December 23, 2024 to January 3, 2025

We took last week off for the holidays and today bring you the regulatory developments of interest to broadcasters from the past two weeks, which we discuss below with links to where you can go to find more information as to how these actions may affect your operations.

• The Commission released a Report and Order requiring reporting by MVPDs of blackouts of their carriage of commercial television signals (including Class A and LPTV signals already on a system) that last more than 24 hours due to the failure of retransmission consent negotiations.  The reports will be filed in a portal to be developed by the Media Bureau.  The reports will require the system to not only identify the station(s) being blacked out, but also a good-faith estimate of the number of subscribers affected.  Another notice will need to be filed when a blackout is resolved. 
• The FCC released its 2024 Communications Marketplace Report, which the agency releases every two years to analyze, among other things, the state of competition in the radio and TV marketplaces.  The FCC provides the report to Congress to advise it on economic and competitive trends in regulated industries.  FCC Chairman-designate Carr and Commissioner Simington released statements criticizing the FCC’s continued reliance in the report on a decades-old approach to analyzing competition based on discrete market sectors instead of accounting for how communications service providers, including broadcasters, currently face competition across all market sectors and not just their own.
• The FCC announced the tentative agenda for its January 15 Open Meeting.  Due to the impending transition to a Republican-led FCC, the FCC will not act on any substantive matters at what will be FCC Chairwoman Rosenworcel’s last regular monthly Open Meeting.  Instead, the FCC will hear presentations on the status of the agency’s work on matters including expanding access to communications, and on national security, public safety, and consumer protection issues. 
• Comments were due in response to the National Association of Broadcasters’ proposal that TV stations comply with the FCC’s audible crawl rule by providing “textual crawls that provide emergency information duplicative or equivalent to the information conveyed by the visual image” (see our discussion here).  The rule that the NAB is seeking to change requires TV stations to provide an aural description transmitted on the station’s SAP channel of non-textual emergency information, such as maps or other graphic displays, conveyed outside of station newscasts, so that the emergency information can be received by those who are blind or have visual impairments.  As we discussed here last month, the Media Bureau retroactively extended the waiver of this requirement from November 26 (when it went into effect after the previous waiver expired) through the earlier of May 27, 2025 or when the FCC rules on the NAB’s proposal.  The Society for Broadcast Engineers states that adopting the NAB’s proposal would allow stations to provide the greatest amount of emergency information to the public and fulfill the underlying purpose of the rule.  A broadcaster states that unless the NAB’s proposal is adopted by the FCC, stations will either need to continue relying on waivers of the rule or they will cease disseminating visual emergency information altogether due to the lack of workable technology to convert graphical information into audio.  The American Federation for the Blind “cautiously” supports the NAB’s proposal if the information provided by stations in an accessible text crawl is the same as the information provided by the nontextual graphic.  The AFB urged the NAB and broadcasters to continue to work to find solutions – through AI or otherwise, that will assure that the same emergency information reaches the blind as reaches others in a TV station’s coverage area.
• Paramount, Skydance Media, and other parties filed a Consolidated Opposition to Petitions and Response to Comments responding to objections to the amended Paramount-Skydance Media transfer applications proposing that David Ellison acquire a controlling stake in the company, in addition to serving as its Chairman and CEO (see our discussion here, here, and here).  Among the arguments made by the applicants was one stating that the Center for American Rights’ proposal for FCC-imposed benchmarks to rectify CBS’s purported political bias in their news programming would violate the First Amendment and would entangle the FCC in broadcast editorial policies.  The applicants dismiss CAR’s concerns regarding a minority investor in Ellison’s company with alleged close ties to the Chinese Communist Party as the non-voting investor would have no ability to influence the operation or management of the company or its broadcast stations.  The applicants also state that Fuse Media’s claims about the transaction’s potential harms to the streaming video marketplace are speculative and outside of the FCC’s authority.  Finally, the applicants argue that the complaints raised by an unsuccessful bidder and a Paramount shareholder regarding business issues with the transaction are outside the scope of the FCC’s application review process and are being litigated separately in court.
• The FCC’s Enforcement Bureau released an Order adjusting to take account of inflation the amounts of certain fines.  This includes maximum fines for broadcast indecency which now will, once this Order is published in the Federal Register, increase to $508,373 for each day of a violation, with a maximum of $4,692,668 for a continuing violation.  For pirate radio, the new maximum fines will be $2,453,218.
  • The Enforcement Bureau issued Notices of Illegal Pirate Radio Broadcasting against landowners in Concord, Ohio, Piqua, Ohio, and Mattapan, Massachusetts for allegedly allowing pirates to broadcast from their properties.  The Bureau warned the landowners that the FCC may issue fines of up to what is now the maximum fine of $2,391,097 under the PIRATE Radio Act if the FCC determines that the landowners continue to permit pirate radio broadcasts from their properties after receiving these notices.
• The FCC’s Media Bureau entered into a Consent Decree with a group of Arizona radio stations to resolve its investigation of a series of unauthorized transfers of control among the stations’ owners.  The Bureau found that the stations failed to seek prior FCC consent to their transfer from their original owners into a trust, then failed to notify the FCC of the death of one of the trust’s trustees, and finally failed to seek prior FCC consent for the appointment of a new trustee for the trust.  The Consent Decree requires the stations to pay a $7,500 civil penalty and enter into a compliance plan to ensure that future violations of the FCC’s transfer of control rules do not occur. 
• The Media Bureau also proposed a $5,000 fine against a Nevada Class A TV station for several Online Inspection File recordkeeping violations that the station disclosed in its license renewal application.  After reviewing the station’s OPIF, the Bureau found that the station failed to timely upload ten Quarterly Issues/Programs Lists during its previous license term. 
• Obligations under the Corporate Transparency Act requiring most companies operating in the U.S. to file ownership information, including information about foreign owners, with U.S. Treasury Department were scheduled to go into effect in this month, but the requirement has been put on hold for now by an Order the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit while the Court considers substantive arguments about the Act’s requirements.

On our Broadcast Law Blog, we published our summary of regulatory dates and deadlines for broadcasters in January, as well as our Broadcasters Regulatory Calendar identifying regulatory deadlines for all of 2025, including lowest unit charge political windows for state and local elections that will occur this year. We also provided our look into our crystal ball at the potential legal and policy issues that we think will be addressed by the new Commission this year.