In Re: ) ) EN BANC HEARING ON ) BROADCAST AND CABLE EQUAL ) EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY RULES ) Volume: 1 Pages: 1 through 138 Place: Washington, D.C. Date: June 24, 2002 Before the FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS COMMISSION Washington, D.C. 20554 In Re: ) ) EN BANC HEARING ON ) BROADCAST AND CABLE EQUAL ) EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY RULES ) Commissioners Meeting Room Federal Communication Commission 445 12th Street, S.W. Washington, D.C. Monday, June 24, 2002 The parties met, pursuant to notice of the Commission, at 10:03 a.m. APPEARANCES: On behalf of the FCC: CHAIRMAN MICHAEL K. POWELL COMMISSIONER KATHLEEN ABERNATHY COMMISSIONER MICHAEL COPPS COMMISSIONER KEVIN MARTIN SECRETARY MARLENE DORTCH FORMER COMMISSIONER HENRY RIVERA Panelists - Panel I: HUGH PRICE, President and Chief Executive Officer National Urban League JOAN E. GERBERDING, President American Women in Radio and Television MARILYN KUSHAK, Vice-President Midwest Family Broadcasters APPEARANCES: (Cont'd.) Panelists - Panel I: (Cont'd.) GREGORY HESSINGER, National Executive Director American Federation of Radio and Television Artists ANN ARNOLD, Executive Director Texas Association of Broadcasters LINDA BERG, Political Director National Organization for Women ESTHER RENTERIA, President Hispanic Americans for Fairness in Media Panelists - Panel II: CATHERINE L. HUGHES, Founder and Chairperson Radio One, Inc. BELVA DAVIS, Special Projects Reporter KRON-TV, San Francisco, California MICHAEL JACK, President and General Manager WRC-TV, Washington, D.C.; and Vice-President, NBC Diversity REVEREND ROBERT CHASE, Executive Director Office of Communications, United Church of Christ CHARLES WARFIELD, President and Chief Operating Officer ICBC Broadcast Holdings, Inc. SENATOR ART TORRES, Retired, President Kaitz Foundation TOM BAXTER, President, AOL/Time Warner Time Warner Cable STEVE WHITE, Senior Vice-President AT&T Broadband P R O C E E D I N G S (10:03 a.m.) CHAIRMAN POWELL: Good morning to everyone, and welcome to the Commission's En Banc Hearing on Broadcast and Cable Equal Employment Opportunity Rules. We are honored to have so many take time out of their tremendously busy schedules to accommodate today's proceeding and give us the benefit of their collective experience. We especially want to thank former FCC Commissioner Henry Rivera for joining us today. We are fortunate to have him with us as he has a rich background in this area from his time at the Commission. Thank you, Henry. I would also like to take this moment to recognize some other individuals who have contributed enormously to this subject. First, we have with us today Pluria Marshall, chairman of the National Black Media Coalition. Pluria, thank you. David Hoenig, executive director, Minority Media and Telecommunications Council, standing in the back. Phyllis Eagle Olson, president of the Emma L. Bowen Foundation. Where is she? There she is. And Felix Sanchez, executive CEO of the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts. Thank you all for being here. All have devoted a considerable amount of time and energy to equal employment opportunity over the years, and we thank them. I am also indebted to my fellow commissioners, whose commitment to crafting constitutionally sound EEO rules is evident by their enthusiastic participation in today's hearing, and a special nod to Commissioner Copps, who suggested last December that we convene this hearing. At this point I'd like to ask my colleagues to share their opening remarks, and we'll begin with Commissioner Abernathy. Commissioner? COMMISSIONER ABERNATHY: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I also want to thank everyone for being here today and being part of this hearing on the proposed equal employment opportunity rules. Our goal is to ensure that all people from various background within each community become aware of specific job openings and opportunities in the media. In addition, longer term recruitment initiatives, including scholarships and internship programs, should help a wide array of people develop the knowledge and the skills to pursue these opportunities. At the end of the day, I think that all of us will benefit -- the media, consumers, employers -- so this is basically a win/win situation for everyone. That became clear to me last week when I had the opportunity to meet with a talented group of college students who were working in the industry as interns through the Emma L. Bowen Foundation for Minority Interests in Media. These amazingly talented kids -- I can call them that because they're so much younger than me -- were all concerned about the opportunities that lay ahead of them, and I believe that the FCC's EEO rules, partly by fostering the kinds of opportunities that the internship program fostered, will ensure that these students and others become a part of our vibrant media industry. The other point I want to make is we were overwhelmed with the number of people who wanted to come here and talk with us today, and I think that's fabulous. The insight and the viewpoint of the industry and the public is always an important part of the process. I'm hopeful that the proposal that we've set forth will allow companies a considerable amount of flexibility and discretion in how they achieve broad outreach and will pass scrutiny by the Courts, but the benefit of today's en banc is it provides us an opportunity to hear from all the affected and interested parties so we can refine those rules. Thank you again. I look forward to hearing about the various companies' best practices that you can share with one another about all the industry efforts that are already underway and how we can further refine those to ensure that we come up with the best and the most effective EEO rules possible. Thank you. CHAIRMAN POWELL: Thank you. Commissioner Copps? COMMISSIONER COPPS: I am really pleased to welcome all of today's panelists and participants to this important meeting. Some of you have come a long ways to get here today distance wise, and we thank you for that. Others have come a long way fighting to break down barriers and to open doors of equal opportunity to get here, and we thank you for being here, too. We have been many, many years getting to an en banc hearing on equal employment opportunity. I'm told the last one may have been 1973, so I want to commend the Chairman for making it possible. I think this is a real public service. We at the Commission are in the middle of a struggle to establish effective rules to ensure that the doors to employment in our media industry are open wide for all Americans. The fact that the D.C. Circuit has twice struck down our EEO rules does not mean that we should shy away from a strong commitment to a proactive program of equal opportunity. That would be constitutionally unnecessary and morally unforgivable. What the Court's action does mean is that we have to work harder, be more creative and discover together how to reach our goal. To be frank, there are counsels of caution, even in some quarters a feeling that we best not push very hard for fear of yet another Court rejection, but that approach is not sound counsel. It is instead a formula for retreat and defeat, and it is at odds with the whole direction and progress of America over the past 40 years. By now we should all understand that America's strength is its diversity. Diversity is not a problem to be accommodated. It is an opportunity to be developed. We will succeed in the twenty-first century not in spite of our diversity, but because of our diversity. As our friends in the Congressional Hispanic, Black and Asian Pacific American Caucuses remind us in their insightful letter of June 21, "Diversity is the backbone and strength of our great nation, and diversity provides the opportunity for us to become an even greater nation." Of course we have to act in light of the D.C. Circuit Court's decisions, but we must not allow these decisions to halt our progress towards true equal opportunity in the media industry. Our first panel will give us more insight into the critical role that our EEO rules have played in these industries and information about the obstacles that stand between success and us. We will hear clearly and frankly, I trust, about the problems that many have had in learning about job openings and getting hired, about the state of diversity in our licensees' companies today and about the wide differences in various companies' dedication to making equal opportunity a reality. Our second panel will help us find solutions to these problems. I believe in these industries and in the ingenuity and good citizenship of American broadcasters and cable companies. Our second panel is living proof that a number of companies are aggressively continuing their outreach efforts, even after the Court's ruling. Their hard work in connecting with their communities has improved their work forces and improved the diversity of their companies. We need to distill from these successes best practices that other companies can employ, so I look forward to hearing from people actually trying to achieve equal opportunity, about what they think could work and about what they think won't work. I welcome hearing good news, but I want to know about the bad and the ugly, too. We've got a big job to do and a long ways to go, so I hope today no one will pull any punches and that you will tell us how we can work together to open wide the doors of opportunity. Why is this so important? Here's one reason. Just two years ago, an FCC Commission study by the Ivy Group found that women and minorities faced pervasive discrimination in the media industries over the last 50 years. The study found that the loosening of the ownership caps made these barriers nearly insurmountable for small minority and women owned businesses attempting to thrive or even enter the broadcast industry. The report concluded that government actions or inaction on particular regulatory and market issues have exacerbated the barriers. These actions and inactions include the uneven enforcement of EEO policy. In that same Ivy Group study, former Commissioner Henry Rivera, who I am so pleased to see here today because he has been such a real leader on this, explained how EEO rules are critical not only to jobs today, but to new voices in the media tomorrow. He explained that new people hired for positions in the media companies are the farm team for the future of the industry, and he correctly noted, "Those are the folks that you look to in the future to get into ownership." If the doors to jobs with our licensees are not open today, the doors to diverse ownership and a multiplicity and diversity of voices in the media are already closed for the future. Let's not look on this hearing as an isolated proceeding. It is in fact related to so many other things we do. How we craft these rules will affect not just employment in the ranks, but employment in the upper management ranks and in ownership, too. How we craft these rules will have much to do with our ability to enhance diversity in programming. The two go together. Note that I said diversity in programming and not variety. There's a big and substantive difference. How we craft these rules is also related closely -- intimately connected -- to the public interest that both the FCC and broadcasters are charged to promote. This is not something we do at the fringes or something divorced from our other ongoing work. It is rather at the heart of what we do, and how we do here will affect how we do across the board. We can do better than we're now doing. This includes the industry. This includes the FCC. We must all do better both as trustees of the people's spectrum and as citizens of this land of ever greater opportunity, so let's roll up our sleeves and get to work. Thank you. CHAIRMAN POWELL: Thank you, Commissioner. Commissioner Martin? COMMISSIONER MARTIN: I, too, want to thank all of you for the considerable time you've taken out of your schedules to be with us this morning and help educate us about the challenges and opportunities that we're facing. You are each in a unique position capable of explaining to us both the challenges and opportunities inherent in crafting rules that can promote equal employment opportunity in the cable and broadcast industries. Certainly creating EEO rules that will withstand the Court's scrutiny is an extremely important responsibility of the Commission. I believe we all share the same goal -- designing a broad outreach program that is comprehensive, effective and constitutional. I believe it is also important to remember that a successful EEO program can be a valuable tool to promote not just diversity, but also true competition. Broad outreach will benefit our society tremendously by enabling the media to take advantage of the rich diversity of our nation. By expanding our recruitment efforts, broadcasters and multi-channel video programming distributors are more likely to find the best qualified candidates. When the media has the most talented work force possible, we all reap the benefits. I, therefore, am particularly interested in hearing from all the witnesses today who are able to speak about what tools actually can create such broad outreach programs, and I know many of you have had such successful programs in place for some time, and I commend you for it. I appreciate your taking the time to share with us today how those programs have been effective. I also look forward to hearing from you what you think would constitute the best practices that we could adopt in expanding those equal employment opportunity programs to others. While I'm confident that we will succeed in creating an effective outreach program, I am cognizant of the Commission's history in this area. Twice the Courts have struck down this agency's EEO rules as unconstitutional. This time as we draft EEO rules we must make sure that we give proper heed to the Court's instructions, and in that regard I also hope that our witnesses address any particular weaknesses that they might see in our proposed rules. Again I thank you for your time and your willingness to share your concerns and insights, and I look forward to hearing from all of you this morning. Thank you. CHAIRMAN POWELL: Thank you, Commissioner Martin. Before we begin with the panelists, I'd like to invite our FCC secretary, Marlene Dortch, to give us the rules of the road, if you will, with some recognition that we have a lot of panelists, and we need to stick to them in order to get through them. Madam Secretary? MS. DORTCH: Good morning, Mr. Chairman, Commissioners and invited panelists. Following are the procedures for today's en banc hearing. We will utilize a time keeping machine located in front of Chairman Powell to maintain time limits on each presentation. Each panelist will have a total of six minutes to make their individual presentation. The green light will signal for the first five minutes of your remarks. When the yellow light signals, you have one additional minute to sum up your presentation and close your remarks. The red light signals the end of your allotted time. Please conclude your remarks at that time. We will adhere to these procedural rules for both panels. Thank you. CHAIRMAN POWELL: Thank you. Before we begin, I'd like to acknowledge Commissioner Copps made reference to a letter that we received from members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, the Black Caucus, the Asian Pacific American Caucus that "...urging the Commission to take affirmative steps to ensure that broadcasters and cable entities do not discriminate against current and prospective employees and that they eliminate barriers predicted upon race, ethnicity and gender." I will have this letter entered into the official record. We would now like to begin with a historical overview. The en banc, of course, will focus on issues raised in the rule making, and we'll hear many recommendations from panelists on best practices and successful outreach programs, but we thought it important to try to provide an opportunity to frame the discussion by getting a historical overview of the EEO rule, and we've asked former Commissioner Henry Rivera to perform that task. I can't do justice to Henry's varied and successful career, but, just to name a few highlights, he has currently since 1998 been a partner in the law firm of Shook, Hardy & Bacon, also was an assistant managing partner in the law firm of Ginsberg, Feldman & Bress, and prior to that a partner in Dahl, Lonas and Albertson. Mr. Rivera served as FCC Commissioner from August, 1981, to September, 1985. During his tenure at the Commission, Henry served as Chairman of the Advisory Committee on Alternative Financing for Minority Opportunities in Telecommunications. Henry is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Donald Magnan Award for Advancing the Cause of Women and Minorities in the Media. He is currently chairman of the board of the Catholic Charities of Washington and a board member of the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council. Commissioner Rivera, welcome. COMMISSIONER RIVERA: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Good morning, Mr. Chairman and Commissioners. It's a pleasure to be here, although I must confess to feeling a little odd being on this side of the dais. I have been given the job of providing you with a little history of these important regulations. Speaking of history, I gather that we are making it today by participating in this unique en banc hearing that brings together representatives from the cable, broadcasting and public, supporters and opponents of EEO. My own history with these rules began almost immediately upon my arrival at the Commission. I can assure you that when I came here it was not with the intention of being the focal point of EEO efforts at that time. However, as my tenure unfolded I encountered a large number of people who went out of their way to tell me how important these rules were, how their careers in the media were attributable directly to these rules and how important it was that they be preserved. As Commissioner Copps has just pointed out, many people told me how important it was to their efforts to become media owners. Time does not permit me to recite a comprehensive history of 35 years of FCC EEO regulation or list all of the chairmen, commissioners and general counsels who have been committed to these rules, but I commend that history to you. Some of the names on that list might surprise you. The jurisprudential background is already in the record of this docket, so I will focus on how these rules came to be adopted and how they were called into question. The Commission's EEO efforts began in 1967 when the Office of Communication of the United Church of Christ petitioned the Commission to prohibit stations that engaged in employment discrimination from holding a license. In response, the Commission announced a new policy requiring broadcast licensees to show nondiscrimination in their employment practices. The Commission recognized, as articulated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the national policy against employment discrimination on the basis of race, religion, sex or nationality and that deliberate discrimination would be inconsistent with the responsibility of each broadcaster to serve all elements of the community. In further explaining the basis for its new policy, the FCC cited the Kerner Report, which was the federal government's first official written document concluding that racism existed and that it was a problem. The report cited the mass media's failure to foster interracial communications as one of the causes of the 1960's civil disturbances and found that the media had not shown an appreciation of black culture or history, had not employed or trained enough blacks in decision making positions and recommended that television develop programming integrating blacks in order to foster positive race relations. In 1969, the FCC adopted rules requiring equal opportunity in the employment practices of broadcast licensees. The Commission required stations to establish, maintain and carry out a continuing program of specific practices designed to assure equal employment opportunity in every aspect of station employment and that the EEO programs address issues such as program dissemination, recruitment, managerial accountability and self-evaluation. The Commission stated that a formal EEO rule was necessary to emphasize its policy, make it specific and provide remedies for noncompliance. The Commission also reiterated the bedrock principle that discriminatory employment practices are incompatible with the operation of the station in the public interest. A year later the Commission refined its EEO rules and instituted reporting requirements. These rules required each licensee with five or more full-time employees to submit with its license renewal application a written equal employment opportunity program designed to ensure nondiscrimination in station recruitment, hiring, placement and promotion. The Commission also adopted a rule requiring each licensee with five or more full-time employees to file an annual statistical profile report, known as FCC Form 395. The Commission explained that these changes would provide useful statistical data and ensure that licensees focused on the best method of assuring effective equal employment practices. Later years saw the extension of the rules to include gender and to cover the cable industry. The Commission fine tuned its program as it developed experience in the area, most notably by entering into a 1978 memorandum of understanding with the EEOC outlining the jurisdictions of each agency in handling complaints of discrimination against licensees, thus avoiding regulatory duplication. In 1994, the Commission designated for hearing the license renewal applications of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod for failing to recruit minorities and for possible misrepresentation or lack of candor. Among other things, the licensee explained that it had not recruited minorities because its station employees required classical music expertise. Ultimately, the Commission fined the licensee $25,000 for allegedly misrepresenting whether classical music expertise was a job requirement. The licensee appealed the FCC's decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. In 1998, the Court ruled that the outreach provisions of the broadcast EEO rule were unconstitutional and vacated other aspects of the FCC's Order. The Court held that the FCC's internal processing guidelines, which compared a station's minority and female employment to minority and female representation in the local labor force, pressured licensees to hire minorities. In response, the Commission adopted new EEO rules for the broadcasting and cable industries to provide them with significant flexibility and control over the development of their outreach programs. Upon review, the Court eventually affirmed the Commission's statutory authority for its new EEO outreach rules, but found unconstitutional one of the provisions designed to achieve broad outreach. That brings us to where we are today. Last December, the Commission sought comment on a proposal for new EEO rules. The Commission reiterated its commitments to prohibiting discrimination in broadcast and cable employment and to requiring broadcasters and cable entities to reach out to all segments of the community when filling vacancies. It is against the backdrop of these Court decisions that you and the panelists here today must craft new rules that will pass judicial muster. I have every confidence that you and this institution are up to this challenge. And now, before I have to leave, I want to offer a few words of praise for the Commission's sometimes under appreciated, usually under compensated and always underestimated staff. I like to think that this Commission's staff is the smartest, most capable and most creative of any federal agency. Its integrity and commitment to developing, explaining and enforcing the agency's regulations is unparalleled. Its hard work will be invaluable as the agency strives to meet the challenges you face in this arena. Thank you again for the opportunity to be a part of this historical event. CHAIRMAN POWELL: Thank you, Henry, for that outstanding overview. On behalf of Commission staff, thank you for that public recognition, which I share wholeheartedly. Before turning to the panelists, we do have a brief videotape address from Reverend Parker from the United Church of Christ. As you heard in Henry's opening remarks, they played a pivotal role in the original petition that brought EEO's rules into being. We can run the videotape. (Whereupon, a videotape was shown.) REV. PARKER: Mr. Chairman, Honorable Commissioners, my name is Everett Parker. In 1967, the Office of Communication of the United Church of Christ, which I headed at the time, successfully petitioned the Commission to issue EEO rules for broadcasting stations. When the first station reports were published in 1971, executives set about making changes. By 1973, when the first en banc hearing on EEO was held, blacks and women were beginning to be seen in prominent on-air roles. It's heartening that in the years since the FCC has never wavered in its commitment to equal employment opportunity. I believe that every Commissioner save one has endorsed EEO regulations. Responsible broadcasting and cable companies support EEO rules, realizing that our diverse population requires that a variety of views and voices be involved in communication decision making. It is shameful that there are still those who spread the myth that the FCC's EEO program is a kind of quota system or an imposition on business. Actually, giving employment to everyone is one of the best things government can do. I believe it is especially important that broadcasting and cable companies concentrate, as some are doing now, on opening entry level jobs to inner city and remote area minority youth, grooming them to be decision makers in the future. Please keep in mind that today's minorities plus women constitute tomorrow's overwhelming majority. We're not yet at the halfway mark of achieving full equal employment opportunities for them. I know I won't be around to see you finish the job, but I urge you never to give up trying. Thank you. (Whereupon, the videotape was concluded.) CHAIRMAN POWELL: Very nice. Thank you. We have an ambitious agenda, so let's begin. If I could ask that you please state your name and company or organization you represent before sharing your remarks? We'll start with Mr. Hugh Price. MR. PRICE: Thank you very much, Chairman Powell. My name is Hugh Price. I'm president of the National Urban League. I'd like to thank you and Commissioners Abernathy, Copps and Martin for convening this historic en banc hearing, which I believe is the first in more than a generation. It's also delightful to see the tape of Everett Parker and a relief to know he still has vinegar coursing through his veins. He is very much in this game. I particularly want to salute the Commission for keeping the issue of equal employment opportunity on the radar screen of the Commission itself despite the judicial setbacks and, more importantly, on the radar screen of the industry and of the public. Certainly promoting diversity and inclusion through outreach is an effective way to accomplish those ends. I bring several perspectives to the comments that I want to offer this morning. First, as president and CEO of the oldest and largest community based movement devoted to empowering African Americans to enter the economic and social mainstream, we see all across the country in our more than 100 affiliate communities the vital importance of making sure that young people in our community are aware of the industry and the opportunities in the industry. They are eager to participate in the labor market and in the communications field, and we know that we can provide those opportunities and that access through the kind of outreach that's envisioned by the FCC. Secondly, through the work that we do as Urban Leaguers around the country, we understand the critical importance of the composition of labor forces in communications decisions and the choices that are made about which stories to cover, how to cover them, whether they're given the kind of importance that's necessary in order to convey a full picture of our community, so from the vantage point of the Urban League I understand the importance of outreach and inclusion. Secondly, from 1982 to 1988 I was a senior executive in public broadcasting with Channel 13 in New York City. I initially oversaw all local programming and scheduling for the station, and then I ran all national production for the station. As an executive, I saw up close that this is indeed a word of mouth industry and that people who make critical hiring decisions tend to want to rely upon known quantities and are more resistant to opening it up to those who are unfamiliar than we need. This is also an industry that increasingly relies on freelancers and subcontractors, and without outreach to help young people understand how the industry works to see what the opportunities are not only with primary broadcasters, but also with those who supply programs and perform services, they will not be fully aware of the possibilities in communications. Thirdly, I'm a member of an African American men's organization in Westchester County called the Foundation of Westchester Clubmen. A few years ago, we took a number of our young people who were in middle school on a tour of Channel 13. I can't begin to tell you what a revelation it was for them to see not only minorities and women on air, but to see them in the editing suites, behind the cameras and to know that this is an industry that truly can be exciting. For many perspectives we believe that outreach and recruitment are critically important in achieving EEO goals. We believe that diversity and inclusion are important to the industry and to the country because that work force needs to be robustly inclusive so that our young people know that this sector of our society is open. We know that it's critically important in the editorial process and story selection, presentation, framing of stories, the editing of stories and in the mix of programming that is offered on air, be it television, radio or cable. Lastly, the exposure sets the stage for promoting diverse ownership in the industry. In an evolving world with our multi-channel world with digital television and web radio and all the many new options, we've got to have many, many voices there. I can only tell you as the president of the Urban League that the existence of Radio One, the existence of Inner City Broadcasting and others you will hear from today vastly enriches our society because in many respects those outlets serve as the town meeting on the air for our community. They promote civic engagement in our community. Therefore, having those kinds of entities owned by women and by minorities in our society it vastly enriches the way in which our society functions. We think that promoting diversity and inclusion helps to fulfill the goal which is the theme of our annual conference each year that opportunity plus equality equals one America, and we believe very strongly that the outreach initiatives envisioned by the FCC will help to accomplish that end. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. CHAIRMAN POWELL: Thank you, Mr. Price. Ms. Gerberding? MS. GERBERDING: Yes. I am Joan Gerberding, president of National Media Partners and national president of American Women in Radio and Television. Mr. Chairman, Commissioners, I want to thank you today for having AWRT here to discuss these issues, although I find it hard to believe that in the year 2002 we still have a need to discuss these issues. The world of broadcasting and communications has undergone rapid changes in the recent years, yet as these changes in technology and ownership heighten competition among broadcasting companies, it seems that one needed change has been overlooked. Women, a vital resource, are still not present in the world of broadcast management as much as they should be. Even the newest media conglomerates seem to be reflecting old boy attitudes in their executive suites. Women are rarely represented among the top executives or on their boards of directors. According to the recent study by the Annenberg Public Policy Center entitled Progress Or No Room At The Top, out of all the executives in media, telecom and the e-companies, only three percent were women with clout titles, clout titles being defined as chairman, CEO, vice-chairman, president, COO, senior EV-P and EV-P. AWRT, whose mission is to advance the impact of women in the electronic media, is very concerned that the perpetual glass ceiling in the broadcasting industry has had too few cracks in recent years. Thus, while many state broadcasters associations have implemented on-line recruiting, job fairs and the like, AWRT believes that the FCC's proposed EEO rules are necessary to ensure that all non-exempt broadcasters offer equal employment opportunities through broad outreach to and recruitment of all candidates regardless of gender, race or ethnicity. Otherwise, the substantial progress still needed in the development of a diverse broadcast industry won't happen as rapidly as it should. AWRT's comments in this proceeding cited employment statistics that we believe demonstrate the continuing need for regulatory overlay by the FCC in the area of EEO. For instance, in the year 2000, in the 3,000 plus radio stations in the top 100 markets in this country, only 13 percent of all general managers were women, only 25 percent were sales manager, and only ten percent were program directors. The average percentage of women in the upper four job categories was up by only 0.5 percent since 1995. In 2001, we saw some slight improvements. In those same radio stations in the top 100 markets, the number of women in the general manager position rose from 13 to 15 percent, sales managers went from 25 to 30 percent, and female program directors stayed the same at ten percent. While AWRT is encouraged by the slight increase in the number of radio stations with female general managers, we certainly do not believe that these figures in and of themselves are laudable. Indeed, one of the most discouraging facts revealed by the employment data compiled in 2001 by M Street Productions' Most Influential Women in Radio Group, nearly one-half of the 32 groups that owned between 12 and 49 radio stations have no female general managers at all. The numbers are a bit better with television with 17 percent female general managers and 31 percent females as sales managers. Women make up 44 percent of TV news anchors, but only 26 percent of news directors. So what do we need to do? All owners and managers of television and radio stations should determine whether they encourage or discourage women from advancing within their companies or organizations. Does their corporate culture encourage retention of women? Are there women who are qualified to move into positions of greater authority? Are there female friendly training programs? Are management meetings female friendly? Are women encouraged by company executives from the top down to seek advancement? If not, they should be. Broadcasters should identify successful training programs both inside and outside the company and organization and encourage their rising stars, both female and male, to participate. Broadcasters should ask whether their male managers are even trained to identify rising female stars within their ranks. If not, they should be. Mentoring opportunities with senior executives are important for the vital growth of men and women and for their success. Are women employees encouraged to join organizations that give them leadership training? Can all of the above be accomplished without the FCC's anti-discrimination rule and proposed EEO regulations? As much as we'd like to say yes, I think that the statistics still say no. AWRT therefore urges the FCC to continue to be the driving force to create a level playing field for women in the broadcast and cable industries through EEO rules that require stations and cable systems not only to engage in broad outreach and recruitment, but also to be accountable to the FCC and to the public for their efforts. It has taken the broadcast industry way too long to break out of the bad habits of the old boys' network and the word of mouth recruitment that have limited opportunities for advancement by well qualified women. Without the FCC's regulatory push to ensure that these old habits cease immediately, the glass ceiling will be perpetuated. Thank you. CHAIRMAN POWELL: Thank you very much. Ms. Kushak? MS. KUSHAK: I'm Marilyn Kushak. Mr. Chairman and Commissioners, thank you for the opportunity to appear at this historic en banc hearing on equal employment opportunity. I am vice-president of sales and marketing and also a partner in a group of four small and medium market radio stations based in Springfield, Illinois, actually Lincoln's hometown. The Springfield market is part of Midwest Family Broadcasters, which also serve four other markets in the midwest. We operate all four of our radio stations with only 44 full-time employees, of which 12 of them are sales and marketing professionals. My stations have always believed in having a diverse staff because it's in our best interest, and it just makes good business sense. It is merely the activities and the strategies used to meet our mutual goal where we differ. At this hearing today, I appreciate the opportunity to share with the FCC the activities we have found to be most effective and most efficient to achieving our mutual goal of work force diversity. In a typical year, we usually hire between six and eight new full-time employees. Given the size of our company, we just simply cannot justify having a personnel director or human resources department. We found that complying with the FCC's previous rules often were very difficult since my employees are already taking on a maximum number of duties in order to serve best our stations and our community. Specifically, we have found it very burdensome to track, collect and report the information needed for the many forms required. We found that for many of our vacancies, recruiting in our community is unrealistic and fruitless. In the past year, we have had vacancies for an engineer, a midday personality and a news person. Each of these positions require a different strategy for identifying qualified candidates. Placing an ad in a newspaper or making on-air announcements simply do not attract candidates for these specialized positions, although we sometimes have success finding employees in this way for other types of jobs such as the sales and marketing, clerical jobs, support staff. My stations have found that widely disseminating information on these specific job vacancies is very often a waste of resources. On the other hand, we have experienced great success in identifying superior job candidates through our ongoing general outreach efforts. I'd like to share a few of those examples with you today. First, we produce a job fair in central Illinois every January and July. Our stations heavily promote this approximately eight weeks in advance, also on our website, and we also distribute educational information about this to our educational institutions. As a result, the expos have attracted an average of 1,000 job seekers in a small market and routinely are a major source of new employees at our stations and other participating companies in our community. In addition, we have noted that the expos attract an extremely diverse mix of attendees. We also perform continuous ongoing outreach on our radio stations' websites. We maintain a current list of available job openings, and as a matter of course we post all vacancies on NAB's electronic career page and also on the Illinois Broadcasters Association's website. We also make on-air announcements describing particular vacancies. In fact, we've identified that our on-air announcements are one of the most effective ways of attracting quality job candidates for certain types of jobs such as the sales support staff and promotions. We encourage listeners to visit our websites for additional details on these vacancies. Finally, we make a concerted effort to establish partnerships within our community organization. One very worthwhile successful partnership is forging the partnership with the annual Women's Professional Conference, which is made up of about seven women's organizations within the community. Several of the women we've hired over the past several years have noted that our presence at this conference was one of the ways our stations came to their attention for the first time. I believe these examples demonstrate how much more successful that ongoing general outreach can be as compared to job specific recruitment. From my perspective as a female broadcaster in management with many years in the business, I have never witnessed or experienced discrimination against anyone. It simply is not a characteristics of our industry, and not because the FCC tells us not to discriminate, but rather because it is good business to have a diverse work force. We have a common goal, and we are very committed to executing results oriented strategies that achieve workplace diversity. Again, thank you for the opportunity to share my experiences with you. I appreciate your attention and consideration, and I would be pleased to respond to any questions that you may have. CHAIRMAN POWELL: Thank you, Ms. Kushak. We'll ask questions at the end of all the panelists. Mr. Hessinger? MR. HESSINGER: Thank you. My name is Greg Hessinger. I'm the national executive director of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists known as AFTRA. AFTRA is the national labor union that represents employees working at television and radio stations and networks nationwide. We represent approximately 80,000 members, and we negotiate over 300 collective bargaining agreements with stations and networks throughout the industry. I want to thank you for the opportunity to speak to you about these issues as they are immensely important to our members in their working lives. I want to thank you for reaffirming the Commission's anti-discrimination policy, which we obviously endorse. We also support the proposed new EEO rules that are designed to promote broad outreach to all qualified applicants for job vacancies. As set forth in my written statement and our written comments, we do believe the rules could be improved with some clarifications and modifications, but we applaud you for continuing to promote the public interest. If there is one thing that I would really like to emphasize to you today it is that our members, who after all are most directly impacted by the Commission's policy in this area, report both the perception and the real life experience that meaningful EEO rules are absolutely essential to ensure that the broadcast and cable industries remain accountable and responsible to the communities they are obligated to serve. What our members tell us is that the need for strong, meaningful and legally sound EEO rules is greater now than ever. It's partly a function of the deregulation and consolidation that has occurred over the past few years. It's undeniable that as the industry continues to consolidate there are certain cost and efficiency pressures placed on the corporations that ultimately are shouldered by the employees. There are simply fewer jobs and less resources within these companies to devote to the practice of equal opportunity employment. If you read the response of broadcasters, I think you can essentially sum the response up in this fashion. We should be treated like any other employers in any other industry. Even if you do conclude that our industry deserves special scrutiny, they will argue that alternatively the market will protect the public interest or that we should trust the employers based upon the practices that have taken place in the past. I would submit to you that we, the public, cannot afford to take these kinds of risks of relying upon the market or relying upon trust in the employers that operate in these industries. When you talk about the market, you need to be honest about the marketplace that exists. The licensees in these industries are for-profit corporations by and large. They are in business to make a profit for their shareholders. The CEOs of these companies are held accountable for generating those profits. That is the interest that they serve. They are in the business to make a profit. The compact that we, the public, have with these broadcasters is that in exchange for utilizing a public resource we demand only that they serve the public interest. That is the fundamental compact between broadcasters and the public. Our interest, the public interest, is in promoting diversity of voices over the airwaves and promoting equal opportunity in employment in these industries. Those interests, while I would argue are largely compatible with a profit interest in most cases, we believe that promoting equal opportunity in employment is something that is very compatible with making a profit, but there's also no denying that it is interest that is different than a purely economic interest in profit. Given these realities of the market, it is obviously not responsible to simply trust employers to do the right thing. There is already some evidence that absent meaningful EEO rules the commitment in the industry will tend to wane. There are employers who have already removed the equal opportunity employer label from their websites. We have seen a reduced participation in job fairs throughout the industry, and we receive reports from members that insular hiring practices are on the rise. You need not impugn anyone's character or intent, however, to reach the conclusion that these rules are necessary. As I said before, sometimes the profit interest and the public interest simply collide, and it's our job to protect the public interest. As I said at the outset, AFTRA does support specific outreach and record keeping rules that have been proposed, but we also believe that there are important modifications and clarifications that should be adopted to best further the Commission's goals. The specific recommendations are set forth in my written statement, but I will say in sum that we have deliberately designed those recommendations to minimize the burden on employers. For example, with regard to the proposed rules that licensees be required to distribute job announcements to any organization that requests them, we have suggested that organizations only need request that information once, after which they would be part of a regular distribution list. That is a suggested rule that we believe would minimize the burden on employers. Once somebody has requested the information, they're on a regular distribution list, and the administrative burden is minimized. Finally, and I know I'm running out of time, while age is not currently part of the Commission's anti- discrimination mandate, the Commission does have authority and responsibility to continually monitor the industry to ensure that licensees are serving the public interest. At AFTRA, we have seen increasing evidence of age discrimination practices in this industry. We believe that the time has come to investigate the scope of this problem. After all, we are talking about an industry whose business model is undeniably based upon selling the eyeballs of younger viewers to advertisers at a profit, at a premium. Given this undeniable fact, coupled with the rise of complaints, we urge you to take seriously this problem and to investigate it thoroughly. Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today, and I look forward to answering any of your questions. CHAIRMAN POWELL: Thank you, Mr. Hessinger. Ms. Arnold? MS. ARNOLD: Thank you. I'm Ann Arnold. I'm executive director of the Texas Association of Broadcasters. We represent the free, over-the-air broadcasters in Texas, 834 radio stations and 197 television stations. Today I also represent the other state broadcasters' associations. I organized the unanimous effort of the state associations in successfully challenging your last EEO rules and coordinated the state associations' joint comments in this proceeding. I'm grateful to be invited to speak to you today. In the past six years that I have been concerned about the FCC's actions in this area, this is the first time that there has been an opportunity for all parties to talk directly to the FCC Commissioners about our concern, the numerous efforts we already undertake to promote diversity in broadcasting, the unwarranted burden bureaucratic regulations impose on broadcasters and the unfair impact of the rules, making radio and television operators targets for attack and the reasons that we believe the FCC should routinely defer to the EEOC, the Courts and state authorities on questions of unlawful employment discrimination in the general area of the EEO. I commend all the members of the Commission, as well as the able Commission staff, for arranging this forum where we can express our views. I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not here to talk about the law. Our written comments fully address the legal issues, and our lawyers would be happy to provide you anything additional that you need. What I'm here today to do is to give you the real world impact of your previous attempts to impose stricter requirements on broadcasters than other American businesses face and the misuse of the entire regulatory process in an abusive way that I cannot imagine you ever envisioned or countenanced. I want to stress that we're in total agreement with your goal of equal employment opportunity and the critical importance of ensuring that no one is discriminated against on the basis of their color, their country of origin, their ethnic heritage or their sexual orientation. We support diversity, and I believe our record in Texas and the Texas stations demonstrates that we believe in reaching out to the entire qualified population in our job searches. Where we differ is the need for the Federal Communications Commission to take a heavy handed role and attempt to dictate specific requirements for radio and television stations and how they seek out employees, whether a broadcaster must advertise in a newspaper or meet some arbitrary requirement with regard to how many minority organizations are solicited or how many minorities are interviewed for each job opportunity. We think broadcasters do a good job of reaching out to minorities, providing diverse programming to meet the needs of a diverse interest and promoting the values of a multi-ethnic society with opportunities for all. The broadcast industry lived three decades under FCC administered nondiscrimination and affirmative action rules. For all practical purposes, those affirmative action or broad outreach rules have been off the books for three years now without any evidence of radio and television stations acting to curtail equal employment opportunity for all or to discriminate against any minorities. The broadcast industry continues to reach out for qualified employees from the entire population. Outreach efforts have in essence become institutionalized, and we question why anyone would assert that there is any true need for any industry wide re-regulation in this area. I don't know of any allegations of discrimination against actual individuals. The real concern we have about re-regulating is the way the rules are used. I'm here today to tell you the ugly truth about how the EEO rules you promulgate are misused to abuse, threaten and blackmail radio and television stations. There's a reason why the state associations have taken the lead in this fight. Most broadcasters and many groups and organizations that traditionally represent radio and television stations' interests are wary of repercussions. Some tell me they fear they would be branded as racist to object to any of the FCC's EEO regulations or actions. Individual broadcasters are actually afraid to complain to you about it, but they tell me about the calls they get asking for thousands of dollars for preparation of "minority recruitment plans" for their station in exchange for dropping protests of their license renewals. Even those who paid and got the two or three page boilerplate plan still found themselves caught up in an enforcement action in 1994 when the Commission adopted rules one day and applied them the next day retroactively to stations whose license renewals were still pending from four years earlier. They were all expected to have records of actually interviewing minorities in two-thirds of their hiring opportunities when no one had ever talked about that or discussed it before that point. Some stations in the midst of sales or other actions requiring FCC approval quietly pay the forfeitures, only to be contacted again asking for several thousand dollars in exchange for a group not appealing the FCC's final decree to Court. Whether they paid or refused to pay, the unlucky broadcasters targeted for attack face legal bills totaling tens of thousands of dollars. The undue pressure to hire from a particular ethnic group that the Court cited last year in striking down the latest version of the FCC's EEO rules is real. The pressure is there. Broadcasters tell me and sometimes they even tell white male applicants that they cannot hire anyone but a minority. Rightly or wrongly, in the face of the regulatory environment created by the FCC regulations the broadcasters believe they must find a minority for an opening, especially if the economic downturn has caused them to downsize or have fewer openings. I have agonized truthfully at the prospect that these broadcasters will be caught in a Catch-22 situation, a trap, and find themselves sued for reverse discrimination. TAB has also documented the incredible paperwork burden imposed by some FCC regulatory schemes. In 1994, we conducted a statewide survey of the costs of the paperwork regulations by the then EEO rules. On average, it cost radio stations $15,775 and television stations $9,500 to deal with all the bureaucratic requirements. We broadened our outreach efforts at that point. We already had those underway, but we did broaden it to try to especially recruit minorities to positions for other than traditional air jobs that many young people regard as the only opportunities in broadcasting. We went to more job fairs. We created more job fairs. We did all kinds of things. We try to recruit minorities and other qualified applicants to business administration jobs, sales positions and every other opening available in radio and television stations. In the current economic downturn, however, I wonder if the repeated job fairs give applicants a false hope of employment in an industry where the work force is being downsized. Consequently, we have grave concerns about the likely impact of the proposed new FCC regulations along the lines that you're considering. We're most troubled at the proposed requirement that stations have to report specific numbers of ethnics on their 390 report and make that public. Even if you wait three years, that will be used by people in the way that I'm talking about to abuse the process. If you find that your reasons and rationale outweigh our very serious arguments against further regulation, we sincerely implore you to consider restraint in imposing regulations so that what broadcasters are required to do is as clear cut as possible, as straightforward in what stations must do to comply and least susceptible to the misuse I have described at the stations. I would like at this point to ask the long-time chair of Texas EEO efforts to tell you about the special things Texas broadcasters do in this regard and the outreach efforts we undertake jointly for the members of our association without any FCC rules in force. Ernie Jackson served a number of years as a member of our board of directors and last year was unanimously elected to move on to the executive committee. He has deferred temporarily moving up to become TAB president to devote himself full-time to a hugely successful public service effort that he pioneered as general manager of Houston's KBXX and KMJQ. If it's all right, Mr. Chairman, I'd like for Ernie to speak. He's right here. CHAIRMAN POWELL: Ms. Arnold, I'm sorry. Your time is up. If we could finish the panelists and then come back around, if you don't mind? MS. ARNOLD: All right. CHAIRMAN POWELL: Thank you. Ms. Berg? Ms. BERG: Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Commissioners. My name is Linda Berg, and I am the political director of the National Organization for Women, which is the largest grassroots feminist organization in the country. NOW's 500,000 contributing members reside in every media market across the nation. As one of NOW's missions is to work to achieve pay equity and economic equality for women, we are extremely concerned with the implementation of equal employment opportunity rules in the broadcasting and cable industries. We very much appreciate the opportunity to testify at this vital hearing. Employment statistics in the aftermath of EEO Court decisions and the suspension of the EEO rules clearly demonstrate the continuing need for EEO regulations by the Federal Communications Commission. Women and minorities are still under represented in broadcasting cable industries, particularly in upper level and management positions. After years of slow but steady progress towards parity, the numbers are slipping for the first time in the wake of the Lutheran Church decision and the subsequent EEO rule suspension. A study by the Radio Television News Directors Association noted that in the year of 2000, "The white male world of TV general managers is actually a bit more white and a bit more male this year than last." The study shows that the percentage of minority radio news directors has also dropped from eight percent in late 1998 to approximately 4.5 percent in 2000. In television, the drop was from 14 percent to eight percent. While women are represented in radio and TV broadcasting, they tend to be clustered in clerical, administrative, support and sales areas, often trapped below the glass ceiling. In the year 2000, close to 75 percent of office and clerical workers in broadcast stations were women. In contrast, in a study by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, only ten percent of top executive officers were women. For this reason, NOW seeks broad outreach regarding job openings, as well as other creative solutions to reverse this alarming trend. NOW has worked with the Commission for years to develop fair gender and sex neutral EEO rules, and NOW fully appreciates the Commission's initial proposals and supports their goals. We do, however, have suggestions to expand the outreach of these proposed rules. We ask that part-time jobs, as well as full-time jobs, be included in the requirement for full dissemination of information and notice of job openings. We also suggest that stations be required to make public service announcements which inform the public and community organizations of their right for information on job openings. We further request that any EEO reports that stations must already make available to the public be posted on the stations' websites or a central website. Requiring outreach for part-time jobs would advance parity in the industry. Part-time positions constitute a significant portion of the total work force at most broadcasting stations -- 31 percent for radio news staffs and 13 percent for TV news staffs. According to the National Association of Broadcasters, these positions are important for gaining entry to and training in broadcasting, which is particularly crucial for women who frequently re-enter the work force via part-time jobs after having their children. Without wide dissemination of information about part-time positions, a significant avenue of entry into broadcasting may be unavailable for many potential applicants. While broadly disseminating job information and granting community organizations the right to be notified of job vacancies is a good start, these requirements will be ineffective if the groups do not know of their entitlement to that information. NOW therefore asks that broadcast stations be required to issue public service announcements which inform the community organizations of their right to be notified of job vacancies. Finally, NOW suggests requiring increased public access to filed EEO reports. As the Commission itself has noted, meaningful ongoing communication between a broadcaster and the public will result in a more effective outreach program. To allow for easier access to the reports, the Commission should require stations to post them on their websites and perhaps also in a central location, such as at the Commission's website. Because most stations already maintain extensive websites, any additional burden would be minimal and outweighed by the benefits of facilitating public access. While NOW supports using the internet for wide dissemination of vacancy notices and aiding access to EEO reports, traditional forms of notices appearing in newspapers and trade publications are still essential. Only 54 percent of Americans have access to and use the internet, and only 7.5 percent of Americans search for jobs via the internet. Additionally, while about 60 percent of white Americans have access to the internet, only 40 percent of African Americans and 32 percent of Hispanics have internet access. Allowing radio and television stations to advertise jobs only through the internet would not meet the Commission's goals of broad outreach. Thank you. CHAIRMAN POWELL: Thank you, Ms. Berg. Ms. Renteria? MS. RENTERIA: Mr. Chairman and fellow Commissioners, I commend you for holding this hearing. Many of us were terribly disappointed when the Court of Appeals struck down the 30-year-old rules in 1998. We feel very strongly that until television and cable programs look like America looks, there needs to be a mechanism for change and a reason for broadcasters to do it. I have had a very long association with the media first as an employee from 1959 through 1983 and later as a community advocate for change from 1986 to the present. In 1959, I was a newspaper reporter, and in 1968 I was recruited by KNX Radio to become the first Hispanic woman on their staff. They called three different organizations and asked for recommendations for a Hispanic reporter, and they were given my name by all three groups. They called and offered me a job, and I took the job as a news writer and desk editor. If I hadn't been recruited, I would not have gone into broadcasting. There were very few women and no Hispanics outside of the Spanish language media at that time. There were no role models for me at all. In late 1969, I transitioned to television, working as a writer, producer and host on a KCET series about Mexican Americans. I thus became the first Latino host of an English language program in Los Angeles. That was 1969, and I was told that I was the 200th woman on the air in the United States. As you may recall, the 1960s were turbulent years with many civil rights issues and some civil unrest. That was a time when few women and even fewer people of color were employed in the media industries. For example, during the Watts riots of 1965 the Los Angeles Times had to instantly promote a mail room employee to be a reporter to cover the event. They had no black writers. I am happy to tell you he is still working there as a reporter. Then we got the Kerner Commission and the Christopher Commission Reports, which documented the blatant racism then existing across America. The FCC, among other governmental institutions, called for equal employment opportunity rules and regulations. We believe that these rules were very helpful in opening broadcasting to women and minorities in the 1960s and the 1970s. However, by the middle 1980s many station managers had adopted the idea that EEO rules were no longer that relevant. We'll come back to this statement in just a few minutes. In 1986, a group of us looked around and saw that Hispanic American faces were disappearing from LA television stations. A few of us got together, and we founded the National Hispanic Media Coalition as a non-profit educational foundation. I worked very closely with Armando Duron, the founding chairperson, and in 1990 I succeeded him as the national leader of the group. As I mentioned before, some general managers were no longer really taking the EEO obligation seriously. We met with the general manager of one Los Angeles station who later wrote to us saying that "because he didn't believe in affirmative action or equal employment opportunity" he didn't need help from the Coalition to find good recruitment sources. Fortunately, his network headquarters did not share his opinion. The next general manager at KCET -- at KCBS -- was happy to meet with us and reinstitute equal employment opportunity rules. From 1988 to 1996, the Coalition filed about 60 petitions to deny license renewals against radio and television stations for the most egregious violations of EEO rules. We could have filed many others, but our pro bono legal counsel only had so much time. The Coalition routinely reviewed EEO performance at stations, and we found some very strange things. In one instance, we noticed that a New York City station had very, very few minority employees. When we visited the station and asked what newspapers and magazines they used for recruitment, we were told they didn't. They simply posted the job openings on their employee bulletin board, and the employees referred their friends, their relatives and their neighbors to apply for the open positions. That's not equal employment opportunity. We filed against WNET in New York, and it received a conditional license renewal with serious reporting conditions from the FCC. We've noticed some backsliding by stations in their EEO efforts since the Appeals Court voided them in 1998, and we find them to be very tragic at several levels. Hispanic American children need to see good role models on television to provide them with goals and aspirations. Other children need to see Hispanic Americans because they will be competing with them in the future. Latinos remain severely under represented on prime time. While we make up 12 percent of the U.S. population, we are only four percent of the prime time populous. We applaud your December, 2001, draft. We feel that the oversight of the broadcasting industry is definitely a federal responsibility since broadcasters are essentially migrant workers who go from city to city and state to state as they move up to bigger media markets. However, we disagree with your thought that stations with less than five employees should be exempt from these rules. If America is truly to be the land of opportunity for everyone, then we need to level the playing field by adopting these equal employment rules. They are needed now more than ever. Communities of color have grown from 16 percent of the national population in 1970 to 31 percent in 2000. The minority population has doubled in 30 years, and the Latino population has tripled in the same time period. The problem is that employment opportunities for minorities have decreased. CHAIRMAN POWELL: Thank you very much. We are running slightly behind on time so, Ms. Arnold, if you could submit your manager's testimony for the record as opposed to having a presentation? He's welcome to join you at the panel for Q&A if you'd like. We're going to enter the process of questions and answers now. I'd like to take the prerogative to ask one set of questions. I was struck, Ms. Arnold, by your presentation in that without knowing any of the facts of the particular things that you allege, it seems to me ironic to suggest that the FCC rules are the coercive element of that kind of activity should it exist. It seems to me that the FCC's rules are a dramatic subset of the kind of legal recourses that exist generally in the population, including Title VII litigation and the like. The FCC rules last time, though struck down in one component, were largely process, the requirement that one reach out broadly. The FCC tried to make clear that it didn't have an intention of using the coercive aspects of its regulatory authority for the enforcement of alleged claims discrimination. I'm sort of curious why the FCC rules are a source of that potential sort of shakedown, if you will, as opposed to the general rules of discrimination in society, so why aren't you just like every other institution who faces those sorts of challenges? MS. ARNOLD: Well, the discrimination, if there were any, would be the subject of a complaint of the EEOC. I don't know of any complaints that are being filed, but these regulations give these certain groups and individuals a power over stations who are fearful of having some sort of action or complaint filed with you. CHAIRMAN POWELL: If we are making clear that we don't use the process to entertain complaints and take regulatory enforcement, why don't you just not pay? MS. ARNOLD: Whether you entertain or announce that you're not going to use them for those purposes or not, they in effect end up being used that way because you collect the information on what races are at a station and how many there are and how many they interviewed. That ends up being a subject for someone to complain about. CHAIRMAN POWELL: Surely, but they have recourse for complaints in many other places than they do here at the Commission. MS. ARNOLD: Yes, and if there were legitimate claims of discrimination they would be able to file those complaints and to have some action, but there aren't any complaints of discrimination. All there are are these groups that are trying to push an agenda to have certain entities or certain groups favored over other groups, and it amounts to reverse discrimination. CHAIRMAN POWELL: My only reaction is if they are false and unsubstantiated, there is nothing to fear, and people shouldn't pay. MS. ARNOLD: You might not think they should pay. However, in the business perspective of a broadcaster who is looking at whether or not he can sell his station, whether or not there's some pending action against him, when the license renewal thing drags out for four years and then somebody can complain even further and it goes on forever and you have to get those sort of things resolved before you can sell your station or take some other actions, that's a real problem for businesses. Literally some of the businesses that were fined in Texas told me they felt like they had to pay because they were in the process of some sale or action that needed your approval. CHAIRMAN POWELL: I appreciate that, but at some level you have to sort of be believed in what it puts into law and says, as opposed to what it might do. I wanted to ask a separate set of questions before turning over to my colleagues. Many of the panelists focused quite heavily on the broadcast base, and certainly the EEO rules are borne and come out of the broadcast base. It seems to me one of the questions that's always presented in the context of this debate is why does this industry need a level of regulatory intervention in EEO above and beyond what the rest of business is and society is, and the answer is, as Mr. Hessinger pointed out, in the context of broadcasting was that broadcasters receive licenses for free and as a condition of that license serve the public interest. What's becoming increasingly challenging, however, is that similar claim can't necessarily be said about the cable industry to whom we extend these rules. We did not provide the core license functionality. While the cable companies have franchise licenses, the public interest model that's traditional of broadcasting is not the core of regulatory authority in that industry. One could talk about direct broadcast satellite, who purchases spectrum at auction, as opposed to the traditional public interest model. They certainly in some kind of general sense are trying to serve the public, but to the extent you have that hooked in broadcasting. I would invite anyone on the panel to talk about why media is different in a way that can reach or justify the rules with respect to other industries, as opposed to specifically broadcasting. MR. HESSINGER: I can certainly take a crack at it. It's absolutely a very valid question to ask, and it's a distinction worth noting. One of the rationales that broadcasters will cite for why the regulatory scheme as applied to broadcasters should be loosened not only with respect to EEO rules, but other rules, is that there has been an explosive growth of other media that consumers have available to them and, therefore, our attention on broadcasters is in a sense misplaced because it reflects the reality when there were only three broadcast networks that everyone watched, and those broadcasters uniquely influenced the public. I think you have to take a global perspective and recognize that the media, whatever it may be, whether it's just the broadcast network, so the broadcast networks plus the stations or the networks and the stations and cable or the network stations, cable and the internet, and who knows what's going to come along in the future. The media has a unique influence on this country, on its citizens, on our democracy, and I think you have to start there. It becomes a question of what is it that we stand for as a country? What kinds of democratic ideals are we trying to promote? If we don't have policies and regulatory schemes in place that promote the continued dissemination of diverse points of view, I think it's a very dangerous thing for our democracy. I think you can get away from the traditional analysis of the quid pro quo of the broadcast spectrum for serving the public interest and take a larger view of what are we really trying to promote as a country when we talk about this resource of the media that reaches the eyes and ears of our citizens. I think it's very important that we continue to grow our thinking with the growth in technology. CHAIRMAN POWELL: Hugh? MR. PRICE: Mr. Chairman, I would only add as a criminal defense lawyer and not as a communications lawyer by any stretch of the imagination that I think that the same kind of oversight and encouragement should be applied to all sectors of the communications industry. I think there is an artificiality emerging because of evolving technology, and I think that the cable industry, the over air industry, should be equally encouraged to promote outreach and inclusion. CHAIRMAN POWELL: I'll end here and turn over to my colleagues. I purposely would sort of be edgy here as devil's advocate here because in maintaining some sustainability before the Court one could easily say isn't the argument equally true of the newspaper industry and who provides an additional level of oversight there or other components of industry that have an important impact on society. I think that's an important question to be focusing on as we develop the rules in terms of the rationale. The why is it different component is always one of the most challenging aspects of rationale underlying the rules. Questions or comments in any order? COMMISSIONER ABERNATHY: I have a couple quick questions. I'm curious to better understand the percentage and numbers of part-time employees that are involved in the broadcast industry so we can have a feel for just what role that plays in the recruitment efforts. I thought maybe, Mr. Price or Ms. Kushak, you might be able to tell me generally the percentages of part- time employees that broadcast entities employ and the kinds of jobs that are generally recruited for on a part-time basis. Are they on-air personalities, engineers, administrative or all of the above? MS. KUSHAK: And that is an important question. We have, and I haven't called into my office today so it changes from hour to hour, but for part-time we range around ten part-time people. Those are in various capacities. It's when we have clearly maximized all of our other full-time employees that we are able to benefit with part-time employees, which would be some on-air, there are some support staff and in various positions. They become very valuable. It's a great time many times for the interns to be able to move in to our industry and get some very valuable experience and from the part-time then be promoted into full-time. It works very well. MR. PRICE: Commissioner, I don't have the data to answer your question. I would only say from my understanding, having been in the broadcast industry for a spell, that it's not only a question of part-time and full- time. It's a question of freelancers who don't count as part-time in the many production companies that subcontract for the creation of programming that broadcasters run. When you look at the importance of the issue, it reaches to not just who's working and who isn't, but also one of the critical aspects of it is what kinds of programs are chosen, what's the vantage point of those programs, et cetera. The Commission would have to wrestle with the question of the reach of your authority obviously, but the way the industry works it stretches out far beyond part-time and full-time, but it's critically important in all of the ramifications. MS. GERBERDING: Commissioner, if I could add to that as well? COMMISSIONER ABERNATHY: Sure. MS. GERBERDING: Since consolidation has happened, many radio stations now are using many more part-timers than they did prior to that in order to be more efficient in their staffing of their radio stations. COMMISSIONER ABERNATHY: Okay. I have one last question for Ms. Kushak, which is the statement that you made about recruitment efforts. You said ongoing general outreach is far superior to job specific outreach. I think that was your statement. My question there is if you have ongoing general outreach, when a job opens up how do the job fair folks know that a specific job has opened up? I'm a bit confused about what you were trying to say there. How would you envision it working in the real world? MS. KUSHAK: Thank you for the opportunity to clarify that. Our different specific jobs, for example, that I had mentioned -- engineer, on-air prime time personalities, some of those individuals -- are not available in our own community, so having to recruit for those positions we have to use different strategies to achieve the results to get the work force diversity. Very, very important would be our ongoing outreach with our job fairs, with our internet, over the air where at any time individuals in our community know that we do have the positions available and, if positions are not available, at least how to contact us and apply for positions, so keeping people as we call in a pool, in a benchmark, is very, very effective not only for the job seeker, but also for us. MS. ARNOLD: Commissioner, could I address that for a moment? COMMISSIONER ABERNATHY: Sure. Thank you. MS. ARNOLD: That was actually one of the things that I wanted Ernie to talk about is that we have had a job site that I think is probably one of the more successful in the country. We have today 800 plus individuals who are being notified about any listing that applies to their particular expertise or the kind of things they're interested in doing. We have 210 resumes posted on our job site, and we have 113 jobs, so there's a continual pool for people to access if they're looking for a particular kind of person with a particular expertise. Because of the FCC's requirements, we have attempted to try to go out and find large groups of minorities that we could include in the bank by job fairs in particular areas, and then because we are not able to tell people you're looking at a minority when you pull up this person we tell them if you pull ten people who were at this job fair, you'll have 60 percent of those be minorities or whatever. It's a complicated thing when they're trying to look at both meeting the expertise requirements and also getting a certain race. COMMISSIONER ABERNATHY: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. COMMISSIONER COPPS: Well, I must say I'm still in kind of a state of shock listening to this that the old lines are as clearly and starkly drawn as they seem to be. I thought we were coming here today to talk about options for dealing with a problem that most of us agree exists in one fashion or another, but I've heard a couple of the panelists say don't worry about it. There is no problem. We can all go home. The situation will take care of itself. I was reading something over the weekend, and I wrote it down. I said well, I won't need this quote in this day and age. It says, "After nearly five decades of operation, the broadcast industry does not seem to have grasped the simple fact that a broadcast license is a public trust subject to termination for breach of duty." That was said by Warren Berger, hardly a paragon of judicial activism, in 1966. He referred to five decades. You can add three and a half decades on that now. We're 85 years into this and still debating some of these issues. I suppose it does lead to a legitimate problem or question on how do we find discrimination? You know, I think discrimination is out there. I think it's probably under reported, but I'd like to hear if any of our panelists have some suggestions on how we find out about discrimination. You know, for a lot of our rules we wait for the competitors to come in and say well, so and so built a tower over there. It's too tall. Get them to take it down. Then you go up and down the whole agenda that we have here, all of the rules that we have here. We can rely on the competitors to do that, but I'm not sure that that happens with regard to discrimination. Even employment candidates I think often don't know they're being discriminated against, and if they do know they're being discriminated against how will they know that the FCC, which they've probably never heard of, has a whole lot to do with it? I'd like to know a little bit how we get the information we have on discrimination and what we can do to get a better inventory of information without running afoul of the Court. Mr. Price, would you have any thoughts on that? MR. PRICE: Well, I think one of the challenges is, to use the phrase, to flood the ramparts with qualified people and then see whether they're hired. That's why outreach is so critically important. I think if more pools of qualified applicants can be developed, if more people can be introduced to the industry, that puts less pressure on the industry to shop around all over the country to fill slots. Secondly, of the subtler aspects of discrimination, which is hard to get a handle on, but the NAACP with its study I think was trying to get at it. It would be interesting to document the choices that broadcasters make about what's carried and what isn't, what kinds of stories are broadcast and which aren't, how many stories are constructed and which aren't. I realize that that's uncomfortable terrain, but I think it's terrain that we on this side of the table probably have to explore and then have to bring that to the attention, but I can only say as someone in a field where we are perpetually trying to tell stories about what is moving forward, tell stories about what the problems are. The responses of folks in the communications industry are often dispiriting, and we need to do a better job of documenting that and helping the broadcast industry understand the implications of the choices they make. It is alleged that folks in the African American community, for example, do not care about academic achievement. The examples of programs in the Urban League and the NAACP and many, many others that are promoting academic achievement are legion. Getting those stories told, which is an exercise of discretion on the part of broadcasters, is very, very difficult. I think it would be interesting to examine what are the choices that are made and what are the ethnic and other implications of those choices. I think you're only getting the tip of the iceberg, and I appreciate the delicacy of the legal situation that you face, and I think on our side we need to be more helpful in lifting the lid on that. COMMISSIONER COPPS: Ms. Kushak, do you believe that your recruitment program or the representation of diversity in your organization is something that should be of any interest or concern to the FCC at license renewal time? MS. KUSHAK: That's again a very important question, and we've never had any problem with it. In the last two and a half years or so when there were no requirements, nothing changed. I'm very proud of our diverse work force. We've always been committed to that, and I would have no problem at all keeping the FCC informed. COMMISSIONER COPPS: But you think it's a legitimate area for us to have an interest in and to be looking at? MS. KUSHAK: I think that the tracking is something that, you know, I'm unqualified to say in terms of, you know, I think it's a legal issue. You know, I have nothing to hide, and I would never do that. We're committed to a diversified work force, and we have the same mutual goal that you all have. MR. JACKSON: Commissioner Copps, if I might? COMMISSIONER COPPS: Yes, sir. MR. JACKSON: If I might just add to that? Before I do that, you mentioned another issue, and that is the issue of public service. In addition to the issue of EEO, broadcasters in our industry also face this concern about public service. Broadcasters are being criticized for not doing public service. As Ann mentioned, I was in broadcasting for 27 years, and I am currently working with broadcast companies, specifically Inner City Broadcasting, Clear Channel, Cumulus, Radio One, Infinity, Hispanic Broadcasting and Emmus Broadcasting, and I am testing African American and Hispanic listeners for what is the most critical health issue facing African American and Hispanic communities in this country, and that's HIV and AIDS. In the past year, Project Way, which I'm the executive director of, has tested 7,000 people for the HIV virus around the country using radio station T-shirts as incentives for getting tested. It's an unprecedented program. The reason that's important, sir, is that there are 450,000 people walking around today with the HIV virus that don't know they have it. Now, let me go on the record to say that I am an advocate of affirmative action. Most Texas broadcasters I work with are advocates of affirmative action. In 1995, in the City of Houston on the ballot was an amendment to do away with the city's affirmative action program. My radio station created a public service campaign that created the largest turnout of African American voters in the city's history, and the affirmative action initiative which was on the ballot was saved. What I am here to talk about is that when I was called by the Texas Association of Broadcasters, we created a very innovative, a very successful program using job fairs, using internet, using other recruiting activities, working with the local urban leagues. My posture is, going back to your original question, that broadcasters should be given credit for those kinds of activities, for participation in those kinds of activities. As you think about rules and regulations, it seems to me that broadcasters in Texas and other places who are doing this should be given credit for those kinds of things. COMMISSIONER COPPS: Thank you. MR. HESSINGER: Commissioner? COMMISSIONER COPPS: Let me just comment on that for a second. I agree 100 percent with you that broadcasters should be given credit for the thousands of good actions and programs that they undertake. I think there are many, many of them. Also, I think they need to do a better job sometimes in telling us what they're doing. That's one of the problems we're dealing with right here right now. People come by and say well, you don't know what we're still doing. We don't know because nobody has told us a lot of these things. I applaud the public service activities of broadcasters and cable, too. I don't think we're where we need to be yet on that. I think the recent Kaiser study told us that when it comes to public service announcements on the air waves we've looking at about 15 seconds an hour and that those come primarily between midnight and 6:00. Not primarily, but in overwhelming force. Yes, there are a lot of success stories. This is an industry that's doing a lot of good, but, like I tried to say in my remarks earlier, we've got to do more. We've got to do better. God knows, there's enough room for improvement. You had a comment? MR. HESSINGER: Yes. I'm sorry, Commissioner. I would just like to underscore the importance of the point that was made about outreach requirements and how you have to start there as an important ingredient in dealing with these problems. You know, these issues, as you can see, a lot of time invoke intense feelings and emotions in people, and sometimes we lose sight of the fact that I really believe that most people who are out there doing the hiring would like to do the right thing, want to do the right thing and think they're doing the right thing. The problem is that the industries that these people work in, there's a lot of pressure being imposed on everyone involved, intense pressures of profit and efficiency. When you're in a position when you need to fill a position, you've got 16 other things you need to do, you can't spend the money to engage in real outreach activities. You tend to fall back on the more insular practices of hiring. It's just the fact of the pressures that are imposed on the people involved. I once worked on the employer's side of the broadcast industry, and I have some experience with how it works. I can remember when a particular company that I worked for was taken over by another company, and there was a new CEO in charge. I was talking to a general manager of one of the stations about the new budgeting process and how he would go line by line through the budget and say the Christmas party. Tell me how that generates revenues for the stations. That was a funny anecdote until about a year later when the individual who was in charge of human resources at the station, who was in charge of the program for equal opportunity employment, was laid off because there was not perceived to be a need for that particular position because it was not a revenue generating position. I believe that equal employment practices ultimately lead to profits because the public wants to see a diverse work force in front of them on the television camera. I really believe that, but I also believe that the Commission needs to lead broadcasters and cable operators to that conclusion. I believe that if you impose a requirement that you actually do the hard work and expend the limited resources that are necessary to do the outreach that the people who make the hiring decisions will do the right thing. If they're exposed to a diverse pool of applicants, they will in fact engage in diverse hiring practices, but you've got to impose the obligation to do the outreach because absent that it will simply fall by the wayside as difficult choices are made about resources and what can be done in a very competitive environment. COMMISSIONER COPPS: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. COMMISSIONER MARTIN: I wanted to follow up on some of the comments in Ms. Arnold's testimony. She was talking about the importance of providing flexibility to the broadcasters to meet these kinds of opportunities, and I think you just talked about getting credit as well for the flexibility. Isn't it helpful still, though, to have some regulations that would establish some kind of safe harbor for the kinds of outreach efforts that we would be expecting in part to minimize those challenges that can occur on the renewal side so that you would recognize that if you had taken these certain steps then you would be presumed to be meeting the expectations that would come across from holding that public interest license? In the absence of those, won't it actually lead to further exacerbation of the kind of challenges that are being filed in the context of your renewals? I actually viewed some of our steps in this regard as trying to actually minimize that and trying to provide some helpful floor or a safe harbor so to speak; not trying to not recognize the additional flexibility and give you credit so to speak for the other steps you've taken, but maybe I'm missing something in my analysis. MS. ARNOLD: I agree that having specific requirements and clear cut options would be an improvement over what you've done in the past. We've proposed something that we think is a good balance of those in suggesting that you do require at least 50 percent. If you want to look at the numbers or come up with some different number, we're not tied to that, but have some certain number that people have to post either on the internet or on their own website or something like that and then allowing them to promote those websites so people have notice of the availability of jobs and that be essentially the requirement without all these other things that get into how many minorities you interviewed and keeping records on where the applications come from. COMMISSIONER MARTIN: Maybe I'm starting to appreciate. So some of the concerns you have are not as much on the regulatory requirements that might be posed on the outreach side, but some of the record keeping requirements? MS. ARNOLD: Very much so. COMMISSIONER MARTIN: One of the -- MS. ARNOLD: Although the outreach can be a problem, too, when you go to the extent that you insist that a minority be interviewed in two-thirds of the hiring opportunities. COMMISSIONER MARTIN: On our record keeping and forms, on the Form 395, which I think you mentioned in your opening testimony as well, you thought that some of the proposals to not have that information available for three years was insufficient to kind of provide protection from the kinds of concerns that you were raising. I know that I think Mr. Hessinger in his written testimony -- he didn't mention it in his oral testimony -- talked about the Commission could be collecting that information, but not be making it available to the public. I think that was his proposal to try to address some of those concerns. Do you have any other thoughts on what the Commission could do to try to make the information available on an industry wide basis, but trying to protect against some of the concerns that you've raised about the potential misuse at times of that information by others? Is there anything else you could do in trying to minimize the likelihood of that occurring while still trying to gather industry wide information to make that available? MS. ARNOLD: If that's the only way that you can collect the information, I would suggest that there are other entities that could give you that kind of information without even subjecting stations to that. The BIA and some of these people that do these kinds of number crunching for other things could give you those kinds of figures, I believe, especially if you would ask them to do that specifically. Obviously not having it subject to investigation and review in the individual stations' case would be an improvement over the alternative. COMMISSIONER MARTIN: I didn't mean to exclude any of the other panelists if they wanted to comment on an important subject, but I did want to focus on it because you had raised specific concerns with collecting that information. Thank you. CHAIRMAN POWELL: Thank you. Just one final comment before we take a break. We're going to abbreviate the break in the interest of time to five minutes. One of the challenges we have, and I urge people to try to explore some of this precision, is there are two components to rules and the worthiness of them. One has to do with actual discrimination cases, which is unquestionably unlawful and is a serious question of enforcement. Whether the FCC has a role to play in that or not is a legitimate question, as opposed to the general. The other thing we're talking about is what used to be called affirmative action, but is a component of an affirmative choice because you think the media industry is important or benefitted in some meaningful advancement of communication policy objectives to justify trying to reach out. I think the outreach programs were designed to provide increased representation to advance communication policy objectives, not specifically for the purposes of rooting out discrimination, though there could be a secondary effect of having a healthy recruitment process. Just thinking about the tradeoff or the balance between actual discrimination and something akin towards an advancement of a communication policy objective I think is important. With that, I think we'll take a brief five minute break. If I could urge everyone to come back at 11:50, and then we'll go to the next panel. Thank you. (Whereupon, a short recess was taken.) CHAIRMAN POWELL: Let's reconvene the hearing and jump right in with our first panelist, Ms. Cathy Hughes. MS. HUGHES: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am very grateful that I was invited by the FCC to provide testimony this morning, and I pray that God will place in my mouth and upon your ears words and facts that will be agents of change for this great broadcasting industry. I have been a broadcaster for over 30 years, and I am very proud to support the FCC's proposal to lift its suspension of EEO rules because I am without question a living example of what equal opportunity in broadcasting can produce for women, for people of color and for this great country. I have sold air time. I have programmed and created formats. I have managed facilities, and this morning as I appear before this distinguished hearing I am the only African American woman to ever head a publicly traded corporation. Radio One is a radio corporation that employs over 1,600 broadcasters, 70 percent of whom are African American, 42 of whom are women, and you can rest assured that as I am speaking my HR director is diligently working on getting our number of women up to 50 percent because that is a true representation of the population we are licensed to serve. The reality is that women have made far more progress in basketball than they have in broadcasting. The WNBA is a viable enterprise that in some cities attracts more attendance than its heritage male counterparts, yet when I attend sessions at the National Association of Broadcasters I am always the only woman and only one of a few African Americans to be seated among the major broadcast owners of America. My career in broadcasting has been the exception to the rule, not because I am exceptional, but because the Federal Communications Commission pried open the window of opportunity that afforded me an equal chance to prove my worth in value to the broadcasting community. It is painfully evident that other members of my gender and my ethnic group have not been afforded the same opportunity, and I am obligated to do everything in my power to correct this disparity. Perhaps Radio One's greatest contribution to EEO has been our willingness to provide first time opportunities to women and people of color. Over the last couple of years, we have hired seven African American and three women first time general managers. At the executive level, Radio One has provided first time opportunities for our CEO, who is an African American, and our general counsel, who is a woman. We understand that consolidation has caused a reduction in job and management opportunities, particularly for women and people of color, and that experienced management is usually the preference of any industry. However, we remain committed to the old tried and proven principle of recognizing potential, and we recognize the potential not only applies to the employee, but also to the opportunity to better serve our audiences, which has directly impacted our ratings and revenue. In 1980, we acquired our first radio station and changed its format from R&B to talk during a period when Washington, D.C. was starting to experience a substantial Spanish population increase. We saw the potential to attract listeners outside of our target audience, and we hired the first full-time Hispanic air personality to host a talk show in the nation's capital. Broadcasters and trade associations who oppose EEO rules are limiting the potential of not only qualified applicants for broadcasting opportunities, for also limiting their own growth and success. Many may think that EEO has been easier for Radio One because we are African American, but the opposite is the reality. The 30 percent of our work force that is not African American did not just one day mysteriously appear at their positions. We have had to apply the same techniques and procedures for identifying and recruiting applicants throughout all ethnic groups, and sometimes it's really more difficult for us because we are African American. Before consolidation and taking our company public, I shudder to remember how many times a non-black applicant spent the majority of the interview questioning our financial viability. Our overtures for recruitment were often times met with objections over our format, location of our facility, apprehension about having to do promotions in the community or the reluctance to service our local accounts. I maintain that while EEO sometimes has challenging aspects for all broadcasters, commitment and creativity are the keys to its success. Since the first of this year, Radio One has sponsored and promoted job fairs in Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore and Detroit, as well as participated in those sponsored by other companies and organizations. Our HR booth is set up at non-traditional events like concerts, health fairs, vendor malls, remotes and wherever we know our audience will be in attendance. We stay in constant contact with high schools, colleges, and we offer both intern opportunities and volunteer slots. We recruit for every vacancy. Our list of job openings is posted throughout the company and e-mailed to churches, organizations, agencies, companies, clubs and anyone who contacts us. Technology makes it a lot easier for everyone to know when you are recruiting. We advertise in national, as well as local newspapers and magazines, and we have a policy of requiring our staff to respond to all inquiries concerning employment. Additionally, we have used our air waves to announce opportunities at Radio One, knowing that if other companies trust us to advertise in finding qualified applicants for them then certainly it should work for us, and it has. In all of our recruitment efforts, it is our policy to make it clear that we are an equal opportunity employer. Diversity in the workplace is much easier to achieve when a company makes it clear that all applicants are welcome. Last year we were named by Fortune magazine as one of the best companies in America to work for, and we attribute that recognition to the diversity in our work force and management team and our reputation that we give everyone equal opportunity. In closing, I would like to stress the importance of all broadcasters having active EEO efforts. This industry is a seamless web with an interdependence on each and every facility in each and every market regardless of size. Broadcast professionals in small and medium markets bring their experience and expertise to the major markets. Broadcast professionals in major markets become executives who run our consolidated corporations and become equity players and owners. When you take a survey of those of us who own and operate the broadcasting outlets of America, you quickly realize that broadcast operation and broadcast finance are the common denominators we share. You will also find an embarrassing absence of women and people of color. How can anyone own and operate a company that they have not been allowed to work in is the question. Too much time and energy and money has been spent fighting EEO, and yet so little has been spent in an effort to correct the discriminatory practices that limit our collective potential and safeguard our future. New technologies threaten our old ways of doing business, and we ask the FCC to do as they have done so many times in the history of broadcasting, and that is to move our great industry in the positive direction that is required of us at this time to assure our healthy and prosperous future. Thank you. CHAIRMAN POWELL: Thank you, Ms. Hughes. Ms. Davis? MS. DAVIS: Thank you and good morning. My name is Belva Davis, and I would like to join all the others in thanking the Commission for this opportunity to speak today. In particular, I would like to thank Chairman Powell for keeping his word to continue the dialogue on this subject and the FCC staff members who assisted me in getting here from quite far away to take part in this very important occasion. I have worked in broadcasting now for 35 years. I've been a reporter, an anchor, a program host, done politics, done most of what can be done on air. At the present time, I host a current affairs program at KQED-TV, the public station in San Francisco. I also continue to work part-time at KRON-TV doing special projects for them. I worked full-time there over 20 years and announced my retirement three years ago. I'm also a national vice- president of AFTRA and its national EEO chair. I have seen tremendous change in the industry. When I began my career, broadcasting was almost totally a segregated industry. My first job was for black owned newspapers. I then moved to work for black programmed radio stations that were white owned. I speak to you today as one who knows personally what it was like to seek employment in broadcasting before there was a government willing to open the door of opportunity for all of us. I've seen the hugely positive change after pressure from citizens through this agency forced fairness. I believe with all my heart that the electronic mass media is far too critical to democracy to let it return to segregation. This is America's signature industry serving as the mirror through which not only the citizens of this country, but those of the rest of the world, form their opinions about who we are. My three decades in local television has taught me that our immigrants and our international visitors and tourists all look to us for leadership in this area. My husband, William Moore, also recently retired after nearly three decades working as a television news photographer. Just like me, when we decided to pursue our dreams and look for a job in TV, there were no road maps, nothing for us to follow. In those early days, the broadcast industry and its unions were closed to us. Thank God the unions have changed. Now we must bring industry along. Part of my union with AFTRA has been in the vanguard of keeping those doors open for minorities and women. As part of our collecting bargaining agreement, AFTRA has been able to achieve mandated meetings to discuss the employment of minorities on daytime television dramas. Using employment numbers kept by show producers, we've been able to track the inclusion of women, minorities, seniors and performers with disabilities that explore ways to be more inclusive in their employment. While this area of work does not fall directly under the rules that we are discussing today, I believe, though, that the positive results came from the policy direction of the FCC and its EEO rules. We started down this path in large part because of the interest and power of one man, and I want to emphasize that it takes interest and good people to make these things happen. This man, his name was Jim Cochran. In the 1980s, he was the vice-president of Proctor & Gamble. They were the largest buyer of time on soap operas in this country. Our union sponsored a conference in New York in the 1980s. Mr. Cochran came to that conference without invitation, without letting any of us know that he was in the room, listened to our grievances during the day. After the lunch break we asked who are you, and what are you doing here, and he explained. He thereafter wrote a letter to his advertising agency saying that he wanted change. From that day forward, daytime soaps began to have color. One man can make a big difference. In the 1960s, a few good men like Don McGannin, the former president of the Westinghouse Broadcast Company, also set an example through a directive to his general managers to reach out to minorities and women and let them know they were welcome to apply for jobs. Consequently, in 1965 I was interviewed, along with 64 other women, for a job I finally landed. Let me tell you what it was like before the FCC EEO rules put fairness on every manager's mind. In 1965, I also applied for an open position at the ABC ONO in San Francisco where civil rights leaders had been pressuring them to hire a person of color. I finally got my interview with the manager, Dave Sachs, who at the time was a very nice man, very friendly. I waited more than two hours, though, to see him, and I knew I was in trouble. At the end of my short time he said to me I want to thank you very much, but we are not hiring negresses yet. If we ever do, I will certainly keep you in mind. Those hurtful words relegated me to jungle status. It commits me today to be here with you, and I still choke up over it. It was an emotional moment, a turning point in my life, and I was determined that if I got in I would certainly work hard to make sure that others did, too. Various managers have supported all kinds of programs, mentoring programs, drawing from our colleges with diverse student population. Minority staff members have been given time off to speak at college conferences and participate in seminars. My station even financially supported a summer scholarship program in my name at a junior high school in a predominantly black neighborhood as a way of reaching students early and letting them know they had to prepare themselves if they wanted to be part of this industry. Even with those successful programs, it was difficult to make sure we didn't slip back in the old habit of cronie-ism or word of mouth recruitment would still prevail. The minorities in the newsroom were told to be proactive and to also let their friends know what was going on. It is critical for there to be someone at the top, someone committed to this chore. That is why I continue to be proud of my association with KRON-TV in San Francisco, who just won the RTNDA award, as well as the Unity award, for continuing to reach out, continuing to cover the populations in our area. They do it because there is a diversity committee to discuss stories, culture, ideas, staffing. It takes that to succeed in America. We do it with everything else. We certainly can do it in broadcasting. Thank you very much. CHAIRMAN POWELL: Thank you, Ms. Davis. Mr. Jack? MR. JACK: Thank you, Your Honor. Good afternoon. My name is Michael Jack. I am the newly appointed president and general manager of WRC-TV here in Washington, D.C. I am also the newly appointed vice-president of diversity for NBC Television where I replaced Paula Madison, who is the president of our TV stations in Los Angeles and continues on the Diversity Council with me where she spearheads our efforts in the area of entertainment. Most recently, for the past three and a half years I've been president and general manager of WCMH-TV in Columbus, Ohio, also an NBC station. It is a pleasure for me to be here with all of you to discuss an issue that is crucial to GE and NBC and something that is personally very important to me. Diversity at NBC is a moral and economic imperative. Moral because it's the right thing to do. Economic because NBC realizes that in order to succeed, we must service the communities we live in and have a work force that is reflective of the diversity of these communities. We have made unprecedented progress with our on-air efforts in the past three years. I wanted to share some of the highlights with you. Our on-air diversity has increased by 51 percent across prime time, daytime, late night and Saturday morning teens since the 1999-2000 season. In prime time series, we're up 38 percent from that same year for series regulars, and that figure jumps to a whopping 54 percent when combined with reoccurring roles. While much attention is paid to prime time programming, it is our local TV stations that have the key relationship with our communities. We know that it is of utmost importance that we represent our communities at the local level with relevant programming, community involvement, representative anchors and reporters and a diverse management team. While we are proud of the progress we have made among our management and employee ranks throughout the company, we realize that our future leadership will come from those who are just now beginning their careers. One of our key focuses has, therefore, been on increasing minority presence among our entry level positions. There are five distinct programs that I'd like to share some best practices with you right now. The first is the associates program. NBC has created a year long program within our news, entertainment, sales, finance, information technology and HR departments in order to give professionals an opportunity to learn the broadcast industry from the inside out. Based on the success, we are now actually even rolling it out in the summer of this year to the NBC agency which is our internal advertising and promotions organization. In 2002, NBC will have 30 minority associates up from 24 in 2001. Secondly, the Emma Bowen Foundation scholars. We are proud to be the sponsor of the Emma Bowen Foundation for Minority Interests in Media, which offers paid internships for high school and college students with interests in the broadcast industry and is housed at our NBC corporate offices in Washington, D.C. The Foundation's programs are unlike other intern programs in that students work in our company during the summers and school breaks from the end of their junior year in high school until they graduate from college. Mentoring is a key component, and these students are mentored by various leaders within the divisions that they are placed in. In 2002, NBC will have 37 Emma Bowen scholars, up from 26 in 2001. All are minorities. We have internship programs, the third program I'd like to speak about. Our programs give students the opportunity to apply course work learning to the workplace. Students are placed throughout our company in positions related to their major and career goals. It is in practice a feeder program that identifies high potential talent for future employment. During the fall/winter school season, 28 percent, as many as 78, of our interns are minorities. Fourth is the page program. The page program has been at NBC for many years. It offers college graduates the opportunity to take the first step in broadcasting. Pages learn many aspects of the network television business from the ground up. They are primarily involved as a liaison between NBC and the general public and have the opportunity to work in different departments within the company on either short or long-term assignments. As of June, 2002, 30 percent of the pages at NBC in Burbank and New York where the majority are employed are minorities, up from 20 percent in the year 2001. Finally, the fifth program is the second year writers program. In the 2000 and 2001 season, NBC initiated a second year writers program in which any show returning for a second season would have a writing position filled by a minority. We've expanded the program this year to include all 21 of our Fall, 2002, shows. It is the network's hope that increasing diversity behind the camera will result in the development of additional minority characters and story lines. We are making good progress. We are proud of the progress, but are energized and committed to seeing that these results grow. We believe it is imperative that we become more diverse in all facets of our business. The merger with Telemundo has instantly made us a more diverse company, but this merger will not in any way be a substitute for our commitment to incrementally increasing diversity in the future. Ultimately our success at NBC is measured quantitatively. It is measured by talented people from diverse backgrounds who have assumed leadership positions. Bob Wright and the senior management team at NBC will not rest and will not be complacent until our leadership, employee base and on-air programming is representative of the diversity of all people in this country. CHAIRMAN POWELL: Thank you. Rev. Chase? REV. CHASE: Mr. Chairman, esteemed Commissioners, it is an honor to participate in these historic proceedings. It's an honor further to speak in my capacity as successor to Dr. Everett Parker, who so eloquently addressed us on videotape this morning. I serve as director of the Office of Communication, Inc., of the United Church of Christ or UCC, a mainline Protestant church of more than 1.3 million members in almost 6,000 congregations in every state and Puerto Rico. I also speak to you today on behalf of the National Council of Churches, the leading organization in the movement for ecumenical cooperation among Christians in the United States. The NCC's 36 Protestant, Anglican and Orthodox member communions and denominations include more than 50 million persons in 140,000 local congregations in communities across the nation. As you know, the UCC has had a long partnership with the Commission in the quest for equal employment opportunity dating back to 1955 when we first began to call the Commission's attention to discrimination at broadcast stations. It was in fact the UCC that first filed the petition for rule making that led to the original EEO rules. Not only in our churches, but many in the nation's mainstream religious community have been steadfast in their support for the Commission's efforts to prevent discrimination. For us, at its heart it's a question of justice. Once again the agency displays great statesmanship in proposing to lift the suspension of the EEO program. Your EEO enforcement efforts have helped the broadcast industry move past its worst impulses and begin to offer opportunities at all levels for women and people of color. Since 1969, virtually every FCC Commissioner has supported this effort. You have heard anecdotes about proactive efforts broadcasters have undertaken, and I applaud such efforts, but I, too, can cite anecdotes. In more than 20 years in video production and dozens and dozens of crew members, I have worked with only one female camera person, with no African American editor or technical director and with no Latino/Latina, Pacific Islander, Asian American or Native American technicians in any discipline. I am both personally and professionally aggrieved by this experience, which in part is why I am before you today. I long for this reality to change. Partly in response to Commission Copps' question at the first panel, for 30 years it has been voluntary public participation in broadcast regulation that has rooted out lawbreakers and kept the industry honest. According to the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council, which studies such things, there were 251 FCC EEO enforcement rulings from 1994 to 1997. In 62 percent of these cases, involving 155 licensees, the Commission found that the licensee had fallen short of the agency's minimal standards for effective EEO programs. In few other areas of FCC regulation has public intervention been so helpful in rooting out law violators. Every one of these 155 EEO cases were brought because citizen groups, assisted by a handful of counsel who usually work without pay, came forward and brought evidence of misconduct to the Commission. As explained in the EEO supporters' comments in which we joined, research has found that across a broad spectrum of industries about 20 to 25 percent of companies discriminate covertly against minority job applicants. For argument, let us assume that only one percent of broadcasters discriminate. That would be about 150 broadcast stations, none of which under longstanding precedent is entitled to have a broadcast license. Would the IRS tolerate 150 tax cheats among 15,000 businesses? Would a town of 15,000 tolerate 150 drunk drivers or looters or polluters? Even a little unemployment discrimination should be unacceptable, just as a little housing discrimination or a little police misconduct is unacceptable. It drives bright, creative people away from an industry whose very health is dependent upon talent and creativity. Reports of unremedied discrimination are sure to frighten impressionable college freshmen away from broadcast majors and into other pursuits. It would hardly be reassuring to them to learn that only 150 broadcasters discriminate. In a recent study by MMTC, since the set aside of the rules in 1998, 42 percent of the listings on state association websites do not have EOE notices. Forty-two percent. That's a cause of great concern. One of the most absurd arguments our opponents have made is that the FCC has caught few discriminators, so we don't need the rules anymore. It is not surprising that the FCC catches few discriminators. The EEOC catches less than one one-hundredth of one percent of discrimination as identified in scholarly research. The reason? Discrimination is done covertly so that almost all of it escapes detection. How would a job applicant know if her application was thrown into the trash or that it wasn't true that the job was just filled? Simply because someone has not been caught does not mean that laws have not been violated, people have not been hurt, communities and whole institutions have not been damaged. One need look no further than the tragic current events in the church to be reminded that unreported events do not mean that such events have not taken place. In closing, we want to encourage broadcasters to stop fighting anti-discrimination laws and start fighting discrimination. Deploy your vast resources and skills to expose the lawless ones in your midst. Turn over evidence of discrimination to the FCC just as you tell the FCC when you see other broadcasters violating antitrust laws or over modulating or broadcasting out of band. We want to applaud the FCC in its determined effort to reinstate the EEO rules for race neutral recruiting. As our society moves relentlessly toward a day, some estimate little more than 40 years away, when people of color will constitute the majority of our population, this is a small but essential step toward ensuring all citizens, irrespective of race or gender, a voice over the air waves, a public trust held on behalf of all of us. Thank you. CHAIRMAN POWELL: Thank you, Reverend. Mr. Warfield? MR. WARFIELD: Thank you. Good afternoon. I, too, thank you for this opportunity to participate in this historic hearing. I, too, personally and on behalf of Inner City Broadcasting Corporation salute Chairman Powell and the Commission for your ongoing commitment to diversity, nondiscrimination and equal opportunity in our industry. As stated, I am Charles Warfield, and I'm the president and chief operating officer of ICBC Broadcast Holdings, Inc., a subsidiary of Inner City Broadcasting Corporation in New York City. Our company is the second largest black owned and operated radio company in America. My broadcast career covers 25 years, beginning in 1977. Inner City Broadcasting Corporation hired me as its first comptroller. The company and its founding family members, Percy and Pierre Sutton, provided me an opportunity to learn the radio business and the opportunity to advance to the position of vice-president and general manager of its flagship stations, WBLS and WLIB, in New York City. At that time, there were three African American general managers in New York City, and black owners employed two of us. In the past 20 years in New York City, there have not been more than two African American general managers, and at all times they have been employed by black owners. Since my initial tenure with Inner City Broadcasting Corporation, I've held senior management positions with Summit Broadcasting Corporation as vice- president and general manager of WRKS-FM in New York and also as senior vice-president and regional manager for AM/FM Radio with responsibility for management oversight for a 30 station cluster. In those two companies, I was the most senior African American employee. In both companies, senior management was responsible for, committed to and involved in efforts to identify, recruit and hire employees from diverse ethnic backgrounds. While this effort was ongoing, we were continually challenged to identify suitable candidates due to a shortage of very high quality job applicants; that is, people with extraordinary creativity, long-term dedication to and passion for broadcasting as a profession, not just a career. There are a number of reasons for this difficulty. First, broadcasting is not all that highly regarded, unfortunately, in the minds of young people making their career decisions. A highly motivated person wants to rise to the top, but when a young minority person considering whether to pursue radio or some other career looks at the top of our profession, he or she doesn't see a lot of people who look like him or her except at minority owned station. As reported by the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council, just over half of the minorities in radio work for minority owned stations. Minorities only own 4.2 percent of the radio stations. Thus, minority owned stations simply don't have enough top positions to which young people coming into the industry can aspire to. The record of this proceeding includes extensive evidence of the gross under deployment of minorities and women and under utilization of their talent in our industry. For example, EEOC data for 2000 discloses that for broadcasters with over 100 employees, minorities were only 15 percent of officials and managers and 15 percent of sales workers. Women were only 18 percent of the technicians. The Radio and Television News Directors Association has found that between 1994 and 2001, the percentage of minorities among radio journalists declined from 14.7 percent to 10.7 percent, and the percentage of minorities among radio news directors declined from 8.6 percent to 4.4 percent. Most of the few minority news directors were at Spanish language or minority owned stations. From my own experience, in 1997 at a meeting of corporate executives and general managers of a 96 station group, there were only six African Americans in attendance. We represented six percent of the general managers in attendance, and as a result of consolidation only three of us are employed today in the broadcast industry. A second reason we have difficulty attracting talent is that too many companies disregard their obligations to provide equal opportunity. I'm not talking about intentional discrimination, although there's no question that there is a lot of that. I'm talking about broadcast stations that simply do the bare minimum or nothing at all to show that they care at all about bringing persons historically excluded from our profession into the fold. When the EEO rule was originally adopted in 1969, the Commission said that the best hope for equal opportunity was the voluntary efforts of broadcasters to do training and mentoring, efforts that should be taken above and beyond the bare minimum requirements of the rules. That's still true today. However, most of today's broadcast managers were kids in 1969 of weren't even born then, so they don't remember the tradition of public service that we as broadcasters took for granted. A young person trying to decide what to do with his life will go where he thinks he will have a fair chance to compete. Thus, the decision by the FCC to lift the suspension of the rules will go a long way towards reassuring our young people that the broadcast industry offers them real opportunity, an opportunity free from discrimination and a process open to all. The rules you have proposed remind me of the days of voluntary public service a generation ago -- my generation -- when most of us today were participants in the start of the industry. One of your proposals is that we pick four means of outreach from a list of 13. I suggest that that be expanded. Let's look at what's on the list. Job fairs, mentoring programs, internship programs, participation in job banks, scholarships, speaking to groups of young people. Our industry should be doing all of these things. There are also a few additional steps I would propose. First, you might encourage broadcasters to work with minority and women's groups to help them develop training programs and mentoring and job referral programs targeted to broadcasting. Second, you might encourage broadcasters to do their own in-house training on EEO so that junior broadcast managers will acquire a conscious understanding of how to provide equal opportunity. Third, you should encourage broadcasters to participate in joint, industry wide programs such as the Walter Kaitz Foundation and the Emma Bowen Foundation for Minority Interests in Media, which we all support within our company. EEO isn't something our industry should be cheap about. It is our legacy, and this is the least of what we have to do to maintain our industry's competitiveness today. Thank you for this opportunity of being here today. CHAIRMAN POWELL: Thank you very much, Mr. Warfield. I thank everyone for trying to stay within the time. I would just remind people to keep their eye on the red. MR. WHITE: Did you say that just for me? CHAIRMAN POWELL: Yes, I did. MR. WHITE: Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Commissioners, for the opportunity to be here with you this morning. It is an honor to be here. My name is Steve White. I'm the senior vice-president for AT&T Broadband in Atlanta, Georgia. I have the honor of supporting 1,600 employees in serving almost 800,000 customers with video, internet and telephone services. Prior to joining the Atlanta team during the summer of 2000, I served as regional vice- president for AT&T Broadband in Chicago and its predecessor company, TCI, serving the greater Chicago area and northwest Indiana. I grew up in the State of Indiana, one of four boys raised by a single mother to this day who still works as a high school custodian. We lived in government housing projects, and as the oldest son my mom wanted me to go to college and be successful. One of the reasons I selected this industry was that it embraced the notion of diversity. I worked at Colgate-Palmolive and Pepsi Cola, and this is one of the industries, the cable industry, that certainly embraced diversity. Through the efforts of the NCTA, NAMIC and other organizations, we have seen women and people of color aggressively recruited, developed and promoted to the highest levels of leadership. I'm an example of that. As you know, AT&T Broadband is the nation's largest broadband services company, providing a variety of communication and entertainment services to about 14 million cable customers nationwide. As you look out across our markets, you can see examples of the progress we've made in the areas of diversity and equal employment opportunities. Women and people of color serve in the most senior leadership positions in Atlanta, Denver, Boston, Miami, Dallas, Los Angeles and Seattle. We're proud to say that women and other minorities lead in the areas of finance, sales and marketing, customer care, advanced product services, media services and commercial business development at our corporate offices in Denver. At AT&T Broadband, our commitment to diversity starts with recruiting, finding the right people for the right jobs regardless of race, culture, lifestyle or other differences. In Atlanta, 66 percent of our 1,600 employees are minority. Forty-one percent of our senior management are minorities. I've personally interviewed our top leaders to ensure that we are maintaining a diverse work force. In this high tech world, many companies rely heavily on the internet to recruit employees. However, while the web may reach the world, we've found that personal relationships and face-to-face time with community organizations often make the difference. For example, in Chicago I had the pleasure of personally working with a group called Jobs for Youth. It's a group that focuses on minority youth age 18 to 14 where we hired and mentored members of this group. They received training both in business skills and life skills. The organization recognized AT&T Broadband as its employer of the year. In Atlanta, we recently developed a multi-lingual recruitment plan where we regularly reach out to employment prospects through organizations like the Latin American Association, the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and local colleges and universities. The Hispanic population of metro Atlanta has grown to seven percent. We now have four percent in our employee group, obviously an opportunity. In addition, we have developed relationships with NAACP, the National Organization of Women, the Urban League and other organizations. Once we have recruited the right people, we place a strong emphasis on training and development from front line employees at our call center and in field operations to management and senior leadership. Our new hire orientation is more than a handshake and directions to the break room. It's a three day intensive training program on the basis of our basis, our vision and what we're trying to do as an industry. Once you're introduced into the business, our commitment is for continued training and development. For example, we call it high performance leadership and leading the broadband way. AT&T Broadband also requires all leaders throughout our company at supervisor level or higher to participate in extensive training on managing inclusion. Our commitment is to create a work culture where our core value is respect for others and inclusion is lived out in the workplace. Beyond our employees, at Broadband we also place a great deal of importance on diversity among our suppliers and business partners. Since diversity is an inherent part of serving our employees and our customers, everyone involved in delivering our products and services must share this emphasis. In Atlanta, we spend on average 20 percent of our discretionary budget each month with minority vendors. In closing, I was raised to believe that every person deserves a seat at what my mother calls the table of prosperity, but first they must receive an invitation to the table. Mr. Chairman and Commissioners, thank you for the opportunity to allow me to sit at this table today to talk proudly about my company's record and my personal beliefs and values. I am honored and proud of your leadership in creating a tent wide enough for people of all color. Thank you again for the opportunity to be with you. CHAIRMAN POWELL: Thank you very much, Mr. White. Mr. Baxter? MR. BAXTER: Mr. Chairman, fellow Commissioners, my name is Tom Baxter. I am president of Time Warner Cable. I work out of our Stanford, Connecticut, corporate offices. I also represent the cable company on the AOL/Time Warner Diversity Council, which was set up by our parent company so that each division could share experiences and success stories in terms of seeking greater diversity in our employee base, management and third party business relationships. I appreciate the opportunity to be here this morning to share with you our experience in terms of expanding diversity of our work force, as well as among vendors with whom we do business. For the record, I'd like to point out that Time Warner Cable, in conjunction with the NCTA, continues to voluntarily comply with the Commission's EEO regulations because we wholeheartedly agree with the policies behind them. Cable television is fundamentally a local business, a wire line distribution network built for an individual community that we construct, operate and maintain under a franchise granted by a municipality. People from the community staff it. Local management selects programming based on the assessment of its local viewing preferences. We work in partnership regularly with local associations and organizations as a member of the local business community. At Time Warner Cable, we have long favored a highly decentralized management approach which will not get in the way of localism, but rather serve to nurture it. It is against this backdrop I would like to briefly talk about Time Warner Cable's approach to increasing the talent pool, as well as expanding the list of people we do business with. Some examples from our local operating divisions would be instructive. In our Memphis division, we have partnered with the YMCA since 1993 in an effort to help women either enter the work force for the first time, return to the work force or find their way into a non-traditional job. In 1999 and 2000, our partnership took the form of creating a special training class for cable installers, hardly a traditional work opportunity for women. That one year program yielded 15 graduates who joined our work force in Memphis. Each year the partnership helps women find employment in the community and provides solid hires for Time Warner Cable. Four women have been placed so far this year in this Memphis YMCA program. The division also works closely with the Mid South Minority Business Council in hosting annual expos that seek to enlarge the circle of minority vendors with which we do business. In our Memphis division alone, over $2 million was spent on firms owned by minorities and women last year, an increase of 19 percent over the year before. That increase was in large part due to the success of this relationship we enjoy with the Mid South Minority Business Council. Across the 28 states where we do business, Time Warner Cable spent over $136 million last year with minority vendors, about ten percent of our total expenditures in that area. Last year, our Cincinnati division initiated a plan to increase the direct sales staff from 17 to 50 associates. Through carefully targeted job fairs, a new sales management team was recruited that had the effect of tripling the representation of women in that job category. In Houston, we participate with the Houston Community College and Texas Southern University in job fairs and regular seminars designed to help students become more marketable. We do the same with local military job fairs, usually two a year. One of the most successful projects in Houston has been the production of recruitment spots, which are run across channels in unsold advertising inventory. The spots feature a diverse work force and promote a fun and satisfying work environment, and it provides a substantial number of leads for us in our recruitment efforts. Of course, in states like New York, Ohio, North Carolina and Texas where we are the largest cable operator, we recruit actively from local colleges and state universities with two goals in mind. We are looking for the next generation of talent, and we keep a special eye on developing people of color and women as a part of that group. Internship programs have also proven useful tools to increase diversity in our work force. We were involved with historic black colleges and universities in many areas, including Jackson State and the University of South Carolina to name two. These are simply two examples of kinds of community outreach efforts which each of our divisions are involved in. When you look across our 39 divisions, we work with more than 400 community groups in terms of recruitment and training efforts targeted at women and minorities. Each of these efforts is successful because each of us draws on community resources, works through established institutions and organizations, most importantly, that best reflects the community itself. Efforts in this area are not undertaken in a vacuum. A diverse work force is not just a social goal. It's a business imperative. Our customer care center in Queens, New York, for example, is staffed by people capable of speaking a dozen languages, including Hindi, Greek, Russian and Portuguese. That operation has direct dial customer service numbers in Korean, Spanish and Chinese. Our systems serving communities in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas reflect the Hispanic culture that exists in those cities. We could not serve our customers if it were otherwise. Our 24 hour news channel in Tampa, Bay News 9, also operates a 24 hour Spanish language news feed. We need editors and reporters fluent in Spanish to staff that operation. Cable television, after all, is in the cultural transformation business. Our early promise in the beginning was to bring diverse programming to people that traditional broadcasting networks could not. Cable was responsible for making television not only a tool for mass entertainment, but also a source of niche programming and serving the needs of each segment of our audience. We're bringing our promise of the internet in an increasing number of homes today with the role of our broadband service. Incidentally, through a program called Power Up we provide access and training to young people, especially those in inner cities who may not otherwise have the opportunity to go on line. Change is part of cable's DNA. That is not only right, but it is absolutely appropriate that cable television companies like ours should take an active role in helping change the employment landscape as well. These efforts put Time Warner Cable ahead of the cable industry in terms of the number of minorities in our work force, 39 percent, and the number of minorities in our top four management levels, 31.6 percent. They have contributed to a track record for women that is at parity with the overall cable industry against both of those calibrations. To do anything else, from my point of view, would simply be wrong. It would be wrong from a social responsibility perspective, and it would be wrong from a business perspective. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. CHAIRMAN POWELL: Thank you, Mr. Baxter. Senator Torres? SEN. TORRES: Mr. Chairman and members, it's a pleasure to be with you. Thank you for continuing your leadership and staying awake throughout all these panels. I am president of the Walter Kaitz Foundation and took the foundation over in late 2000 during a very difficult time, but I want to say thanks to Robert Sachs, who is the president and CEO of the NCTA, Michael Wilner, who is our chairman, and Glenn Britt, who is the chairman and CEO of Time Warner who is the current chair of the Kaitz Foundation, and the CEOs that form the basis of this Foundation's board, which have never provided an obstacle, but rather encouragement to look at how we develop many of the initiatives that you've talked about, Mr. Chairman, and members of the Commission, as well as what we can do essentially in terms of the future. I believe that dividing the cable industry's approach is both acute and preventive care. Like a good doctor in the country, we want to make sure we take care of the emergencies, and you've heard some of those emergencies today. We want to make sure we take care of preventive care as well. I want to talk about diversity in programming. We always talk about employment in the management field, and we're lacking there. As Mahatma Gandhi said, "Without a struggle there is no movement." Well, we're definitely in a struggle when it comes to higher management replacing Tom Baxter with a Spanish surnamed individual, but the fact of the matter remains that that is still a struggle because he's a pretty good guy. We're also in a movement, and the movement encourages us to look at what we've been doing in programming. We far exceed the broadcast industry. My apologies to my colleagues there. Look at HBO. Look at Showtime. Look at BET, Lifetime, A&E, Oxygen, Discovery, Telemundo, Weather, Nickelodeon. Yes, the Weather Channel. There are more women on that channel than most people realize through the good efforts of Decker Angstrom. Nickelodeon, The Rainbow, MTV with gay and lesbian programming, Turner Broadcasting, even Turner CNN News providing an incentive, especially during Hispanic Heritage Week, during Affirmative Action Week, during African American Week, providing programming and initiatives to those. The second issue is what does the cable industry do in terms of its foundations? We don't even talk about that. We've heard references earlier, about millions -- untold millions -- of dollars on a regional basis, as Tom well knows and others here at AT&T on a regional basis, in terms of contributing for scholarships, internships, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, which go on on a regional basis, which if you mounted a total initiative could reach clearly almost in the billions of dollars. Lastly, I want to talk to you about what we're doing in terms of preventive care. The Walter Kaitz Foundation was founded about 18 years ago, and it was founded to deal with diversity in the industry. The cable television industry was far ahead of everybody else talking about the fact of what Esther Renteria talked about earlier -- she was my instructor years ago as well in Los Angeles -- trying to figure out where do we go from here? How do we provide more incentives? What the Walter Kaitz Foundation is now doing is providing three essential elements. Number one, awarding grants to innovative projects, some of whose directors are here. The Emma Bowen Foundation. Stand up, Phyllis. The Women in Cable Television. Stand up, Anita, Olympic champion, gold medalist. People who are concerned about the future not only in their communities, but in an industry. What do we do with these organizations? We have awarded grants to AFTRA to develop a master course to help human resource people understand how to recruit people. Number two, we've developed at the initiative of the NCTA and Robert Sachs' leadership a diversity supplier network. Commissioner Copps was there and gave a very enlightening speech, even in the heat of New Orleans, at our national conference talking about where we're going to move, how we're going to provide incentives to diversity suppliers. It was like a Christian meeting, wasn't it? There was even testimony from diversity suppliers who had received contracts from the cable television industry as a direct result of the NCTA's efforts, one which we've taken up. What does that mean? Today a diversity supplier can go to our website and find out what RFPs are available. A procurement officer in the cable television industry can look and see who do I need to hire in my area and connect on a real basis. The same thing is true in terms of a job bank. A human resources professional can provide access to that website and find out who the candidates are -- there are over 1,000 now resumes that have been updated -- and provide an incentives to make sure what kind of jobs they have available and what kind of connection to make. We heard today that internet is not enough. That's true. Not everybody has access to the internet, and that's why on our website right now we have over 50 ethnic media. We're increasing those numbers day by day. In California alone, there are over 500 ethnic media outlets -- radio, television. In Los Angeles alone, there are six Thai speaking newspapers, for heaven's sake. We haven't even begun to scratch the surface in terms of outreach. This website will help to do that. We also want to make sure that we list within this website the calendar of events. The people know where to go to job sites in their regional area, number one. Number two, we also highlight a list of all universities and campuses from Bay Mills Community College in Montana, which has the highest Native American student population, where people can go and search out for Native American professionals that might work in the cable television industry, to where Latinos and Asian and Pacific Islanders, African Americans and others may reside as well. What are we doing on the preventive side as well? As our very, very wonderful chairman of the Women in Cable understands, we're providing funding to make sure that executive leadership programs continue. We're also providing to make sure that the mentoring program continues with the Emma Bowen Foundation and to make sure that we work with NAMIC, which is another organization designed to help minorities with a tremendous leader, Pat Keenan out of Chicago, trying to make sure that they know how to access the internet and, most importantly of all, how do we get those kinds of mentoring programs, of which they have had 260 pairs so far of mentors -- I was one of them -- with CEOs and of minority professionals and also how to make sure that we provide an incentive to do that. Lastly, we want to make sure that we talk about the future, and that is where are we going to find the engineers for the future? We have just signed a contract and a grant with Polytechnic University, which is probably the urban MIT. Those of you from New York will understand that. A lot of their young people are young people of color. We will establish this summer for the first time in the history of the industry a cable television specific scholarship program with high school students with express interest in becoming engineers and relating them to the cable industry. You can't just rely on the current pool of people that are out there. You're going to have to reach out and create new pools of opportunities and new pools of candidates as well. My light is on. COMMISSIONER ABERNATHY: It's only yellow. SEN. TORRES: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. CHAIRMAN POWELL: Most admirable from a former legislator. Questions and comments? COMMISSIONER ABERNATHY: Just a quick question. As I've been listening, and, by the way, the programs that all of you are talking about are absolutely fabulous. We're struggling with how do we get the most bang for our buck with the initiative and with the EEO rules we'll ultimately adopt. My question is when you look at some of the programs involving job fairs and scholarships and internship programs, which I think in many instances are promoted and advocated by the trade associations, as opposed to outreach and recruitment efforts which I think come more at the radio station or the broadcast station level, on balance are some more effective than others? Are they all part of a pool that is necessary in order to see some changes in the industry? Anyone can answer this. What do you think about basically public/private partnerships that go more towards away from some of the mandates, but more towards encouragement of the internship and the scholarship programs and the educational efforts that seem to be too great for some of the smaller broadcasters to do on their own? That's it. SEN. TORRES: Yes, Commissioner Abernathy. If I may, I think your question is very complex and requires a complex answer. COMMISSIONER ABERNATHY: Okay. SEN. TORRES: Number one, you need regulations or statutes -- COMMISSIONER ABERNATHY: Right. SEN. TORRES: -- because a lot of people don't have a historical frame of reference, and you're not going to be able to take the time to educate somebody in Fresno, California, for example, or some other rural community about what the incentives or initiatives ought to be, but rather give him a set of regulations by which to follow. The other answer to your question is that we need all of what you've heard today because not one organization, not even the great FCC, can provide all of these answers. You're going to need the efforts that are happening in Texas, in Colorado, in Arizona, in New York, in California, all working together. What we're trying to do with the cable industry in terms of the Kaitz Foundation is to make sure we support organizations like WIC, Emma Bowen, NAMIC and CATHRA and others because they are much more able to deal with specific interaction with potential candidates, but also to make sure that other professionals have an access where they may not have the opportunities in their own communities, at least a website of where to go. Let's say you're in a community. What kind of ethnic media can I advertise this job in? They can go to the Kaitz website, find out who those media outlets are in their own communities and utilize a resource they may not have literally on the reservation or in the barrio or in the ghettos of America. COMMISSIONER ABERNATHY: So the idea then is to build on the steps. You've got the regulations, and then you push and go beyond that as you work with the trade associations, as you work with the internships and the scholarships? SEN. TORRES: And membership organizations who you know are here in this audience and who are outside of this room who are trying to do the best they can to reach out and to continue to support that. The only way you can ensure that is if in fact you have a framework by which to follow that others can proceed thereafter. COMMISSIONER ABERNATHY: Okay. That's all. Thank you very much. In the interest of time, I'm going to defer. COMMISSIONER COPPS: I guess our progress here, rather than having one silver bullet set of rules and regulations to solve this problem, is going to have to be a number of practical, targetable, achievable success. Let's just take one item. I think most of us agree that there needs to be better interaction with minority recruiters, minority owned recruiters, yet there is a legal caution now that we really can't mandate that broadcasters reach out with every job notice to the recruiters. How do we come up with a program to ensure that that loop is closed and that we really have communication between the broadcasters, the cable companies and the minority recruiters? You know, I'm always a big believer in the government not trying to do everything and public/private partnerships. It seems to me if we could get to the realization that there is a problem among all the stakeholders and then try to take some practical steps, I could see some public/private partnering or just private partnering really to reach out and make sure that the minority recruiters, minority owned recruiters, know that there are openings, know what the problem is and are brought into the extent of the problem so they can be part of the solution. Do any of you have any ideas how we can maybe encourage that? MR. WARFIELD: Mr. Commissioner, I think that when we talk about, you know, minority recruiters, and I think we're all sensitive about forcing individuals to use specific individuals. What we're all looking for here is finding the best and the brightest of our young people and giving them an opportunity. I think that when you look for the best and the brightest, you can't afford to leave any segment of our community, of our country, unaddressed, unspoken with. I think that the regulations require broadcasters to identify where these individuals can be reached. Word of mouth, and I think we talked about the statistics in our industry that word of mouth is just not done enough. There's still a lot more to be done. We're all looking for as we talk about driving the profitability of our company, the way that we do that is through having the best and the brightest employees in our company. I think that when we talk about the public/ private, we talk about minority recruiters, we're not trying to exclude anything here. What we're asking the broadcasters to do is just be aware that there are many sources out here that they may not have tapped into before. There are many resources out here for them to utilize, and we're asking them to continue that process; not feel that it's required to do that or there's any advantage for them to do that. MR. BAXTER: At Time Warner, one of the participants in the first session talked about kind of the pressure of hiring, that all of a sudden a job comes open, and the executive has ten other things to do plus then fill this slot. Sometimes they don't take the time to do the proper recruiting. What we're doing at Time Warner Cable is what we call build the bench. We're actually organized into six operating areas, each one run by an executive vice- president. This year we've told each one of them you must hire, you know, a young executive from a diverse background, and you've got to make that hire with the following understanding; that they're going to work for you for a year, and then within a year they're going to be moved someplace else so that, you know, they're going to have to be moved. You build a bench. Then when jobs come open you've got good candidates. I think one of the problems here is pretty legitimate that things are moving so fast now that unless you build a bench when all of a sudden jobs come open, people won't take the time to do the full recruiting job you should do. The way to really solve that I think is to build a bench. If you do this every year, you know, a company like Time Warner all of a sudden within a couple years can have a pretty substantial number of talented young men and women to pull from when jobs do open up, so I think you've got to do some, as Art would say, preventative work here. COMMISSIONER COPPS: Well, it just seems -- I'm sorry. MR. WHITE: I would just like to make the point about the uniqueness about our business, whether it's cable or broadcasting. We're local companies. We might be part of larger companies, but we're paid to be in tune with what's happening in our local community. The value of knowing what's important in your community actually drives your business, so we're uniquely prepared and set up to do that because we are locally there, and we're local businesses. COMMISSIONER COPPS: I would encourage a multiplicity of ways to reach out, but it seems to me if we could get the industry together, everybody who agrees that there is a problem here, with some kind of an outreach program to make that first hook up and make sure all of these recruiters are in the loop, I think once they're all in the loop they'll stay in the loop. Let's get them in. I think that would be a great first step. Let me ask Kathy Hughes or Belva to comment. What is the relationship between diversity and programming and diversity and ownership in your mind? MS. HUGHES: Why don't you go first? MS. DAVIS: Well, I can tell you I tried to mention the program at KRON where I worked. We had a problem. One day I looked in my newsroom, looked around my newsroom, and it was the shock of my life. I was the only person of my color in a newsroom where I thought we had a very high awareness of what it meant to serve our community. We formed a diversity committee, which is open to all employees, to come once a week. The news director always attends. We discuss story content, our slant on stories, the inclusion of communities and look at our employment group to see who within our bank who may not be at that week's meeting could help us pursue that story. That's how we get a diversity of opinions, culture and outlook on our stories. It took active participation by our managers to say this is something we're going to do. We're going to serve this community. That's reflected in our programming, and that is why it is an award winning station in this area because they have an interest. It's your programs that cause them to have an interest. COMMISSIONER COPPS: Ms. Hughes? MS. HUGHES: I think that probably the most obvious evidence of the benefit of diversity in programming deals with women's health issues, which have always been of key importance in our community, but you didn't hear about them. You didn't know about them because there were not women in positions to disseminate that information. Now that there are a few women, you're seeing more and more information. In terms of diversity in ownership, it's what has made America great. Without it, we continue to always turn on our news, and if it bleeds it leads is still too common with little regard for what is really important to this local community. What's really important to the people who live in this community? It's been so interesting with consolidation how although the numbers of stations that are now under minority control has increased, the number of us has in fact decreased. That greatly affects our ability to exchange ideas, to form teams to help with the scarcity of personnel. It is very difficult, particularly in the Hispanic and African American communities, for us to even compete to attract managers of our own community when they're working for one of the larger broadcast corporations with benefit plans that we hope one day to get large enough to offer to them. With us being the only public corporation, a lot of people assume that just going public would automatically catapult us into that position. It doesn't. It takes years of being public to get to that economic level. I was very naive about it, Mr. Commissioner, when I started because I thought the same way; that now that there's WNBA that there would be a WNAB in that women broadcasters would be able to come together and share. A lot of what gets criticized about the "old boy network" kind of disregards that there were certain benefits and are certain benefits to a fellowshipping and sharing of information, a sharing of talent, a sharing of resources that today those of us in the communities of people of color and the communities of women have not been allowed to form those type of coalitions that would greatly benefit not only ourselves and our facilities, but ultimately greatly benefit the United States of America. COMMISSIONER COPPS: Thank you. COMMISSIONER MARTIN: Briefly, I wanted to ask Mr. Warfield, who had mentioned the importance of potentially adding to the outreach programs and outreach efforts under our rules and making additional requirements. Do you think that that would in any way be sufficient, and how do you judge the effectiveness of that, or can you judge the effectiveness of those programs without also keeping track of the ethnicity and gender of the work force by the companies and the kinds of forms that we've also required and the concerns that have been raised about those? Are those a necessary component, do you think, as well? MR. WARFIELD: I don't necessarily propose that we have to quantify the ethnicity of the individuals that we're talking to. I think that when we talk about additional steps to be taken, if there are additional resources that senior managers can utilize for identifying again, as I said, the best and the brightest of those out there available to join our industry. I think that, you know, the difficulty, and I constantly hear managers in major markets. Where do you find qualified African American employees? Obviously with black owned and operated companies we're able to find these individuals, but the recruitment effort is an ongoing process. You can't wait until you have an opening because we always have the pressure of filling the position, particularly a key position in an organization. You're constantly farming out here. You're having people not necessarily in your company on the bench because we can't always afford that, but we have a list of potential candidates that we can reach out to. You have to do more rather than less. You do remember the individuals that you talked to, and people will leave an impression on you beyond their ethnicity. Again, that's what we're really asking for here is to put forth that effort to identify these individuals. COMMISSIONER MARTIN: Thank you. I don't have actually a question, but I did want to also just thank Belva Davis for her personal testimony and for sharing the poignancy of that with us. I thought that was particularly compelling. I just want to thank her for that. Thank you. MS. DAVIS: Thank you, Commissioner. CHAIRMAN POWELL: I just have one question before we move to wrap up the hearing. One of the things that struck me as being persistent throughout the day is the relatively low representation numbers we've heard and how sort of persistently stagnant they seem to be. One of the things I'm curious about is I don't know if anybody has this information, but it would be interesting to know to what degree does that compare to the representation experiences in so many of the industries that are related to this medium? For example, the number of minorities or women in the Hollywood studio community, the number of minorities and women in the music industry. My sense is, and I could be wrong, that those individuals have done better in those communities, those communities being the lifeblood of distributors ultimately. I don't know if anybody knows that here. I'll just look around. Is anybody raising their hand? MS. HUGHES: I know a little, Mr. Chairman, about the music industry. It has consolidated also, and there are in fact fewer opportunities for people of color and women in the music industry than there have been historically. I guess that my counterpart in the music industry would be Sylvia Rhone, who is the only woman chairperson of a music company, Electra Records, and has been for many, many years now. She's a stand alone. Not only has the music industry consolidated, but entire divisions that are dealing with African American or what they call urban music have actually been shut down. Only one music company now is still owned by an American corporation. All of the rest of the music companies not only have consolidated; they have all been sold to foreign interests. They don't even reside in the United States. It's really amazing how while urban music each year increases in terms of the profit margin that they provide for the music industry at the same time the music industry has eliminated and continued to reduce the number of opportunities that it provides in terms of employment for women and people of color in the business of music. Now, they open their doors and welcome any recording artists that will sell, you know two, three, four, five million copies of a song for them, but in terms of the administrative input you do not find it. As I said, Sylvia Rhone for at least -- what, Charles, over a decade? MR. WARFIELD: A decade. MS. HUGHES: About a decade has been the only woman and the highest ranking African American in the music industry. SEN. TORRES: Mr. Chairman, when I was in the Senate I served as chair of the Entertainment Industry Committee for California, and my dear friend, Sherry Lansing, who heads up Paramount, was one of the few women ever elevated to that level. As you look at the other management levels within the entertainment industry, especially in Hollywood, you'll find very similar occurrences, as Catherine has indicated, in the recording industry. Also, if you talk to actors of color and producers of color, you'll find out how difficult it is to get projects funded, number one, and especially with Latinos that move into the Spanish language dimension. More funding occurs out of Telemundo or Univision than would occur from the major motion picture studies. In addition thereto, I think what you'll find here is when Tom talked about that diversity means good business, he's absolutely on target. Demographics are finally accentuating the line here in terms of where people are going. The other dynamic in the industry, at least the Hollywood industry, is that the chronologically gifted writers are the ones that are being discriminated against more because more and more it's that Adam Sandler is looking for a $100 million picture hit to 14-year-old teenage boys rather than hiring the older writers, which are, quite frankly, in my opinion, much more wise, et cetera. The fact of the matter is there is still that kind of discrimination, so I think it would be interesting to have a hearing like that at some point. CHAIRMAN POWELL: I don't want to open up that can of worms. We have enough problems with our little piece of the universe. We're going to proceed now to closing comments, which I hope will be brief, and call it a day. Commissioner Abernathy? COMMISSIONER ABERNATHY: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I just want to say thanks again to everyone who participated today. I've heard personal stories about the lengths and the efforts that people made to be here to share their stories with us. It's critical to our evaluation, and I think what I've heard today about consolidation in the industry and normal business pressures in today's economy I think has elevated the importance of our task versus what it may have been five or six years ago, and that's been a nuance that I think I didn't fully appreciate until hearing from all of you today. We are going to continue to move forward. We are going to work on all these, take all the information that you gave us today, and I think it's safe to say, looking at all of the talented individuals who participated today, that none of us women or minorities want anything better. We just want an equal opportunity, and I think that's what we're all about as we're working on this proceeding. Thank you. COMMISSIONER COPPS: I think this has been a good and helpful hearing, and I'm grateful to everybody on both panels who took the time and went to the trouble to participate. I guess I would kind of end where Reverend Parker began saying that he won't be around to see us win the fight to use EEO rules to maximize opportunity. Probably none of us will because this is an ongoing battle, an ongoing struggle. As America develops, we have to be constantly aware of it and react to it. I do know that unless we're aggressive now, we will live to be around to see the program fail, and I think that's one message we should take away from here today. I hope we come out of this realizing that there is a problem. I don't know how anybody could listen to most of the folks on this panel and realize or think that there's not a problem. I hope we'll keep our eye on the goal here. The goal is not developing procedures so the FCC can reach out and whack somebody every morning at sunset. The goal is to deal with the systemic problem in this country that, as Mr. Warfield I think said, women and minorities are grossly under represented in this industry. We need as a country to do something about it. We need to push the envelope. I'm glad that most people support the proposal that was put forward in the NPRM. I would hope that we could develop between now and the time we get to further determination even a more proactive stance, one that will still pass Court muster, but will be even more aggressive. I think we've had some good suggestions from the panelists today and in their written testimony, too, and I think we'll all be going back looking very closely at that. I think we've got to realize that the FCC is constrained here, too. It's not a problem in search of a governmental solution. Our rules can help. We can have clear, good proactive rules. We can enforce them swiftly and surely so that everybody knows that we are certain about them, but most of the action here is going to be with you folks in the industry working among yourselves. I would just hope that out of this dialogue we've had today that we might have an enhanced dialogue between the public and the private sectors, but even more than that amongst all of the stakeholders in the private sector. We need best practices, and we don't have those best practices even outlined yet, but we need people working together and reasoning together and dedicating themselves to getting this job done together. I hope that somebody after this meeting will convene a meeting of the industry stakeholders and say hey, let's follow up. Let's see what we can do in a practical way to take a step here. As I said before, we're not going to solve this problem in one fell swoop. Little steps along the way will get us down the road, though, going in the right direction to ensure our progress in the final analysis. Thanks to everybody for coming. Thanks again to our Chairman for convening this. I for one, and I'm sure I speak for all our colleagues, look forward to working with all of you as we try to tackle this problem and do something about it. COMMISSIONER MARTIN: I'd just like to also thank all the panelists from today for what I thought was a very important and useful session to be able to hear all of the experiences and the insight that you all can bring to this process. I also would like to thank the Chairman for organizing this, which I thought was very helpful, and also to Commissioner Copps for originally suggesting that we do this, to both of them. I would take issue with one thing that Commissioner Copps did say, though. I guess I'm a little more hopeful that maybe I would live to see the end of it. I'm not sure that that's a difference in the degree of optimism or age, but I am more hopeful I think in that. Thank you. CHAIRMAN POWELL: That was low. Anyway, let me just take this opportunity to thank our extraordinary panelists and all of you in the audience. I mean, I've always believed quite deeply that equality is achieved in a free and democratic society first and foremost by discourse, dialogue and understanding and for everyone's willingness to come and participate and that this course dialogue and understanding is an important testimony to the rightness of the cause. It seemed to me as I listened today that one thing stood clear. The amount of representation achieved over the decades in this area is nothing to be proud of. I don't know what all the solutions are. I mean, government can contribute a portion to it, but one of the things that strikes me is that at the end of the day it will always be a modest contribution to making significant inroads at the end of the day. It will take leadership. It will take corporate leadership that exercises a commitment and relentless willingness, a strategic imperative to proving the circumstances of their operation, their corporation, to ever achieve the kinds of things that we would universally claim as successful. At the end of the day, we will do what we can do, but I hope that one of the messages that goes away from that is if you are a leader in the twenty-first century and committed to the future and health of the country and its industry, you will be as committed as some of the leaders we saw today are in their programs and their commitment to this what I think is a strategic priority for the nation and for any industry that hopes to make money in a diverse future. With that, this hearing is closed. We thank everyone for their participation. (Whereupon, at 1:10 p.m. the hearing in the above- entitled matter was concluded.) // // // // // REPORTER'S CERTIFICATE FCC DOCKET NO.: -- CASE TITLE: En Banc Hearing on Broadcast and Cable Equal Employment Opportunity Rules HEARING DATE: June 24, 2002 LOCATION: Washington, D.C. I hereby certify that the proceedings and evidence are contained fully and accurately on the tapes and notes reported by me at the hearing in the above case before the Federal Communications Commission. Date: __________ _____________________________ Official Reporter Heritage Reporting Corporation 1220 L Street, N.W., Suite 600 Washington, D.C. 20005-4018 TRANSCRIBER'S CERTIFICATE I hereby certify that the proceedings and evidence were fully and accurately transcribed from the tapes and notes provided by the above named reporter in the above case before the Federal Communications Commission. Date: __________ ______________________________ Official Transcriber Heritage Reporting Corporation PROOFREADER'S CERTIFICATE I hereby certify that the transcript of the proceedings and evidence in the above referenced case that was held before the Federal Communications Commission was proofread on the date specified below. Date: __________ ______________________________ Official Proofreader Heritage Reporting Corporation UNITED STATES FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS COMMISSION HERITAGE REPORTING CORPORATION Official Reporters 1220 L Street, N.W., Suite 600 Washington, D.C. 20005-4018 (202) 628-4888 hrc@concentric.net 5 Heritage Reporting Corporation (202) 628-4888 Heritage Reporting Corporation (202) 628-4888