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| El Paso-owned and proud |
May. 4 - May. 10 |
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KVIA Perspective |
FCC deluge
By Kevin Lovell |
Angry broadcasters are filling the FCC’s mailbox in advance of a Monday deadline to weigh in on a raft of new localism proposals.
We already tell the FCC about our kids’ programming and programs of local community interest. Now Big Brother wants to heap more bureaucratic requirements in our laps. The list includes having someone physically present at a station at all times, a set number of hours of local programming per week, required consulting with community advisory boards, and the like.
At KVIA, we’re all about local all of the time. We produce five hours of local news and weather on weekdays. We go live and sometimes for hours on end whenever there is a major breaking event. I’ve never seen another station give viewers a forum to the degree that Gary Warner does on his weekend ABC-7 Listens segment. We’ve had numerous forums, town hall meetings and community outreach projects through the years. Our anchors and station managers are constantly in the community – at schools, health fairs, serving on boards and other outreach projects.
Requiring stations to be staffed during all hours of operation would lead to cutbacks in overnight service to avoid the additional cost. More than 120 members of the House of Representatives and 23 senators have signed onto letters to FCC Chairman Kevin Martin asking to not impose any additional localism mandates on broadcasters. The lawmakers say that “radical re-regulation” would effectively “turn back the clock on decades of deregulatory progress by imposing a series of new and burdensome regulations on broadcasters.”
Fellow FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell believes that additional regulations should not be heaped upon broadcasters with any such requirements for cable, satellite or the Internet. The FCC needs to lighten up on the “fleeting expletives” and other archaic indecency standards imposed on broadcasters. The FCC rules for over-the-air broadcasters were established long before cable and the Internet shoved far greater excesses of smut in American homes. In order to be accepted by viewers and clients, broadcasters must be responsive to our communities, responsible in our actions and programming.
Comments or questions about this story? E-mail news@elpasoinc.com
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