Broadcasters and their Washington attorneys made a last-minute push to derail an FCC proceeding aimed at restoring local programming and ascertainment requirements on TV and radio stations—regulatory obligations that were jettisoned 25 years ago.

In letters to the FCC last Friday, just ahead of the cut-off for submitting them, the broadcasters call for putting off tomorrow's scheduled vote on the rulemaking, saying that new regulations are unnecessary and that even their prospect would hobble broadcasters in the financial and credit markets.

“This is the worst possible time for the federal government to consider rolling back the deregulatory clock on broadcasting,” said communications attorney Richard Zaragoza, who represents the Tennessee Association of Broadcasters.

A "decision proposing a broad array of re-regulatory changes to the commission's broadcast rules is likely to further spook the equity and credit markets which are so vital to broadcasting's present and future,” he said.

Zaragoza also warned that the proposals will “raise substantial constitutional concerns with litigation likely to follow.”

Thirty-eight state broadcasting associations represented by attorney David Oxenford called proposals to bring back ascertainment and programming requirements and other rules “particularly unsound policy” in light of the competition now faced by broadcasters.

In the past, the programming requirements “did not produce better programming, but instead simply a greater regulatory burden that resulted in litigation over meaningless regulatory details,” Oxenford said.

The prosposal also intrudes on broadcasters' constitutional rights,” he said.

“The commission cannot lightly abandon its precedent of the last quarter century, nor can it lightly interfere with broadcasters' editorial discretion in that regard without violating long-settled First Amendment precepts,” he argued.

Jack Goodman, representing Schurz Communications and Mt. Mansfield Television, said the proposals are ill-timed and unlikely to achieve the desired result.

At a time "when many stations are already facing enormous competitive pressures from other media, launching a reregulatory proposal of this kind would create precisely the kind of regulatory uncertainty that harms stations' ability to finance new services,” Goodman said.

“It should only be predicated on a compelling showing of pervasive industry failure,” Goodman added. “The old ascertainment and license renewal standards did not result in better local service,” he said. “The ascertainment rules required, as any veteran of those days can tell you, dry and formulaic exercises as much as meaningful efforts to interact with stations' communities.”