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It’s high time we changed a few rules.
Throughout my four-decade-plus career, I often visited with FCC commissioners and their staffs to plead our case regarding outdated or irrelevant rules and regulations rendered so by technological changes, societal shifts and competitive changes significantly impacting the broadcasting landscape.
In some cases, our pleas were heard, and changes were enacted. Children’s television rules were relaxed once everyone came to understand that traditional broadcast was no longer a significant driver of children’s programming. Public files were finally allowed to be accessed online long after they should have been, making it far easier for anyone to examine what used to require a physical visit to a television facility. And political advertising schedules were finally allowed to be viewed on the FCC’s designated site, allowing anyone who cares the access and knowledge of just who is behind on-air political ads.
While these changes were helpful, they required years of prodding and discussion with an FCC staff still clinging to the notion that broadcasting should be regulated and governed as it was 30 or more years ago. There has been little to no regard for the elephants in the room — streaming media, artificial intelligence, networks controlling negotiations with video distributors and the massive disintegration of print media, all of which together have left broadcast news and a few nascent digital start-ups to cover the news across far too many communities.
Apparently, the notion that broadcasters