Groups Hail Disclosure of Political Ad Information From Broadcasters

The FCC working group that drafted the report made the recommendation due to the public interest assessment of broadcasters, said Steve Waldman, who was an aide to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and led the effort. “Broadcasters got spectrum from the public originally for free and in exchange they were supposed to serve the public in certain ways.” The working group decided the system wasn’t working and that “disclosure and transparency is potentially a more useful tool than it used to be because of the Internet,” he said: One suggestion included “taking the public file that is already being kept in a filing cabinet and putting it online.” It was “somewhat surprising to me that broadcasters opposed this,” Waldman said: TV stations are in part news organizations that routinely demand transparency of other public officials “who have taken the position that in their case, they should not have to be transparent even when it has the potential to improve the information that is available to residents in their communities” and improve the political system.

The consumer complaint process should be changed, said Corie Wright, Free Press senior policy counsel. The commission doesn’t routinely monitor whether broadcasters are actually following rules and regulations, she said. Instead, it puts the onus largely on the public to bring it to the FCC’s attention when a broadcaster is violating rules, she said. “It’s very difficult for the public to help the FCC enforce the rules and regulations if they can’t actually get meaningful access to this information.” Gaining access to a broadcaster’s public file usually requires taking off from work and traveling to a station, she said. “Frequently, you will encounter recalcitrant staff.” Most people would agree that “in 2012, public access means available via the Internet,” Wright said: She hopes the meeting vote results in the public having access to a “complete, unredacted online political file."

Harold Feld, Public Knowledge legal director, is outraged the public file debate is unresolved, he said. Broadcasters routinely get privileges in law, special treatment from legislators and regulators because they argue that “we're the special local trustees who serve your local community,” he said. Retransmission consent was a special rule put in place solely for the benefit of broadcasters, he said. “Broadcasters make millions of dollars off of this.” The effort “to put these public files online is so trivial that it is astonishing they haven’t done so already,” he said. Public Knowledge suggested an alternative to doing license renewals based on a public-interest obligation, Feld said: “From now on every eight years we're going to open up for bid for people who want to do commercial broadcasting."

The broadcasters have a silly argument regarding digitization, said Adam Thierer, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Washington. “The cost of digitizing and making things more transparent ... is most certainly lower than the broadcasters suggest.” The more interesting debate is whether the system has legs going forward with new ways of obtaining information, he said: “It obviously doesn’t apply to all the new guys in town,” like social media sites and services and app developers. Politicians and campaigns advertise in other places too, he said. “We don’t have the authority under current law to scale these regulations up to cover the entire modern information ecosystem."

Thierer agreed that broadcasters have taken advantage of the regime to obtain all sorts of privileges, including the DTV spectrum giveaway and tuner mandates. “There’s a direct linkage from all these scandals and all that special treatment to their public-interest obligations.” There’s a long history of regulatory capture, and the FCC has not been immune from it, he said. It’s become an intractable problem, he added. Industry and government should think about going the public expenditure route, Thierer said. If there’s a concern about whether there’s enough children’s programming or localism, “it’s almost always better to devote general Treasury revenue funds to some sort of program to deal with those than to ask an intermediary to do it for us through some sort of an amorphous public interest quid pro quo” regulatory plan, he said.