The Minority Media & Telecommunications Council has
asked the FCC to put its diversity study out for public comment. That came in a
meeting Thursday between MMTC executive director David Honig and acting FCC
chairwoman Mignon Clyburn and her staff, according to MMTC.
The FCC delayed action on its quadrennial media ownership
rule review until the report on the impact of cross-ownership on media
ownership diversity was completed -- MMTCsubmitted it to the commission last week.
MMTC updated the chairwoman on a number of issues, including
MMTC's desire for the FCC's Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau to act
on the Katrina
petition before the 2013 hurricane season. If so, the FCC needs to act ASAP
since the season technically started June 1 and even as Honig was meeting with
Clyburn the first tropical storm of the season was bearing down on the East
Coast, including Washington.
Last month, MMTC joined with the Independent Spanish
Broadcasters Association and the Office of Communication of the United Church
of Christ asking for revisions to the FCC's emergency alert system (EAS)
"to provide for the dissemination of multilingual local, state and
national emergency information via the EAS to ensure that non-English speaking
persons will have access to the same information as their English speaking
neighbors in an emergency." MMTC is concerned that the FCC's testing of
the EAS system was too focused on "saving those who speak English,"
which it says could prove deadly for non-English speakers.
MMTC also said the FCC should start voting on
over 70 diversity proposals endorsed by MMTC, some of which were recommended by
the FCC's own Advisory Committee on Diversity in the Digital Age; and to
include data on minority and women-owned businesses in the Wireless Telecom
Bureau's state of mobile wireless report. MMTC did not indicate how receptive the
chairwoman was to their proposals, but media diversity has been one of her
signature issues as a commissioner.
