It has been a slow year in Washington for broadcasters – not necessarily a bad thing – and it figures to continue along those lines. There are two overarching reasons for this. The first is the election; the second is that the DTV transition is hogging most of what attention Washington has to give.
Although not immune from them, the FCC is less affected than Congress by election year distractions, and it has been moving ahead with a number of items with potentially harmful effects for broadcasters. Chief among this is its pursuit of regimen to promote broadcast localism; it is also looking into ways to increase ownership diversity, and how sponsorship identification rules should apply to product placement and other non-spot advertising techniques; it’s also getting ready to decide the fate of the XM/Sirius merger. And, like everybody else inside the Beltway, it is also focusing on the DTV transition.
RBR/TVBR observation: Key congressional aides who spoke at an FCC gathering this spring predicted exactly this scenario. But they could have phoned it in. Certain Beltway facts are entirely predictable. One of them is that there will always be a snarl on the Beltway at the Shirley Mixing Bowl (if you know DC, no further explanation is necessary) and another is that very little gets done during an election year, particularly a presidential year. But watch out during 2009.
The localism effort has drawn the most concern from the broadcast community. There is no denying the virtues of localism – it is the one and only way to achieve market dominance and business success. But quality local broadcasting requires quality staffing, and it doesn’t come cheap. And for other reasons, it cannot be regulated into existence. FCC proposals for enhanced reporting and disclosure, 24/7 staffing and the location of main studious within the actual city of license will actually drain cash from the end product, making the production of quality local more difficult than it already is.
At the same time, it’ll make work for the FCC, which will have to assign people to read mountains of programming reports from thousands of stations. In the end, thanks to the First Amendment, the FCC will still not have the ability to take the slightest action against a licensee no matter how automated and non-local a station may be.
