Capital Watch

The NAB unveiled two suggestions to the FCC that would make it easier for small businesses, women and minorities to get a piece of spectrum-based services like broadcasting and wireless communications.

The suggestions have the added benefit of helping big broadcasters as well. For starters, NAB wants the government to restore tax breaks for established broadcasters that sell stations to minorities or women. A similar program was abolished in 1985 after abuses, but FCC Chairman Michael Powell and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) have argued that the time is right to bring it back. NAB echoed the suggestion as part of an FCC inquiry into initiatives that might boost ownership of communications properties by minorities, women and small-business owners.

NAB also wants to relax a restriction that discourages broadcasters from making partial investments in stations owned by minorities and others. The restriction requires the FCC to count any stake greater than 33% in a station as if the investor owned the entire station itself. The consequence for investors: Stakes of one-third or larger will count toward national- and local-ownership caps and reduce the number of stations owned by one group.

Hoping to capitalize on last week's flap over Sinclair Broadcasting's anti-Kerry documentary (see story, page 16), media activists are fighting to resurrect the FCC's defunct personal-attack rules and the fairness doctrine. The rules were once bedrock principles of TV news and required stations to give individuals a chance to respond when they were attacked in a broadcast and to present both sides of controversial issues.

Media Access Project head Andrew Schwartzman said his group, Common Cause and others will ask the FCC to reinstate the personal-attack rule, which was thrown out by the courts in 2000 after the FCC on several occasions failed to justify why it was still on the books. The rule was an offshoot of the fairness doctrine, which the FCC threw out in 1987.

Sinclair's plans to air at least part of an anti-Kerry documentary weeks before the presidential election is proof, says Schwartzman, that the public is harmed when one-sided views of public issues are aired.

Fox Network stations face the biggest fine for indecent television programming ever proposed by the FCC. Last week, the commission proposed a $1.18 million fine against 159 Fox O&Os and affiliates for an episode of Married by Americathat featured strippers and whipped cream. The total levy is the largest ever proposed against a TV program, although each station faces only the standard $7,000 indecency fine. Previously, the largest proposed levy was the $550,000 against CBS for Janet Jackson's Super Bowl breast baring.

Unlike the CBS fine, the FCC this time decided to fine affiliates as well as network O&Os. CBS affiliates could not have anticipated the Super Bowl incident, the FCC reasoned, but affiliates of Fox could have refused to air the Married by America episode after previewing the tape.

Telecommunications for the Deaf and other groups want new compliance and record-keeping requirements for TV stations and cable systems. Their biggest complaints: Some networks provide captioning rife with errors that make a show difficult to follow, and others don't offer the service at all.

In a petition to the FCC, the groups said "half measures" aren't working and additional enforcement mechanisms are required. Specifically, they want the FCC to maintain a database with updated contact information for programmers; to create a complaint form that viewers could use to report compliance problems; and to audit compliance. The National Cable & Telecommunications Association countered that most closed-captioning problems are caused by "technical glitches" rather than noncompliance.