There are a couple of media policy-related blog postings worth giving a peruse this afternoon. In addition to this one, of course.One, from Randolph May of the Free State Foundation, has to do with the FCC’s denial last week of three petitions for reconsideration of earlier FCC decisions. The petitions were denied because they were not filed in a timely fashion, but the denials came seven years after they were filed, and were denied on procedural grounds that should have been the work of a few minutes, not years. The filings came after the 30-day deadline expired. Perhaps those petitions were so late in being granted because they were filed with the Department of Irony department under “irony.”
May uses the denials, which were delivered without irony he point out, to push for his argument that if the FCC can’t give petitioners an answer within 18 months, it should be deemed granted. May has been pushing for a number of FCC reforms, including finding that regulations are respumptively unecessary unless an affirmative case can be made for them.
That would certainly be a fast track to the regulatory underbrush-pruning the president has signaled in his executive orders–the most recent one issued Monday–on getting rid of unnecessary regs and “reducing wasteful or ineffective programs, policies, and procedures.” The FCC is in the midst of its own pruning process as well.
The other May point, which he makes at the end of his piece, is that the FCC’s new, redesigned web site is difficult to navigate. I have heard that complaint from several people inside and outside the commission, mostly myself in the outside category, though May is in that camp as well. The FCC has said it is a work in progress and it is soliciting feedback on how to improve it. So, those, like myself, who have complaints or critiques, should lodge them.
The other blog offering is from Media Institute President Patrick Maines, who gives a shout-out to the new Future of Media report as a “thorough and level-headed analysis.” He says it will likely not have a long shelf life, which he thinks is another one of its advantages.
Maines points out that, were its head not quite so level, the report could have provided ammunition for hyperactive activist groups. But rather than try to restate, as through “a glass eye, darkly”,” his perfectly clear points. Check it out here.
