More than two decades after the FCC suspended collecting of Form 395-B data requiring broadcasters to submit annual employment reports listing the composition of their workforce in terms of race, ethnicity, and gender following a pair of legal challenges, the FCC voted this week by a 3-2 margin to resume the process.

The data first began being collected in 1970 with Congress putting the process into law in 1992. A pair of D.C. Circuit Court decisions the FCC to temporarily suspend the collection of the Form 395-B data in 2001, with the suspension lasting until this week. The move to resume collection of the data was accelerated by a letter by 27 members of Congress in December pushing the FCC to act on the new rulemaking.

The revised version of the form collection will require every licensee or permittee of a commercially or noncommercially operated AM, FM, TV, Class A TV or International Broadcast station with five or more full-time employees to file an annual employment report with the FCC on or before September 30 of each year. Data concerning the gender, race and ethnicity of an employment unit’s workforce collected in the annual employment report will be used only for purposes of analyzing industry trends and making reports to Congress.

The employment data collected will not be used to assess a station’s compliance with EEO rules, but “to report on and analyze employment trends in the broadcast sector and also to compare trends across other sectors regulated by the Commission.” The FCC adds that this procedure will be constitutional because of the removal of the use of the Form 395-B data collection towards EEO programs. The data collected will be made available publicly as it previously was, but any attempted use of the data to challenge a station’s license or EEO compliance will be dismissed and any use by a non-governmental third party to use the data to pressure stations in a non-governmental forum would not implicate any constitutional rights of the station. The commission encourages broadcasters to bring to the their attention any evidence that a third party has misused or attempted to misuse Form 395-B employment data and says if evidence of such misuse emerges they can reconsider its approach to the collection of data.

203 LPFM applications filed by Weather Alert Radio Network in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia and the Virgin Islands have been dismissed by the FCC stating that WARN failed to demonstrate that it is eligible to hold the LPFM authorization it seeks.

WARN proposed to use the LPFM licenses to “provide current local weather information, preparedness information and local resource information 24 hours per day and 7 days per week” with local, county, state and national government entities agreeing to work with them. The commission determined that WARN does not meet the criteria to be community-based as that requires each license to be held by a local entity and offered no evidence that WARN has jurisdiction in any of the local communities they proposed nor does it meet the definition of “public safety radio services” as they are not “traditional public safety services such as police, fire, and emergency medical services, private internal radio services designated for non-commercial use by entities such as utilities, railroads, transit systems, and others that provide essential services to the public at large and that need reliable internal communications in order to prevent or respond to disasters or crises affecting their service to the public, or private internal radio services used by not-for-profit organizations providing emergency road services.”

The FCC is seeking additional comments on its pending rulemaking allowing for increased power levels for stations’ HD carriers. The NAB and Xperi filed a petition for clarification stating they “identified an important ambiguity that requires clarification regarding the maximum allowable operating power of a digital FM signal” as the previous discussions regarding digital power levels have only considered digital carriers for primary HD Radio MP1 hybrid service mode. NAB and Xperi noted that other hybrid modes of operation, which increase the number of subchannels have also been authorized and that they need increases in total integrated power above that of the MP1 mode so all the digital carriers individually operate at the intended power otherwise each channel would operate with less than the intended power level to keep the total integrated power at the intended level. The new comment period seeks to clarify maximum digital FM power levels for hybrid and extended hybrid modes and adding clarifying text to the pending rulemaking.

The FCC has issued a Forfeiture Order to Rocking M Media with a $25,000 penalty for failing to upload their annual EEO Public File Reports in the Stations’ online public inspection files, upload their EEO Public File Reports to the Stations’ websites, broadly recruit for certain vacancies, analyze their EEO program, and maintain their recruitment records. The fine was levied against the company’s clusters in Colby and Dodge City KS.

Silent Notifications

• Blarney Stone Broadcasting’s 1230 WMQU Grayling MI (Collapse of sale to Relevant Radio)
• Eduardo Gallegos’ 105.5 KRIX Port Isabel TX (Storm damage)
• Templo Piedra Angular’s 91.1 KMRA Monahans (Storm damage)

FM Changes

A contingent four station proposal would enable a new Seattle move-in.