Is there a requirement that networks dedicate some percentage of their braodcast time to the news? If so, what exactly is the requirement and who is obligated to meet it?
There is no current requirement that I know of. The FCC used to require public affairs time as part of a broadcast station’s license to broadcast in the public interest. This wasn’t a set amount of time, but a handshake nod and wink arrangement that led to the Sunday morning ghetto of news shows, plus the nightly news.
This rules applied to individual stations, not to the networks. The FCC technically has no control over networks. However, since the vast majority of stations got their news from networks the rules were de facto if not de jure on what the networks provided.
The FCC has eliminated all such requirements in recent years. It is generally acknowledged that they did so in response to pressures from the station owners as unregulated cable networks took away more of the audience. However, this gets into political commentary unsuitable for GQ.
There must still be some requirements regarding news, or we wouldn’t see stories like this:
FCC Questions TV Stations on ‘Fake News’
I believe that the FCC still requires televsion stations to be “in the public interest” to retain their licenses.
A few years ago I was commuting to a client with a woman who was a news reporter at a UHF station in the suburban New York area. She said that her station played 23 hours of informercials a day, but had one hour of news to meet the “public interest” requirement. She was one of the couple of reporters they sent out to cover a story or two for their news broadcast.
Apparently, the economics of the station (which was required to be carred on all cable systems in the New York area under the “must carry” rules) was that it could make the most money getting paid for infomercials, rather than trying to gain viewership by actual programming. The hour of news was the fig leaf they needed to keep their license.
This story looks like its about TV stations that would broadcast “prepackaged news” provided to it by commercial and government interests as if it was news. The TV stations claim that they accept this free content because it saves them money and the critics claim that the TV stations are airing propoganda or commercials as if it were news, the FCC seems to think it depends on whether they got any compensation for running the “prepackaged news” (e.g. news stories about the health benefits of red wine provided by local wine producers are OK if they didn’t pay to get it on the air but not OK if they had to pay).
Back in the days of regulation, the radio station I worked for pledged in its license to provide a minimum of 6% news, 3% public affairs and 3% “Other” non-entertainment programming over the course of a year. I don’t know where those exact numbers came from, but I have a pretty good hunch the station owners didn’t just pull them out of thin air.
These days, as others have said, there is only the requirement that broadcasters (not cable networks) operate “in the public interest.” One local TV station has exactly one hour of public interest programming per week, while another has no locally produced news or public interest programming at all.
I suspect that there’s a broadcaster out there somewhere who’s ready to argue that all infomercials all the time is “in the public interest” of the local community.