[EAS] FCC Seeks Comment on Multilingual EAS

[Tom Taggart]

Clay:

This is purely political maneuvering. Just like the complaint several years ago about
agencies "discriminating" in contracts because urban and Spanish stations were excluded
from rate & avail requests. 

Of course, the Commission has no control over the agencies; and for most of us, the only
control we have over the agencies is to say "no" to their low-ball rates. But in the
classic case of blaming the victim, the Commission imposed a requirement that we
"certify" that our written sales contracts contain a "non-discrimination" clause. Pure
nonsense when our "contracts" with agencies now consist of an exchange of e-mails.

I would trust any requirement for the EAS to be bilingual would also generate new rules
that would punish stations more than create any public benefit.

There is no need nor reason to establish any rules regarding bilingual EAS notices. If
the government is prepared to establish a separate chain of Spanish, or multilingual NWS
stations, then, fine, stations using that language can monitor them.  We all know the
answer to that proposal--the NWS can't keep an English language station on-air in NYC.

There's nothing to prevent our local Spanish station to post an announcer during bad
weather to translate weather warnings into Spanish. Or Korean, or whatever language the
station uses. But until the government makes substantial effort to provide the alerting
information in these languages, there is no need to change the EAS rules.