April 18, 2011 10:50 AM PDT
Okay, the FCC in its infinite wisdom (and in my mind, overreaching of its mandate) has specified the new language we need to carry on our contracts concerning non "discriminatory" buying. This mandate confuses me personally.
Clearly by the letter of the law, a buyer with a "no urban" mandate is in the wrong. So is "No Hispanic" also wrong? What if someone wanted buy buy ONLY the Hispanic station in a cluster and did not want the Classic Rock station? Is this too discriminatory toward the people who listen to that type of music? How about the soft AC station... skip it and you are discriminating against, what in my market, is a white female audience.
So the question... are we to enforce this? If so how? Has the FCC now mandated that someone cannot choose the stations they want to run on? Or has the FCC just said that the advertiser must CHOOSE the stations they want to be on, and WE must determine if they are being discriminatory based upon the language that we all put in our contracts (making ourselves culpable at the same time)?
Your thoughts are appreciated.
April 22, 2011 6:24 AM PDT
However well intentioned this new law is, Chris is right. Advertisers will continue buying stations they feel will reach their target demographic and some station operators, especially those of us with urban stations in our clusters, will be put in the unformfortable position of asking advertisers why they are omitting the urban stations. If we don't get a satisfactory answer, the FCC expects us to walk away from the business. Meanwhile, the advertiser will go across town to the operator who doesn't have an urban station and spend 100% of their radio budget with him. This is nothing but another "feel good" law that is burdensome on radio stations and impossible to enforce.
April 22, 2011 9:14 AM PDT
But Larry... the OTHER part of this is that IF they buy ANY of our stations, they are discriminating against someone. If I have a "Legends" type format and they do not buy it, is that age discrimination? How can we be put in a position to enforce something that is not codified and something we have no authority to regulate???
