Washington DC Emergency Captioning Complaint

Editor: Regular readers know that we are in the midst of an FCC complaint regarding the lack of captioning during the southern California wildfires, and we'll be reporting on that in the next couple of weeks. But there's also an emergency captioning complaint underway in Washington, DC. The FCC position on this one is so bizarre that I don't understand how they can support it.

Here's a report from NVRC's Cheryl Heppner on this travesty. Please do read on. We'll be following this story and letting you know what you can do to help reverse this injustice.

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On March 16, 2004 I received a certified mail letter from the Federal Communications Commission that stunned and deeply angered me. Inside I found a copy of a letter to Christopher W. Pike, the President and General Manager of WJLA-TV, Channel 7.

The three-page letter, dated February 17, 2004, was from Colleen Heitkamp, Chief of the Telecommunications Consumers Division of the FCC's Enforcement Bureau. It addressed a complaint against WJLA that NVRC filed on behalf of deaf and hard of hearing consumers in the DC, Maryland and Virginia Metro area related to the sniper shootings.

NVRC's complaint gave a list of dates and times where captions were not provided, including a "breaking news" segment on October 9, 2002 about a shooting in Manassas; on October 10 for a news report about area school lockdowns, and on October 14 for a breaking news segment about the Falls Church shooting. NVRC also listed instances when regular closed captioning and emergency text crawls blocked each other.

The FCC's enforcement bureau announced in this letter that our complaint was denied because the sniper attacks do not appear to be an emergency event "contemplated" in 47 C.F.R. section 79.2 of the FCC rules.

This section sets requirements for video programming distributors to make emergency information provided by audio also accessible to persons with hearing disabilities through closed captioning or another method of visual presentation. The definition of "emergency information" under these rules is information that helps to protect life, health, safety or property.

NVRC will be mounting an appeal of this decision. We cannot allow this terrible mistake to set a precedent. It is unthinkable that the FCC's enforcement bureau has forgotten what it was like during the Fall of 2002. People were afraid to pump gas. Schools were under lockdown and their students and sports teams couldn't practice or play outdoors. Large events were canceled or postponed. Tourists stayed away from the area. We were suspicious of every white van. No one wanted to go to night meetings.

If that was not an emergency situation, I do not know what is. We deaf and hard of hearing people need access to the same information as others because we are responsible for our children, the people we supervise at work, and the people to whom we give care. Without it we cannot make appropriate decisions to protect their safety.

These are among the things I said during my panel presentation at the FCC Summit on Emergency Communications and Homeland Security on Thursday, March 25.

I spoke also about visual images which are the bread and butter of TV news programs and how powerful these images are. Without knowing what audio information is being provided to accompany them, we have no way of knowing if the vivid scenes of fires, bombings, public safety officials or military personnel, and bodies in pools of blood are happening now or if they happened in the past. We don't know if they are going on in our towns or nearby. We don't know whether we should be doing something to protect ourselves and our loved ones.

I hope you are as outraged as I am, and that you are ready to do everything you can to support NVRC in getting this ruling overturned.

-- Cheryl Heppner, Executive Director