A group of TV station owners asked the FCC to...

Cox, Dispatch, Gannett, Hearst, LIN, Meredith, Post-Newsweek, Raycom, Schurz and Scripps, together calling themselves the Television Station Group, asked the commission to let broadcasters out of the requirement to post online the rates they charge political advertisers. “It is axiomatic that disclosure of price information is anticompetitive and disrupts markets,” they said. “In this case, not only local political advertising markets but also the local commercial advertising marketplace more generally, because stations’ political ad rates, by law, must be based on commercial advertising rates,” they said. Under their proposed compromise, broadcasters would provide aggregated information about the money spent on ads for candidates, about candidates and about political issues. Stations would provide updates every other day during the lowest-unit-cost (LUC) period in which candidates for federal office can buy ads at the same rate as that paid by a station’s best advertiser. During the final week before an election the material would be updated daily. Outside the LUC period they would update the information weekly. The proposal builds on a series of suggestions broadcasters made ahead of the rule being adopted that were not reflected in its outcome, the petition said. “At the Commission’s open meeting at which it adopted [the order] ... it appeared the commission may have not had adequate opportunity to dig deeply into these alternative proposals,” the petition said. “For its part the Television Station Group continues to stand ready to work with the Commission to achieve a win-win solution that achieves the goal of transparency without disruptive, anti-competitive effects in the commercial and political advertising marketplaces."