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by Commander Tansin A. Darcos 12/27/2013, 4:06pm PST |
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Under FCC license requirements, every broadcast radio and television must have a "public inspection file" which is, by its name, available for inspection by any member of the public upon request at any time during regular business hours.
That means you can walk into any television or radio station anywhere in the United States, and ask to see the Public Inspection file, and they are required by law to let you sit and read it. So you can actually get the opportunity to look around the inside of a broadcast station. I've been to stations all over the country using this trick over the past 30 years. Sometimes you meet some of the nicest people, sometimes you end up being able to watch a show being done because you're on the wrong side of a broadcast being recorded and they need you to wait because you'd have to cross the studio, and sometimes the office where they keep the records is above or next door to one of the studios.
The FCC takes this very seriously. One TV station that did not have its inspection file available when an FCC team came to look, was fined $5,000. For this one incident. Failure to have your inspection file available is considered a very serious offense for a broadcast station, so a stiff fine is warranted to make sure that they don't repeat it and to let other broadcast stations know that failure to keep their inspection file available is going to be very costly.
I've sometimes had the opportunity to talk with station managers and other people in broadcasting. Not many people take advantage of this function. I once visited Channel 7 in Midland, Texas around 1989, where the inspection file was in the station manager's office. He said my request was the first time in twenty years that anyone had ever asked.
In Los Angeles, it's so common the stations routinely keep a log of requests in case the FCC ever has any questions, and they keep the log as part of the inspection file. I was at KCBS once, the CBS-owned affilliate in Hollywood and discovered that, in a lot of cases, some group that complains about something writes to every single station in town because I'd see the exact same letter I saw in the inspection files of channel 11, 13, 5 and 7. I also visited KNBC channel 4, and met one of their employees, the blind censor. Yeah, the guy is a censor who works at a TV station to check for salacious content, but he's legally blind. This is so unusual that the Los Angeles Times did an article about him, a guy who's a censor at a TV station but he is legally blind.
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