From the Public Comments: Should There Be Tougher Standards for Public Media?
May 25th, 2010 by Andrew Kaplan - Special Assistant to the Future of Media project
The organization American Public Media (APM) recently wrote in their public comment that one critical way to help journalism is to establish tougher standards for public media organizations. APM believes that the public media system in the U.S. has been allowed to underperform for many years without consequences, and this has made it largely ineffective as compared to its international peers or measured against its mission.
The following is from the public comment filed by American Public Media on May 7, 2010. Do you agree with the suggestions made? Which actions do you think would be most effective?
In order to create a truly relevant and robust public media in American, the FCC
and Corporation for Public Broadcasting (“CPB”) must systematically raise the bar for
public media organizations. We can no longer afford to give away valuable spectrum
resources and public funding to organizations simply because they qualify. Instead, the
FCC and CPB should create a high standard for audience engagement and local content
origination for all public media organizations that receive federal funding or are licensed
broadcasters.
The FCC should act in concert with the CPB on the following actions:
Initiate a new license renewal process for CPB-funded public media organizations that requires a demonstration of significant public service and locally originated content, moderated by market size.
Require an accounting illustrating that all media related revenue be invested in an audited public media entity. Eliminate the practice of some colleges and parent companies of charging "overhead" fees that cream off essential public media funding for other purposes.
Consider stopping the NCE waiver for main studios beyond some reasonable distance from a headquarters station (for example, within a state or within a certain radius) to encourage regional service and more local origination and discourage “national stations”. The national station concept can be accomplished by satellite radio. Terrestrial radio should not be comprised of legions of transmitters fed by satellite without local studios.
Support the development of public interest broadband capacity connecting public media centers and their audiences at affordable cost to the producers. These new modes of distribution will require subsidy if they are going to be used at a significant scale by public media.
Require a community board or advisory board for all CPB-funded public media organizations to connect it with community leadership. The current standard, which requires an advisory board for a community licensee but not for a public university, was a legislative error.
The CPB NCE-FM standards that call for broadcasting eighteen hours a day, two full time employees and two full time equivalents paid at least minimum wage as a condition of funding are actually lower in some ways than those that were set in 1970. These standards assume a station model that predates our current definition of a large and established public media.These need to be re-evaluated as standards of performance appropriate to communities of various sizes.
Consider the concept of a rigorous accreditation process, similar to the college and university validation process, to measure impact and continued eligibility for CPB funding.
Encourage models that reduce overhead and duplication and provide incentives for operational consolidation.
