TV stations are moving back in time.

On Tuesday, during a bizarre late-night meeting, the FCC thrust the whole industry into regulatory reverse, voting to require TV stations to fill out standardized forms each quarter showing how much FCC-preferred programming they aired.

The programming the FCC is looking for must fit certain categories—local news, local civic and electoral programming, independently produced programming and, according to FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell, religious programming.

On the forms, samples of which have yet to be released, stations will also have to list how many PSAs they aired during the quarter, what emergency information they provided and what they did “to ascertain the programming needs of various segments of the community.”

Oh, and one more thing: Stations will have to describe their closed captioning and video description efforts.

They will have to post the forms along with their voluminous public inspection files (everything but political) on their Web sites and file the forms electronically with the FCC. Stations will have just 60 days to get it together following publication of the official FCC order.

The bureaucratic burden alone is a fright.

But the principal reason stations need to be concerned is that these “enhanced disclosure” requirements move stations back toward the first quarter century of TV when they had to offer the right kinds of so-called public interest programming in order to get their licenses renewed.

I know this because this is precisely what FCC Commissioner Michael Copps said. And, in case you didn’t know, Copps seems to be running the agency these days or at least, in matters such as this, running circles around FCC Chairman Kevin Martin.

“This is a good step forward,” said Copps as he cast his vote.

“[I]f we ever get serious about having an honest-to-goodness licensing and re-licensing regime around here—and I intend to keep pushing hard for that—we will have much better data on which to make those decisions.”

That kind of rhetoric should scare broadcasters, and I think that Copps might have been underplaying the significance of the new rules.

There is real danger is the categories of programming on the standardized form. The categories, it seems to me, come real close to the FCC telling stations that this is the kind of programming that they need to air to win license renewal.

If the FCC is asking for a list of your “local civic programming,” you better have some “local civic programming” to fill in the blanks.

This is the way Commissioner McDowell sees it, too. In his statement, he questioned the need for the government “to foist upon local stations” its programming preferences.

“This new form is government’s not-so-subtle attempt to exert pressure on stations to air certain types of content,” he said.

“While we stop short of requiring certain content, we risk treading on the First Amendment rights of broadcasters,” he said. “The First Amendment applies to them too.”

Isn’t it sad that the FCC has to be reminded of broadcasters’ First Amendment rights? It’s even sadder that four-fifths of the agency ignores it.

McDowell would be the hero of this story except that he equivocated with his vote, concurring in part and dissenting in part.

It’s a wonder that such a regulatory item ever made it on to the FCC agenda, given the Republican majority. The proceeding was launched by Chairman Bill Kennard during the waning days of the Clinton Administration over the objection of then Republican Commissioner Michael Powell. It had been gathering dust for seven years.

Although Kevin Martin may fit in with the big-government neocon types in the Bush Administration, he must be a growing embarrassment to the old-fashioned, Reagan-style Republicans.

After all, it was the Reagan FCC under Mark Fowler that got rid of the license-renewal standards and ascertainment duties that Martin is now allowing to slip back into the regulatory machinery.

Martin, of course, is also determined to regulate cable any which way he can.

It’s indicative of what disarray the White House must be in these days that it has no one there to police run-amok appointees like Martin.

My only hope is that Martin went along with the enhanced disclosure item to win commission support for some future deregulatory move—perhaps on media ownership.

The NAB allowed these rules to fall into place without much fuss. I guess the thinking among the TV broadcasters that run the place is that they do plenty of the kinds of programming that the FCC is looking for and having nothing to hide.

Maybe so, but are they going to want to be backed into providing airtime for “independently produced programming” (whatever that means) and religious programming?

Good lord. Doesn’t an implicit requirement to offer religious programming on the public airwaves violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment? Somebody call a Constitutional lawyer.

Broadcasters who shrug their shoulders at this should also consider this. Once all this material is on the Web, anybody will be able to peer into the any station’s file, see what it has been doing and how it stacks up against every other station.

The FCC may not set a standard for how much local civic programming a station should be doing, but certain broadcasters will. If one station in the market is airing three hours a week, why aren’t the other stations in the market?

The many groups hostile to broadcasting will scrutinize, analyze and tabulate the station forms and whatever they find, it will not be enough. Their findings will provide endless fodder for license renewal challenges of TV stations from sea to shining sea.

The worst part of all this is that it could get worse. According to one former FCC official whose avocation is FCC history (poor soul), Copps is the most influential non-chairman FCC commissioner in history and he is no friend of commercial broadcasting.

Copps believes in rolling back the clock on ownership and license renewal standards. He believes that he isn’t doing his duty as a steward of the public airwaves if he isn’t making stations air unprofitable programming they don’t want to air and few want to watch.

If a Democrat wins the White House, Copps will suddenly become part of the FCC majority. He might even become chairman.

Welcome to 1967.