This is weird. I thought stuff like this wasn't happening and I was a conspiracy theorist if I assumed it was.
Now, this is an equal employment opportunity form that broadcasters have been filling out for years, so it's nothing new.
The FCC wrote in a 2021 report:
This employment report form is intended to gather workforce composition data from broadcasters on an annual basis …
The Commission has administered regulations governing the EEO responsibilities of broadcast licensees since 1969, and of cable operators since 1972. The Commission's EEO rules prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, age, or sex, and require broadcasters and MVPDs to provide equal employment opportunities.
And believe it or not,
The filing of the form was suspended in 2001 in the wake of a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (D.C. Circuit) vacating certain aspects of the Commission's Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) requirements. While the Commission in 2004 adopted revised regulations regarding the filing of Form 395-B and updated the form, the requirement that broadcasters once again submit the form to the Commission was suspended until issues were resolved regarding confidentiality of the employment data. To date, those issues remain unresolved, and the filing of Form 395-B remains suspended.
Essentially, broadcasters wanted the data to be private and only used to demonstrate hiring practices across the sector.
But this week the FCC has rallied the troops and reintroduced the form, so now broadcasters are not only required to complete the form, they're also required to make the data public.
Well, Brendan Carr, the senior Republican commissioner on the FCC, isn't having it (as you may have gathered from that tweet above). He wrote a detailed review of the FCC's new policy which I will quote now.
Today's FCC Order takes two separate actions.
First, it reinstates the federal requirement that broadcasters file a document (known as Form 395- B) every year with the FCC that lists the race and gender of their employees. I would have had no objection here to an FCC decision limited to requiring broadcasters to file Form 395-B data with the agency — after all, Congress passed a statute that directs the FCC to collect this information …
Indeed, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 expressly requires that the government keep this type of race and gender data confidential when it is collected by the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission.2 But instead of confining today's decision to lawful agency action, the FCC chooses a different course — one that violates the Constitution, as the D.C. Circuit has already determined in not one but two separate FCC cases.
In particular, in the second part of today's Order, the FCC decides that it will take the Form 395- B demographic data and publish it on a station-by-station basis — meaning that the FCC will now post a race and gender scorecard for each and every TV and radio broadcast station in the country.3 In doing so, the FCC caves to the demands of activist groups that have worked for years and across different industries to persuade the federal government to obtain — and most importantly publish — this type of data about individual businesses.
Here's the excuse the FCC uses in order to make these forms public on a station-by-station basis:
[P]ublic disclosure will increase the likelihood that erroneous data will be discovered and corrected, and it will incentivize stations to file accurate data to avoid third-party claims that submitted data is incorrect … Individuals or entities with a connection to the station will be in a position to correct such errors if the data are made public.
Yeah, i wonder what kind of groups are going to come after these radio stations.
The FCC also says making the forms public will work to the "benefit of the public" and help them study trends. Yeah, okay.
Let's hear a bit more from Brendan Carr and then I'll get you outta here.
[A]s the D.C. Circuit stated in Lutheran Church when it struck down one of the FCC's prior attempts at imposing unconstitutional pressure on broadcasters: 'The risk lies not only in attracting the Commission's attention, but also that of third parties.' ... Like those investors, other organizations wrote that publicizing this data would be consistent with President Biden's Executive Order on Advancing Racial Equity and 'allow the public to hold these companies accountable.'
So yeah, the FCC, while hiding behind the "benefit of the public" talk and "accurate data collection," is just trying to feed the beast which is DEI.
That's really all this amounts to. They'll publish the data, liberals with nothing better to do will look it over, and then they'll mobilize to come after whichever station they find to be racist, sexist, or whatever the buzzword of the day is.
It's so easy to see right through these people.
P.S. Now check out our latest video 👇
