Preparing to Post Your Full-Power or Class A Television Station Public Inspection and Political Files on the FCC’s Website

Recently, the FCC adopted a new regulation requiring television broadcast stations to migrate their paper-based public inspection files as well as their political files, all of which are currently maintained at their main studios, to the Commission’s website. Once that is accomplished, anyone with access to the Internet will be able to view those files. Despite the high compliance stakes involved in crowd-sourcing the FCC’s enforcement function with the entire Internet and in granting the whole world a deep dive into candidates’ advertising activities, broadcasters have received little information from the FCC as to how to comply with this looming deadline.

This Advisory is intended to serve as a resource for television stations to know what items must be uploaded and where, as well as to assist stations in making advance preparations to shorten the learning curve once the FCC’s database is functional. Because the deadlines for compliance are different for the political portion of the public inspection file and the remaining portions of the file, this Advisory generally treats the “Political File” and the “Public Inspection File” as two separate files.

Question

When does the new rule go into effect?

Answer

The new rule is scheduled to go into effect on August 2, 2012, but contains some phase-in provisions. As a result, there are effectively four deadlines associated with the new rule.

• August 2, 2012: Effective on this date, all commercial and noncommercial full power and Class A television stations must upload any newly-created “Public Inspection File” document into the FCC’s “TV Station Profiles & Public Inspection Files” database at the time such document is created. Stations will then have five additional months, or until January 1, 2013, to complete the process of uploading their pre-August 2, 2012 Public Inspection File documents into the FCC’s public file database.
• August 2, 2012: Also effective on this date, television stations affiliated with the top four television networks and located in the Top 50 television markets must upload any newly created “Political File” documents into the database as such documents are created. Note that no stations will have to upload pre-August 2, 2012 Political File documents.
• January 1, 2013: As noted above, effective this date, all commercial and noncommercial full power and Class A television stations must have uploaded any pre-existing “Public Inspection File” documents into the database.
• July 1, 2014: Effective this date, commercial television stations in markets below the Top 50, as well as non-network stations in the Top 50 markets, must upload any newly-created “Political File” documents into the database as they are created.

Download: Preparing to Post Your Full-Power or Class A Television Station Public Inspection and Political Files on the FCC’s Website