EEO Petition Proposal Could Find Favor at Next FCC
A petition proposing relaxing equal employment opportunity rules to allow broadcasters to satisfy EEO requirements with online job postings is likely to find favor in the upcoming FCC but could face public interest pushback, several broadcast attorneys told us. Filed last week by Sun Valley Radio and Canyon Media Corp. and put out for comment Friday, the petition says the internet is now the primary means of searching for job postings and rules that don't recognize that are outdated. “The daily newspaper, previously cited by the FCC as the presumptive way to reach all groups within a community, now pales in its reach within the community compared to the Internet,” said the petition. Comments are due Jan. 30 (see 1612150073), putting any potential NPRM well into the next administration.
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Loosening the EEO requirements is seen as a deregulatory move that a Republican FCC is likely to back, said several broadcast attorneys. Commissioner Mike O'Rielly, who's expected to continue at the FCC under the new administration, last year suggested a similar rule change in a blog post. Stressing the importance of broadband deployment to libraries while requiring newspaper job postings is hypocritical, O'Rielly said (see 1502200054). O'Rielly Monday expressed further interest in the proposal. “The Internet has played a critical role in publicizing and attracting diverse applicants across many industries and fields,” O'Rielly said in an email. “I'm pleased to start the process to update our EEO publication requirements so broadcasters will not be punished for using 21st century recruiting methods.” The proposal is also on a small enough scale that there's unlikely to be outcry if an interim FCC approves it, said a broadcast lawyer.
Under the current rules, broadcasters must widely disseminate job postings, and can't advertise them only online or on their own airwaves. Though the current rules don't require jobs to be published in newspapers, many broadcasters do so because it's a readily available way to meet the widely disseminated requirement, said Fletcher Heald broadcast attorney Dan Kirkpatrick. Broadcasters generally also advertise their jobs online, because that's where they get the biggest response, he said in an interview. Typically, broadcasters find “almost nobody” responds to print job ads, Kirkpatrick said. “The FCC has recognized that the Internet is fine for public files and contest rules, so shouldn’t it also be found to be sufficient to get out the word about job openings?” said Wilkinson Barker broadcast attorney David Oxenford in a blog post. Oxenford filed the petition on behalf of Sun Valley Radio and Canyon Media.
The proposal is likely to get pushback from public interest groups concerned that many low-income minority households don't have access to broadband internet at home, said a broadcast lawyer. Allowing online postings to satisfy EEO rules could wall off such households from getting broadcast jobs, exacerbating the problem EEO rules are meant to address, the broadcast attorney said. It's encouraging that the petition seeks to “improve” EEO rules rather than do away with them, said Multicultural Media, Telecom and Internet Council Senior Adviser David Honig, who disagreed with characterizing the proposal as deregulation. “It's different regulation,” he said. But Honig suggested there might be concerns about what sort of online job postings satisfy the requirements. Different groups of people use the internet differently, so some online postings may be more widely read than others.