The holidays are over, and while the regulation never stops, it is time to once again buckle down and look at what is on the horizon for broadcasters. While, in the next few days, we will have our typical look ahead at the broadcast regulatory agenda in Washington for the New Year, we also need to look at more immediate deadlines in the month of January. As we are at the beginning of a calendar quarter, the tenth of the month is the date for broadcasters to add their Quarterly Issues Programs Lists for the just completed quarter to their public file – whether it be the online public file for TV broadcasters and the many radio groups that have already converted to the online file, or into the paper file for those radio broadcasters waiting until the last minute before making the conversion to the online file as required by March 1. These Quarterly Issues Programs lists are the only FCC-required documents showing how a broadcaster has met its public interest obligations to serve their communities and, as we have written many times (see, for instance, here and here), the FCC considers them to be very important, and thus have led to numerous substantial fines for broadcasters who have not met the FCC’s requirements.
TV broadcasters also need to file their Children’s Television Reports with the FCC by the 10th of the month, and place information into their public file about how they complied with the commercial limits on children’s television programming. As we have written before (see our articles here and here), these, too have been the subject of numerous FCC enforcement actions when the Commission becomes aware that the reports were not filed, or were submitted late. So be sure to timely file these reports with the FCC, and place the information about compliance with the commercial limits in your online public file by the deadline.
