FCC Seeks $4.5 Million to Pay for Broadband Plan, Media Work
The FCC asked Congress for $4.5 million of unused funds from previous years to pay for two proceedings, required by statute, in the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1. It seeks $3.5 million to continue working on the National Broadband Plan (NBP) and $1 million for the 2010 media ownership review. The money would be used to hire staffers to implement the plan and to run additional workshops on media ownership and pay for studies on the issue. The request points up the overarching focus of delivering on the March broadband plan at the FCC, though it’s been overshadowed recently by net neutrality and reclassification talks, and on trying to improve on data collected for previous ownership reviews, communications lawyers said.
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The funding request was made in a July 29 letter to Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., chairman of the Financial Services Subcommittee that oversees the commission’s budget, agency officials said. FCC spokespeople and Durbin’s staff declined to provide a copy of the letter, but others who had seen it discussed it with us. The letter seeks permission to use unobligated, unspent funds from fiscal 2004-2008 and would be used next fiscal year. Durbin received a letter from the FCC and is looking into the request, a Senate aide said.
Some of the money sought for the broadband plan would be used to hire staffers, agency officials said. The letter mentioned economists, engineers and technologists, they said. “The commission’s primary focus is NBP and making that happen,” said communications lawyer Harry Cole of Fletcher Heald, who hadn’t seen the letter. “It doesn’t surprise me that they're looking at taking whatever money they can to staff up” to deliver on the plan, he added.
The FCC seeks extra money to run more workshops on media ownership and to pay for studies done by staffers and to pay for outside work, the letter said. Future workshops would be held across the U.S. to learn about the performance of media within markets, with panelists from advertisers, broadcasters, non-profit groups, programmers and others. With the comprehensive studies the commission seeks, “it looks like they're throwing everything including the kitchen sink into it in the interest of creating a total record, but that may be biting off so much that it’s too much to chew in a digestible matter,” said Cole, who has broadcast clients.
Costs for media ownership research could be minimized if “the FCC had adequate data collection of its own” to avoid paying companies that collect such data for commercial clients, said Prof. Angela Campbell of the Georgetown University Institute for Public Representation, which has clients opposing media consolidation. Having aggregated data from new ownership forms that commercial TV stations filed for the first time last month would help, said Prof. Carolyn Byerly of Howard University, who had opposed broadcaster efforts to put off Form 323. “They are asking about things related to race. They are not asking about things related to females, and I think that’s a fundamental flaw in their request for proposals” the FCC recently made, she said. Spending $1 million is significant, said Policy Counsel Corie Wright of Free Press, a consolidation foe. “We hope that this kind of investment will yield better quality research to inform the 2010 quadrennial review. Unfortunately, the FCC’s track record on this leaves something to be desired.”