Lack of TV Captioning During San Diego Fire Emergency
November 2003 - The recent San Diego wildfires ravaged the county,
causing incredible loss of life, property damage, and fear. The
situation was much worse for those with hearing loss, because the
television coverage during the worst of the early destruction was
uncaptioned. Here's the story.
February 2004 - After several months with no response from the FCC or
the offending stations, a chance email to a listserve
brought an FCC response!
February 2004 - Not too long after the email from the
FCC, I got copies of the complaints the FCC sent to the television
stations!
August 2004 - So how does this situation play out? Here's
the latest update!
February
2005 - The FCC has finally acted on the complaint
against San Diego TV stations for failure to provide emergency
communications access during the wildfires of October 2003. Here's the
scoop!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
February 2004
You may remember the horrible wildfires that burned much of the San
Diego area last October, and my (and others') complaints to the local TV
stations and the FCC about the lack of required emergency captioning.
After receiving no response in 30 days, I sent another email to the FCC
- still no response. Thirty days later, another email - with the same
result. During this time I also heard nothing from the TV stations.
I happened to mention this on bhNEWS a couple of weeks ago, and
someone forwarded my comments to someone at the FCC, and I got a
response!
It seems that the email address that I used (access@fcc.gov) is no
longer active and has been replaced by fccinfo@fcc.gov . So please make
a note of that so YOUR complaints don't wind up in some cyberspace
dead-letter office.
The interesting thing about this is that I didn't get any
notification that the email address was no longer valid, and my email
didn't bounce. I may have missed an announcement, but I sure don't
recall any notice from the FCC about the change in contact information.
I did express these concerns to my new FCC contact and encouraged her
to either provide a bounce notification so people know that the address
is no longer valid, or simply forward mail from the "access"
address to the "fccinfo" address. I even volunteered to help
them with that, in case there's no one at the FCC who knows how. I got
no response to those suggestions.
The good news is that I'll be receiving copies of the Notices that
the FCC sends to the TV stations.
Stay tuned!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In previous issues we have reported on the lack of emergency
captioning during last fall's San Diego wildfires and the difficulties
we had getting our complaint to the FCC. The problem was that the FCC's
previous complaint email address in no longer being monitored,
complaints sent to that address are not forwarded, and no
"bounce" message is generated to let you know that your
complaint ended up in cyber never-never land.
A lucky circumstance resulted in a copy of our complaint being
received by the FCC, and they have sent notices to each of the four TV
stations against which we filed complaints. The date of the notices is
February 20, and the TV stations have 30 days to reply to the
complaints, with a copy to us. So we should have those by March 21.
Stay tuned for continuing updates on the FCC's efforts to enforce
YOUR right to receive complete information during an emergency.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
February 2005
I've reported a couple of times on the lack of emergency captioning
during the horrible San Diego wildfires in October 2003. You may recall
that I filed a complaint with the FCC against several of the local TV
stations for failure to provide appropriate emergency communications
access for people with hearing loss. (Note that FCC regulations require
that any emergency information that is presented vocally must also be
presented visually; they do NOT require that emergency information be
captioned. Still, most people incorrectly refer to the requirement as
"emergency captioning".)
It took awhile for the complaint to get to the FCC, because the email
address had changed, and they didn't forward email to the old address or
bounce it. But we finally hooked up. The FCC sent complaints to the
stations, with copies to me, and the stations replied in a reasonable
time period. They generally claimed that they had complied with the law!
At that point, I attempted to contact the FCC again to determine if I
needed to do anything else, but I never received another communication
from them. Repeated contact attempts were ignored. So I figured that was
my answer, that the case was closed.
Lo and behold! Last Wednesday I got a call from our local paper; they
wanted to interview me regarding the FCC fines for failure of the local
stations to provide emergency communications access. Somewhat
embarrassed, I had to admit I had no idea what they were talking about!
So I found out what was going on and had a good interview with the
reporter.
The bottom line is that three local stations were fined a total of
$65,000 for failure to comply with FCC regulations. Before you proclaim
that to be a huge amount of money, remember that the House of
Representatives has a bill before it to increase the fine for a single
curse word to $500,000! So your elected representatives apparently think
that cursing on the air is 18 times as offensive as endangering the
lives of people with hearing loss by not providing appropriate emergency
communications! That's obscene!
There are currently several other organizations and individuals
involved in similar complaints. Hopefully the decision in the San Diego
wildfire case is only the first of many.
For the long version of this whole process, please point your browser
to:
http://www.hearinglossnetwork.org/serv/advcy/fire/fire.htm
And to read the article in the local paper, have a look at:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20050224/news_1n24fcc.html
