Public Broadcasters Want FCC Registration Numbers Proposal Nixed; Public Interest Groups Disagree

Monday. The only support for the proposal came from a joint filing from a coalition of public interest groups including the United Church of Christ, Common Cause and the Prometheus Radio Project. The public interest groups said the proposal would enhance the FCC’s ability to collect the ownership data required to enact policies to increase diversity in broadcast ownership. “The broadcast ownership data must be accurate and comprehensive in order to accomplish the FCC’s goals of studying and analyzing ownership trends,” the joint filing said. The Association of Public Television Stations, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, National Public Radio and several organizations representing noncommercial college broadcasters said the proposal would be an outsized burden for noncommercial stations with boards of directors instead of owners. Requiring even partial SSNs and name and address information for those serving on NCE station boards would have “a significant negative impact” on stations’ ability to recruit volunteers for their licensee boards, a coalition of public broadcast licensees said. “Not only would the proposal not improve the quality, usability, and reliability of the Commission’s broadcast ownership data, it would in fact diminish those qualities in the data,” said a joint filing from APTS, CPB and NPR, pointing to the differences between commercial broadcast ownership and the nonprofit model. “Any policies introduced by the Commission to enhance the diversity of commercial station ownership based upon this data would almost certainly be misplaced in the context of public broadcasting,” the public broadcasters said. Prospective public broadcasting board members “do not have a financial interest in the station and many would not want to reveal private personal information as a consequence of volunteering to serve a community’s public service broadcaster,” the APTS joint filing said.