[EAS] MIA's

[Clay Freinwald]

Dave - 

I suspect the problem here is that a lot of these outfits don't want anyone
communicating with the FCC unless it's their legal department (or hired
gun).     Agreed, Cable was a bit more responsive than expected.   

A lot of broadcasters view EAS as a necessary evil and not much more.   Many
of them refused to participate beyond what the FCC requires.   Not sure the
FCC will bother to follow up on who responded to this and who did not.

Will be interesting to see if the Commission provides some guidance
regarding the format for the SECC reporting to them of our findings.  (Don’t
want to get my hopes up) 

Clay

-----Original Message-----
From: EAS [mailto:eas-bounces at radiolists.net] On Behalf Of David Turnmire

I also got a pretty good response from Cable Companies.  Even heard from
DirecTV.  The response rate was lower from broadcasters.  I did get a letter
from iHeart on behalf of all of their stations (and a note that it
superseded any reports from individual stations) with a list of all of their
stations.

What I found interesting was that a high portion of all of the responses...
especially those owned by large corporations, was sent from attorneys... who
didn't seem to understand how EAS worked.  Often they seemed to think the
FCC was asking licensees to do the translation themselves.  Often they
didn't explicitly state what the primary language was for their station(s). 
And often they indicated they would just "pass through" whatever they were
sent by authorities including multi-lingual alerts... apparently without
thinking about what those words meant or how that would work.

It doesn't surprise me that individuals at local stations wouldn't always be
familiar with this stuff.  But it seems some attorneys are getting a lot of
money for sending out reports that might as well have been uttered by a
politician making stump speeches.

In the end... I don't find myself knowing more after reading these reports
than I knew before.

Dave