FCC members upheld a staff decision to not release under...

bureau’s withholding from the Center for Media and Democracy in response to a 2007 CMD FOIA request for letters of inquiry to licensees as part of the agency’s investigation into VNRs on 77 stations, answers to the LOIs and other records. The bureau cited the law’s exemption 7(a) because the documents related to an enforcement investigation, said an order released in Wednesday’s Daily Digest (http://xrl.us/bnpg85) responding to the center’s 2010 application for review of the withholding. “Exemption 7(A) provides Commission investigations into VNRs the same protection it provides investigations involving national security concerns,” said the order approved by the five commissioners. “Courts also give deference to government showings of articulable harm in law enforcement situations not involving national security concerns.” There’s “one narrow class of records” not raising “concerns” under the exemption: Three completed VNR investigations that led to enforcement orders, said the decision directing the bureau to release the actual videos the licensees submitted to the agency. The licensees are News Corp.’s Fox Television Stations, subject of a 2011 forfeiture order (CD July 11/11 p6) after CMD filed a complaint, Access.1 New Jersey, recipient of a 2011 notice of apparent liability (CD March 25/11 p6), and Comcast, which got an NAL in 2007. The center can seek judicial review of the decision, the order said. CMD has complaints in years past over numerous VNRs, which the center said were carried during TV news shows without disclosures they were material provided by outside parties. The center, which hasn’t decided whether to sue the commission, is disappointed in the order and that it took five years to get the decision after the FOIA request was made, Executive Director Lisa Graves told us. The documents the center seeks “would shed greater light on the use of ‘fake news,’ pre-cooked” VNRs “made by corporations to be passed off as news,” she said. “The FCC does not appear to be up to the task of helping the public regulate the use of our airwaves in fast-moving media markets when it cannot even rule in a reasonable time period on the public’s requests for files. Taking five years to deny requests for information about how its weak rules are enforced does not give any basis for confidence that the agency is taking its responsibilities to be responsive to the public very serious[ly] at all.” This “slowness and obstinacy of burrowed-in bureaucrats” doesn’t “bode well” for anyone complaining that TV stations’ public files are missing information, Graves said. Top-four rated stations in the 50 largest markets began last month uploading to the FCC’s website new political file information, so it’s not just available at main studios in paper form.