There’s no reason to ban any cross ownership of daily newspapers and radio or TV stations in the same market, the new head of the Newspaper Association of America said after her first 65 days on the job. The NAA hopes the FCC in its ongoing review of all media ownership rules will entirely rescind the ban, Caroline Little said during Q-and-A at a Media Institute luncheon Tuesday. “We'd like to get no cross-ownership whatsoever,” Little told us about the current rules. Another NAA executive visited the commission last week to press the agency to change cross-ownership rules. A draft rulemaking notice on the quadrennial review proposes to allow waivers to be sought of the ban in the top 20 markets, restoring a rule remanded by an appeals court this summer (CD Nov 15 p5).

The FCC “put the cart before the horse” when it ordered that relinquished Universal Service Fund cash shouldn’t be redistributed among a state’s eligible telecom carriers, telecom lawyer Todd Daubert told an appellate panel Tuesday. That January order paved the way for last month’s universal service order (CD Jan 4 p2), but Daubert,representing the Rural Cellular Association and the Universal Service for America Coalition before a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, said the FCC exceeded the “plain language” of Section 254(d) of the Telecom Act.

ST. LOUIS -- The FCC is careful not to disturb states’ role as it revamps the Universal Service Fund and intercarrier compensation system, said Wireline Bureau officials at NARUC’s annual meeting Tuesday. They didn’t address the timing of the order’s release, though several state officials expect it to be out before Thanksgiving.

The Senate could take up spectrum in an omnibus bill this year if the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction fails to reach a deal including spectrum, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said at a public safety press conference Tuesday. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., and other lawmakers said they would support that approach. Schumer and other members of Congress urged the super committee to include D-block reallocation in its recommendations.

ST. LOUIS -- Instead of taking the FCC to court, state regulators and consumer advocates should focus on working together with the FCC on implementing the Universal Service Fund revamp, FCC Commissioner Michael Copps said at NARUC’s annual meeting Tuesday. The FCC, which took many of the Federal/State USF Joint Board’s recommendations as it works to finalize the order, seeks to strengthen the federal/state partnership going forward, he said. Meanwhile, the outgoing commissioner said he plans to continue to advocate for media reform even after leaving the FCC.

GENEVA -- The World Meteorological Association secretariat has expanded a username and password system introduced to limit access to a small number of working documents in a steering group on spectrum coordination to include nearly all relevant documents at meetings since, according to interviews with participants and a comparison of the organization’s website, restricted documents we obtained and public information. The organization also appears to be hosting ITU documents on the WMO website without obtaining permission.

Public broadcasting lost more than $202 million in state funding since 2008, including $85 million in 2010 alone, a Free Press study said. The loss could restrict stations’ ability to produce local content and force some rural stations to close, Free Press said. In 24 states, funding was reduced each year over the past four years, it said. “Each year the cuts are compounded because they're against a brand new baseline and that baseline keeps dropping,” said Josh Stearns, associate program director. The key message conveyed through the report is “as anyone considers federal funding cuts, they have to be clear with what’s happening with state funding because so many broadcasters are doing more with less."

The FCC may eventually revisit a four-decade-old-rule barring multichannel video programming distributors from carrying games that are blacked out by sports leagues on TV stations in markets where the games haven’t sold out. The commission doesn’t seem poised to act right away on a Friday petition from several nonprofit entities and some groups saying they represent fans. Because the petition is styled as a way to cut outdated mandates out of FCC regulations, the commission may eventually start a proceeding on sports blackout rules. MVPDs and TV stations haven’t backed the petition yet, in part because they're scared of the leverage the leagues have over them in giving them rights to carry the games, said members of a coalition of five groups that filed the petition (http://xrl.us/bmimyk).

With the Thanksgiving deadline fast approaching for the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, observers are growing skeptical that the super committee will meet its goal of finding $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction. Democrats and Republicans on the special committee seem to agree spectrum auctions should be included, but they continue to disagree on larger, unrelated issues, Hill and industry officials said. Auctions could still make the cut in a smaller package to mitigate an automatic, across-the-board budget cut in January 2013 known as a sequester, telecom industry lobbyists said.

The facts underpinning the Supreme Court’s rationale for allowing regulation of broadcast speech have withered in the 33 years since the court’s landmark FCC v. Pacifica Foundation ruling, a coalition of public interest groups said in a brief filed with the court last week. The Center for Democracy and Technology, Cato Institute, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge and Tech Freedom were among several parties to file amicus briefs arguing the court should uphold a lower court’s ruling in Fox v. FCC that tossed out the commission’s indecency rules.