On Thursday, February 25th — one day before the Radio Preservation Task Force‘s inaugural conference — I traveled to Washington, D.C. to meet up with friend and colleague, Dr. Christopher Terry, who was also attending the conference. Like me, Dr. Terry is a media law and policy scholar who hails from Wisconsin. And also like me, Dr. Terry has been watching with interest the FCC’s foray into definining journalism on the public airwaves.
In his classes, Dr. Terry uses the Commission’s $44,000 fine against WLS-AM for airing newscasts produced by Workers Independent News as a teaching point to explore the FCC’s regulation of sponsored content. In prior posts, I’ve explained how Workers Independent News purchases airtime on selected commercial radio stations to air its newscasts and features. The FCC case stemmed from WLS-AM’s failure to run the required disclaimer that WIN had paid for its own airtime in a small fraction of broadcasts.
But when the FCC decided to sock WLS with such a stiff fine, it made WIN’s legitimacy as a news organization key to its rationale. Unprecedented in the history of U.S. broadcast regulation, the FCC effectively declared Workers Independent News to not be news, thereby justifying such a large forefiture.
Shortly after the FCC’s 2014 decision, I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the agency for all documents related to its decisionmaking process in the WLS case. Last November, FCC attorneys reported back that they had identified several thousand pages of material…but released less than 90 redacted pages. Among them was the original complaint that kicked off the FCC’s inquiry, which defamed Workers Independent News as an activist organization masquerading as a news outlet. It was on this allegation that the FCC seemed to rest its case. Continue reading “"The Documents Are Not Available"”
Tag: sponsorship identification
FCC Facilitated Right-Wing Hit Job on Workers Independent News
A year and a half since I tendered my Freedom of Information Act request with the Federal Communications Commission on its disturbing foray into determining the legitimacy of broadcast news outlets, the agency has finally responded. And it was with a big middle finger: of the more than 4,200 pages of documentation the agency identified as related to the case, the FCC released a paltry 88 (embedded at bottom).
The vast majority of this release is meaningless. It includes copies of the official orders in the WLS sponsorship-identification case, copies of the spot-sales contracts Workers Independent News entered into with WLS (it spent more than $33,000 to air its newscasts and feature programs on the station over a three-month period), official correspondence between the FCC and WLS’ attorneys related to the initial complaint inquiry, and some redacted e-mail correspondence between FCC staffers regarding the collection of the $44,000 fine assessed against WLS.
However, what little useful information gleaned from the disclosure only heightens the suspicion that the sponsorship-identification case against WLS was not motivated by the station’s failure to disclose (in a fraction of instances) that Workers Independent News had paid for its airtime, but rather by a right-wing operative seeking to muzzle Workers Independent News on ideological grounds. Continue reading “FCC Facilitated Right-Wing Hit Job on Workers Independent News”
Broadcasters: Music and Sports Payola is Okay
Several broadcasters have teamed up in a petition with the FCC seeking to change the agency’s sponsorship identification rules. Presently, if an entity pays a radio station to put a program on the air, the station must clearly disclose this relationship on the air at the time the sponsored programming is played. This rule is an old one, first instituted to crack down on the practices of payola and plugola — or the back-channel compensation of radio stations by record labels and promoters to spin their tunes.
The “Radio Broadcasters Coalition” reads like a who’s who of corporate radio: Beasley Broadcast Group, Cox Radio, Cromwell, Emmis, Entercom, First Natchez, Greater Media, Henson Media, and Clear Channel iHeartMedia. Their 20-page proposal seeks to flip the script on payola/plugola disclosures, allowing stations to air music and sports programming that the station is paid directly for without any on-air disclosure at the time of broadcast. Instead, the Coalition suggests that stations engage in a “robust listner education program” about sponsored programming, run “daily announcements” about sponsored programming, and post “enhanced disclosures” online. Continue reading “Broadcasters: Music and Sports Payola is Okay”