Public Interest and Civil Rights Groups Decry Form 323 Elimination
Ending the collection of biennial ownership data through Form 323 would eliminate virtually the only source of information about broadcast-ownership diversity, several civil rights and public interest groups told us. The FCC Media Bureau on Tuesday announced an 18-month pause on collecting Form 323 and seemed to indicate that the requirement to submit the data will be permanently deleted (see 2507300070). Halting Form 323 collection would be “yet another structural policy decision to brush civil rights under the rug, to obscure discrimination in the broadcast industry,” said Free Press co-CEO Jessica Gonzalez in an email. “It's a shameful and brazen dereliction of the FCC's duty to serve all Americans.”
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If the FCC won’t collect information on diversity issues, it won’t be able to address them, said Cheryl Leanza of the United Church of Christ Media Justice Office. Pausing data collection at the bureau level is the latest example of the agency acting without commission votes, making those moves difficult to challenge in court, she said. Although broadcast attorneys told us it should be possible to gather broadcast-ownership data by tracking transfers of control, Multicultural Media, Telecom and Internet Council special adviser and co-founder David Honig told us that reports created with Form 323 data were the only real picture of the low levels of diversity in broadcast ownership. “Form 323 data has long helped public policy experts evaluate broadcast-ownership diversity and whether and how the FCC's broadcast policy decisions impact it,” he said. “Eliminating Form 323 would undermine important efforts to diversify the industry.”