Update: Reconsideration of New Ownership Reporting Requirements Sought
The saga of the FCC's quest to devise the Perfect Ownership Report slogs on. Readers will recall that, back in January, the Commission adopted a new approach to identifying individual attributable owners for tracking purposes across reports (so long, SUFRN; hello, RUFRN!). Also, among other changes, noncommercial educational licensees were advised that they, too, would be having to identify their attributable principals individually.
While the new rules were published in the Federal Register four months later, they haven't really taken effect across the board (as we explained last month). And now comes word that four petitions for reconsideration of various aspects of the new rules have been filed. The petitioners:
- A group of more than 60 noncommercial educational licensees;
- The State University of New York (which is also part of the group filing, above, but they also wanted to add a bit more on their own);
- The American Public Media Group (the parent support organization for Minnesota Public Radio and Southern California Public Radio); and
- The "Public Broadcasting Parties", a separate group of 11 noncommercial educational licensees.
Probably not surprisingly, all of the petitions express concern about the need for, propriety of, and/or mechanics for satisfying the requirement of individual identification (by FRN or RUFRN) of folks sitting on NCE governing boards.
The FCC has now published a notice of the filing of these petitions in the Federal Register, which sets the deadlines for comments/oppositions and replies relative to any or all of the petitions. Comments or oppositions must be filed by June 2, 2016; replies are due by June 13. Submit your pleading at this FCC website; enter Proceeding Numbers 07-294, 10-103 and 10-234.