Local TV Stations Oppose FCC Order Regarding Political Ads

The FCC (Federal Communications Commission) will be voting on an order which would require television stations to post public inspections files online, which would include political disclosure reports associated with political advertising. Public inspection files, which are comprised of information such as programming, staffing and spending on political ads, are required by law to be made available to the public. They are typically kept – in paper form – at TV stations’ offices.

This announcement is concurrent with an election year, and TV stations are preparing to broadcast over three billion dollars in political advertising. Local TV stations have been opposed to the proposal not for the specific condition of public files posted online but because the public files will include disclosure reports for political ads. These reports will reveal the ad rates, as well as the information of the person or group who’ve placed the ad. This, in turn, will put media outlets other than local television, including cable and radio, at a distinct competitive advantage with regard to political advertising.

Exact details of the FCC order will not be released until near the end of this month at the Commission’s monthly meeting. Experts are predicting that the order will require network affiliates of ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox in the top 50 stations of the year to move their public files online, while other stations will likely not have to send their files to the FCC for a couple of years. The agenda for the FCC’s April 27th meeting lists a proposed discussion on “enhanced disclosure requirements” for TV stations. Its purpose is to review the order that is intended to increase “transparency” and expand “public access to community-relevant information” by transferring public files “from paper to the Internet.”

The FCC has tried moving the files to online before, back in 2007, but was unable to overcome legal obstacles. Adversaries consider the proposal a political move and question the practicality of it, while others criticize stations being saddled with financial strain in the transfer and not seeing any benefit for the public. Advocates, on the other hand, believe easily accessible information for the public is valuable, as it will allow people to view details of the political advertising that monopolizes the broadcasts. The FCC claims that uploading the public files would cost no more than 1,000 dollars for most stations and anticipates savings in the long run, since the costs of printing and storing paper documents would no longer be a concern.

The public files online will reportedly be searchable when accessing a single file. Searching all files will initially not be an option. Consequently, those interested in seeing which person or organization has spent the most money on political advertising in all of the U.S. will have no way of doing so. This is another shortcoming for those opposed to the order, as the inability to search across all files is a miniscule upgrade to simply driving to a local station’s office and perusing its documents.