Broadcast Law Blog

FEBRUARY 4, 2010

As we enter the 2010 election season, questions are beginning to arise about broadcast station on-air employees who decide to run for political office , and what a station needs to do about such employees to avoid issues under the FCC political broadcasting rules. For instance, in Arizona, talk show host (and former Congressman) JD Hayworth recently left his radio program and announced that he was planning to contest John McCain's reelection by challenging him in the Republican primary.

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Broadcast Law Blog

FEBRUARY 14, 2010

According to British press reports , Warner Music's CEO Edger Bronfman Jr. stated that it will cease making its music available to advertising supported streaming music sites. This has prompted some questions about how this decision would affect services such as Pandora , Slacker, Accuradio and other Internet radio companies - would it deny them access to substantial amounts of music?

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Broadcast Law Blog

FEBRUARY 16, 2010

The New York Times just ran an article on the number of radio and television commentators who are also potential political candidates , speculating on whether the appearance of these candidates on TV and cable talk shows, and on radio programs, give them an advantage in their future political careers. That perceived TV bump might be most in the news in the potential candidacy of Harold Ford in the Democratic Senate primary in New York, with his appearances on MSNBC (and this past weekend on Meet

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Broadcast Law Blog

FEBRUARY 1, 2010

In a decision just released, the FCC fined a noncommercial FM station $8000 for failing to make its public inspection file available when it was requested. The FCC made clear that past cases where a noncommercial station was given only an admonition for similar violations were no longer good law, finding that the public file was an important part of the station's obligations to the public and the failure to make it available was a serious violation.

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Broadcast Law Blog

FEBRUARY 23, 2010

On Friday, Feb. 19, 2010, two important new closed captioning rules were published in the Federal Register and went into effect. The new rules require immediate attention by video programming distributors -- including broadcast television stations -- to ensure that they respond promptly to viewer complaints regarding closed captioning issues, and to ensure that they timely file contact information with the FCC by March 22, 2010.

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Broadcast Law Blog

FEBRUARY 28, 2010

When someone "lobbies" the FCC on issues pending in a rulemaking proceeding or other contested case, the Commission requires that there be a certain amount of disclosure of the communications made to Commission decision-making personnel. The rules governing the communications with the FCC's decision-making personnel in such cases are called the " ex parte" rules.

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Broadcast Law Blog

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

The FCC announced an extension of the comment filing deadline in its proceeding looking at the Future of the Media (see our summary here ). At the same time, the Steven Waldman, the Special Assistant to Chairman Genachowski , made a public appearance at the FCC's open meeting last week to explain what is intended by this study - and from his comments and those of the Commissioners, this will be a wide-ranging investigation looking at how FCC and other government regulations can insure diversity

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Broadcast Law Blog

FEBRUARY 21, 2010

On February, 18, 2010, David Oxenford conducted a seminar for the Utah Broadcasters Association on legal issues that affect radio and television broadcasters. First, David summarized the various broadcasting legal and policy issues pending before the FCC and Congress. David's PowerPoint presentation will be available here soon. Broadcasters interested in Washington issues that may affect them this year may also want to read our blog post from early January where we presented our legal prediction

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Broadcast Law Blog

FEBRUARY 2, 2010

In two just released cases, the FCC fined television stations $8000 each for failing to publicize the location of their Children's Television Programming Reports for an entire license renewal period (the cases can be found here and here ). The FCC found that any remedial steps taken by the licensees after they discovered their failures at renewal time did not excuse the failure to comply during the license term.

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Broadcast Law Blog

FEBRUARY 9, 2010

Two FCC cases were released last week fining broadcasters for violations of the FCC rule against broadcasting a telephone call (or recording a call for broadcast purposes) without first obtaining the permission of the person at the other end of the call. In one case, a licensee was fined $16,000 for phoning a woman, pretending to be a hospital calling with news that her husband had been in a motorcycle accident and had died, The FCC refused to reduce or eliminate the fine because the call was ma

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