At its meeting yesterday, the FCC adopted a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking suggesting the abolition of the EEO Mid-Term Report, FCC Form 397. That form is filed at the mid-point of the renewal term of TV stations with 5 or more full-time employees and radio clusters with 11 or more full-time employees (see our post here about the form). As the content of the report is principally made up of the broadcaster’s last two EEO Public Inspection File Reports, and those reports are available in a broadcasters online public inspection file (which should be in place for virtually all broadcast stations when the final radio stations covert to the online public file next week, see our post here), the FCC concluded that there is no real reason that these reports need to be separately submitted, and thus proposed its elimination.
The Notice of Proposed Rulemaking did suggest that there were issues on which comments would be appropriate. The one bit of information that would not be readily available without the filing of the Form 397 would be which TV stations have 5 full-time employees and which radio clusters have more than 11 full-timers. That is important as Congress required the mid-term review of the EEO performance of stations meeting these employment thresholds. So the FCC asks how that information should be tracked. It is also noteworthy that the FCC will continue to conduct the EEO mid-term review of stations meeting these employment thresholds even without the filing of the Form 397 reports.
As the FCC says that they will continue to conduct that mid-term review, it is interesting that the FCC also asks in the NPRM what other EEO review should be conducted to assess the EEO performance of stations, seemingly at the insistence of Commissioner Clyburn who feared that the abolition of the Form 397 might send the wrong message about the FCC’s commitment to EEO even if its retention served no useful purpose. Commissioner Clyburn’s comments are available here. Seemingly, as the Commission will continue to do the EEO mid-term review, and continue audits and complaint-based reviews, many methods of assessment are already in place.
Comment dates on this proposal will be set when it is published in the Federal Register. This is one more proposal for procedural reform advanced as part of Chairman Pai’s Modernization of Media Regulation Initiative. As we wrote earlier this week, we are looking forward to more substantive proposals in the months to come.
